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In Canada, "Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes" is sung to the tune of London Bridge is Falling Down, and is super depressing..
posted by 256 at 11:11 PM PST - 68 comments

Taijiquan's (tai chi chuan) roots are in the martial arts There are many pretenders, and few masters. Taijiquan employs a very unique, counter-intuitive style of body movement that delivers great power, at great speed, with great effectiveness, if practiced properly. Everything can be explained via the simple laws of physics, but must be practiced in a way that defies mechanics; there are no "secret" powers, as pretenders would have the naive believe (and pay dearly for). [more inside]
posted by Vibrissae at 10:16 PM PST - 82 comments

GlassPipes.org has 217,287 pictures of glass pipes. Here are five of them.
posted by Trurl at 9:24 PM PST - 51 comments

Most of the prints in the exhibit "Beauty, Virtue and Vice: Images of Women in Nineteenth-Century American Prints" were designed simply to please the eye, but they are also useful to historians who would like to understand how nineteenth-century Americans thought about the world in which they lived. Although prints are often works of imagination (even when they are grounded in fact), they still have much to tell us about the time and place in which they were created. [more inside]
posted by netbros at 9:01 PM PST - 10 comments

DVD cover art for films Criterion hasn't released.
posted by dobbs at 5:44 PM PST - 30 comments

The Dinner Party Matrix from Mark Bittman. Drinks, appetizers, entrees, and desserts grouped by cuisine and ingredient.
posted by Anonymous at 5:28 PM PST - 11 comments

This week, an Austrian climber in Yosemite Valley took a fall on the granite monolith El Capitan. As he fell, his thumb caught in some climbing gear and was severed. Amazingly, the severed digit landed on the ledge beside the injured climber's partner, who retrieved it. Amazing helicopter rescue ensued. [more inside]
posted by tim_in_oz at 4:21 PM PST - 38 comments

Scientist and Science Fiction author Joan Slonczewski, author of A Door Into The Ocean, guest blogs about science fictional and microbiology on Charles Stross's site: Salt Beings, Microbes grow the starship, Synthetic Babies
posted by Artw at 3:37 PM PST - 13 comments

Temporary marriage: the next big thing? The divorce rate in Mexico City is huge, with half of marriages ending within two years. Some lawmakers there are introducing a reform to the civil code that would make marriage contracts renewable, with a minimum of two years. [more inside]
posted by jenfullmoon at 3:26 PM PST - 31 comments

Humanities and the Liberal Arts is the personal website of former Middlebury classics professor William Harris who passed away in 2009. In his retirement he crafted a wonderful site full of essays, music, sculpture, poetry and his thoughts on anything from education to technology. But the heart of the website for me is, unsurprisingly, his essays on ancient Latin and Greek literature some of whom are book-length works. Here are a few examples: Purple color in Homer, complete fragments of Heraclitus, how to read Homer and Vergil, a discussion of a recently unearthed poem by Sappho, Plato and mathematics, Propertius' war poems, and finally, especially close to my heart, his commentaries on the poetry of Catullus, for example on Ipsithilla, Odi et amo, Attis poem as dramatic dance performance and a couple of very dirty poems (even by Catullus' standard). That's just a taste of the riches found on Harris' site, which has been around nearly as long as the world wide web has existed.
posted by Kattullus at 3:12 PM PST - 18 comments

How far above (or below) the average was the temperature and income in your state for the year you were conceived? A genealogy of US Airlines and a visual history of the TSA. See how the increasing severity and frequency of disasters is starting to strain the resources of FEMA (and where will the next big earthquake strike?). Alcohol vs. Marijuana. Facebook vs. Twitter. International travel and hotel prices for Americans and Canadians. How much does the US subsidize energy? And what would it look like if that energy was renewable? [more inside]
posted by Bora Horza Gobuchul at 2:28 PM PST - 22 comments

The Mississippi River has the third largest drainage basin in the world, exceeded in size only by the watersheds of the Amazon and Congo Rivers. It drains 41 percent of the 48 contiguous states of the United States. The basin covers more than 1,245,000 square miles, includes all or parts of 31 states and two Canadian provinces. The US Government has tried to improve navigability of the Mississippi River and its major tributaries for more than a hundred years, focused in part by Mississippi River Commission, created in 1879. The river is ever-changing, and in an attempt to understand their domain, and in 1941, MCR hired Harold Norman Fisk to conduct a geological investigation of the Lower Mississippi Valley. The result was a colorful map that displayed the historical course of the riverway from southern Illinois to southern Louisana. His vivid maps are available online in full, but beware: the files are very large.
posted by filthy light thief at 2:10 PM PST - 24 comments

We are the 99 percent.
posted by Windigo at 12:58 PM PST - 485 comments

Hanano Puzzle is a puzzle game about flowers, stones and gravity. Its author announced it recently on the TIGsource forums. Caveat: there is only a Windows version.
posted by tykky at 12:26 PM PST - 8 comments

Coversmart: The first music trivia website dedicated to the art of album covers. [more inside]
posted by mr.curmudgeon at 12:03 PM PST - 13 comments

“We’re a free speech site and the cost of that is that there’s stuff that’s offensive on there.” This was the response of Erik Martin aka hueypriest, General Manager of Reddit, to the accusation on last night’s Anderson Cooper 360 that the “jailbait” subreddit is “borderline kiddie porn.” [more inside]
posted by waraw at 11:58 AM PST - 235 comments

Boston attorney and one time sperm donor Ben Seisler keeps track of his biological children on an Excel spreadsheet.
posted by T.D. Strange at 11:42 AM PST - 60 comments

David Simon, creator of The Wire, delivers the 2011 Frank Porter Graham Lecture at UNC-Chapel Hill. [more inside]
posted by enn at 11:32 AM PST - 15 comments

SCC approves safe injection sites. The Supreme Court of Canada today ordered the federal government to stop its efforts to shut down a safe injection clinic in Vancouver, opening the door to more clinics opening across the country. [more inside]
posted by modernnomad at 11:08 AM PST - 33 comments

Wednesday night, my friend Todd showed me the key he had made. On the fob was engraved the following text. "1983 TeV 2011". Today, at 2PM CDT, Helen Edwards, the lead scientist of the machine in 1983, will turn that key, and the Tevatron will shut down forever. [more inside]
posted by eriko at 10:35 AM PST - 44 comments

SCREAMING CAT BABBLES, SCREAMS(SLYTP)
posted by The Whelk at 9:39 AM PST - 58 comments

When a family of beavers moved in to a creek in the bayside town of Martinez, CA, in 2006, they gained both fans and detractors. Concerned about flood control in the struggling downtown area, the city council formed a Beaver Subcommittee to explore the options, including extermination, relocation, and engineering fixes. [more inside]
posted by mudpuppie at 9:35 AM PST - 28 comments

If you want to read about the history, construction, sounds and playing techniques of, say, the tympani, or any other instruments of the classical symphonic orchestra, Vienna Symphonic Library's Instruments Online pages are good reading and a handy resource for orchestrators.
posted by Wolfdog at 9:18 AM PST - 4 comments

Grantland's Bill Barnwell is writing an ongoing series demystifying sports gambling for the newcomer. His first two subjects: how to bet the middle and teaser bets.
posted by reenum at 9:13 AM PST - 11 comments

Hold Ye Front Page. The History of the World, presented as Front Pages from the often controversial UK tabloid, The Sun [more inside]
posted by IanMorr at 9:02 AM PST - 14 comments

Tiangong 1, [the] latest demonstration of Beijing's otherworldly ambitions comes in a year when the US has wound down its space shuttle fleet and its partners have said the International Space Station (previously) should be buried at sea in 2020. Perhaps in its honor, [s]trains of the famed American patriotic tune (America the Beautiful) rang out following the launch of the Tiang Gong-1 experimental space station module late Thursday night. [more inside]
posted by obscurator at 8:44 AM PST - 27 comments

Imperial March....
posted by stringbean at 8:37 AM PST - 15 comments

Mike and Frank reminisce about their first meeting in high school...they were cute l'il pickers back then.
posted by treasure at 8:12 AM PST - 25 comments

The 21st Annual Ig Nobel prizes were announced last night. [more inside]
posted by Orange Pamplemousse at 7:40 AM PST - 41 comments

In the 1980s, R. Crumb produced a set of trading cards called The Heroes of the Blues. [more inside]
posted by OmieWise at 6:41 AM PST - 36 comments

Hey kids, what time is it? It's time for Guy On A Buffalo! (SLYT) [more inside]
posted by bondcliff at 6:39 AM PST - 54 comments

Bear breaks into pizza shop, doesn't leave tip. [video] Lawrance was washing dishes at Fat Tony's Pizza in Whistler, B.C. Monday night when a furry four-legged customer with a big appetite arrived about 7:30 p.m. for some grub. More.
posted by Fizz at 6:12 AM PST - 62 comments

What if Smurfs were real? (via.) Be sure to check out Nate Hallinan's portfolio for additional coolness.
posted by cjorgensen at 5:48 AM PST - 39 comments

Tim Rogers has written a long piece about the evils of social gaming and the mechanics of getting players to pay for virtual items. This, in reaction to certain mechanics in the new facebook mega-game, The Sims Social, which Tim has also reviewed, calling it "A Love Letter from a Computer Virus"
posted by hellojed at 5:44 AM PST - 78 comments

Yemeni and US government sources confirm US-born Al Qaeda leader Anwar al-Awlaki was killed today al-Awlaki was widely credited with inspiring the shootings at Ft. Hood and the attempted Christmas bombing of an airliner approaching Detroit. [more inside]
posted by BobbyVan at 5:43 AM PST - 493 comments

Is the internet rewriting history? Teaching the difference between truth and propaganda online via BBC [more inside]
posted by infini at 4:45 AM PST - 31 comments

Two faced cat is a record breaker. Latest edition of the Guinness Book of World Records to feature Frank and Louie, a 12-year-old cat with two mouths, two noses and three eyes who survived against huge odds. [more inside]
posted by SueDenim at 2:51 AM PST - 48 comments

The Star Trek Quiet Book, by the author of The Jedi Quiet Book
posted by Toekneesan at 2:43 AM PST - 35 comments

"In the last few years, the rise of free online porn — content-rich sites that tease viewers to subscribe for more — and pay-site juggernauts like Brazzers have put the L.A.-based adult-video industry against the ropes. Its answer, in part, has been the high-dollar parody, designed to attract ComicCon nerds, science fiction fans and other pop culture aficionados who must collect everything within their target oeuvre." -- The troubled US economy affects pornstars too, so "Porn Defends The Money Shot" (NSFW) [more inside]
posted by bardic at 11:28 PM PST - 79 comments

In October 1870, as American Jews were observing the High Holidays, The Atlantic Magazine published an article called "Our Israelitish Bretheren." 'At the time, it served as a sort of crash course about a tiny, mystifying minority. Today, it survives as something quite different: a snapshot of a transitional moment in Jewish history.' Written by American biographer, James Parton -- the founder of American Heritage magazine.
posted by zarq at 9:44 PM PST - 13 comments

Glengarry Glen Ross endures mainly as a spectacular display of verbal warfare and alpha-male gamesmanship. There’s a musical quality to it, with a great composer and a great chorus hitting the complicated runs of broken dialogue and solos that weave into profane poetry and nuggets of philosophical wisdom. Perhaps the greatest sign of the movie’s success, owed equally to Mamet’s script and this cast, is that it does a great sales job in itself, convincing us that there’s nobility to men who lie for a living — a bill of goods we’re all too happy to buy. [more inside]
posted by Trurl at 8:56 PM PST - 64 comments

William Shatner is Iron Man! Yes indeed. It's just a little taste of what's in store for us in his soon-to-be-released Seeking Major Tom.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 8:42 PM PST - 29 comments

PJ O'Rourke has penned an appreciative essay about architect Antoni Gaudi, designer of buildings such as the bone-like Casa Batlló and the unfinished Gothic cathedral La Sagrada Familia
posted by Lovecraft In Brooklyn at 8:40 PM PST - 16 comments

Banks to Make Customers Pay Fee for Using Debit Cards. 'Bank of America, the nation’s biggest bank, said on Thursday that it planned to start charging customers a $5 monthly fee when they used their debit cards. It was just one of several new charges expected to hit consumers as new regulations crimp banks’ profits.' [more inside]
posted by VikingSword at 6:23 PM PST - 190 comments

John Cerney makes giant plywood people. 5 minute interview.
posted by arse_hat at 3:43 PM PST - 10 comments

Photographer Mario Tama positioned himself over Netanyahu's shoulder at the UN General Assembly, and photographed hand-written edits he made to his speech. Here's what he saw. (via The Browser)
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane at 3:06 PM PST - 18 comments

Brad Pitt Stars as Brad Pitt in New Brad Pitt Movie. [more inside]
posted by shakespeherian at 11:41 AM PST - 171 comments

The FBI presents: Laser Pointer Leads to Arrest. Laser events logged by the FAA in 2010 nearly doubled from 2009, with 2,836 reports. [more inside]
posted by oneirodynia at 10:42 AM PST - 160 comments

A recipe for no-apple apple pie, with notes on the dish's science and history.
posted by Iridic at 10:36 AM PST - 115 comments

Art thrown from bicycles, paperboy style. Papergirl SF is a mail-art and delivery systems art project. Art is distributed like a newspaper, rolled and bundled, and thrown to random passers-by from bicycles, paperboy style. Papergirl SF will roll out in San Francisco, October 29th. [more inside]
posted by busillis at 9:40 AM PST - 23 comments

The importance of stupidity in scientific research
posted by Blasdelb at 9:12 AM PST - 40 comments

“Now, Bill,” Jody tells me, “you got to remember something when you go to grab that frog tonight.” He greets the lady inside the squawk box and places Bryce’s order. “You’re not petting that frog,” he says. “You’re not slapping that frog. You got to…” He presses his lips together, searching for something that will illustrate his point. His eye comes to rest on an empty coffee cup in the truck’s holder. “You got to grab that frog.” As he speaks, a large right fist shoots out, seizing and crushing the Styrofoam cup so quickly and completely that it basically explodes inside the cab. The noise alone is extraordinary. [via]
posted by monju_bosatsu at 8:56 AM PST - 39 comments

Got a lot of Lego sets laying around? Want to build something new with them? Enter your set numbers into Rebrickable, specify how closely you want the colors to match, and voila - look what else you can build. [more inside]
posted by jbickers at 8:21 AM PST - 43 comments

Frank Sinatra on the New York Times crossword. The Guardian provides some cross-Atlantic context.
posted by KirkpatrickMac at 4:24 AM PST - 28 comments

47 is a magical number. It has appeared more than a few times on Star Trek, Alias, and in many films.
The 47 society is dedicated to exploring the phenomenon that is 47.
posted by finite at 2:47 AM PST - 84 comments

A Bad Lip Reading (previously) of Barack Obama [SLYT] "Trick The Bridesmaid" (SLYT original video) + [SLYT] Rick Perry 2012 (SLYT original video) [more inside]
posted by TangerineGurl at 12:11 AM PST - 29 comments

How to easily peel a whole bulb of garlic in ten seconds [single-link vimeo]
posted by DoctorFedora at 11:13 PM PST - 211 comments

The Celebrated Chop Waltz is probably one of the best known musical pieces of all time. Usually performed on piano (for example, this version, inspired by Franz Liszt) it has also been performed by full orchestra, notably in versions by Rimsky-Korsakov and others. Other versions: guitar, mini-harmonica, ukelele, accordion, Liberace, and Tom Hanks.
posted by twoleftfeet at 10:27 PM PST - 7 comments

After beating the Texas Rangers on Sept. 3, the Boston Red Sox were 84-54. Although half a game behind the Yankees in the American League East, the Red Sox had a nine-game lead over the Tampa Bay Rays for the wild card and roughly a 99.6 percent chance of making the playoffs. Fast forward one excruciating month to a dead heat with Tampa coming into tonight's bitter imbroglio. Boston struggles ahead of laughingstock Baltimore by a single run until a rain delay clears the field, leaving them in the surreal position of rooting for the hated Yankees playing down in Florida. They can only watch from the sidelines as the rival Rays, tied with Boston in the pennant race but down 7-0 against New York, roar back to life with six runs in the eighth inning and a tie run on the final pitch at the bottom of the ninth. And then, after blowing two different strikes that would have salvaged the game, Boston loses to Baltimore, completing what is arguably the worst late-breaking collapse in the history of major league baseball.
posted by Rhaomi at 10:08 PM PST - 194 comments

The paintings of Sergey Tyukanov are rich in colors, in characters, in details, delightful the eyes from the first sight. Each work is like a little world, where people live according to different rules. Normal proportions not respected in his works; surrealism characterizes his art the best, and traces of the Russian customs and traditional costumes may be spotted without much difficulty. It all seems to happen in a Russian fairytale or in the nightmare of an artist-because only in the head of an artist’s genius, such a nightmare could be born.*
posted by Trurl at 8:42 PM PST - 9 comments

Amazon unveils a new full color 7" multi-touch tablet it is calling Kindle Fire. Also announced are a new Kindle Touch and Kindle Touch 3G. [more inside]
posted by Ad hominem at 8:32 PM PST - 214 comments

What happens when a multi-millionaire footballer playing for one of England's top club teams refuses to go out and play as a substitute? Possibly, he gets shipped off to prestigious second division northern Irish club squad Limavady United.
posted by bardic at 8:22 PM PST - 39 comments

Controversial Australian newspaper columnist and television host Andrew Bolt has been found to have breached the Racial Discrimination Act when he suggested in 2009 that "fаіr-skinned Aborigines identified themselves аѕ such fοr personal gain" (official court judgement). Andrew Bolt has responded, along with other writers claiming the ruling will "harm healthy debate" and "stile free speech". Commentary site Crikey has collected other responses and suggests that 'he may turn out to be the courtroom loser who wins the propaganda war'.
posted by Lovecraft In Brooklyn at 7:58 PM PST - 183 comments

For centuries, Renaissance composer Alessandro Striggio's "Missa sopra Ecco sì beato giorno", an enormous setting of the Mass for 40 and 60 voices, was thought to be lost to the ages. A few years ago, UC Berkeley musicologist Davitt Moroney discovered that a copy of the work, attributed to a non-existent composer, was hiding right under our noses, in the Bibliothèque nationale de France. In an hour-long lecture titled "The Pope, the Emperor and the Grand Duke", Professor Moroney recounts the story of the Mass's disappearance and rediscovery, describes the historical significance of the music, and unravels the intriguing geopolitical landscape of 16th century Italy.
posted by archagon at 7:55 PM PST - 7 comments

"'Postcards to Alphaville' is a project dedicated to film characters featured in guest-made illustrations. Everyone participating in this adventure has to watch a film and make postcard portraying specific character from it. It is love-letter to films and those characters that brings us, the viewers, moments of joy, sorrow and revelation and sometimes seems more real than the neighbor next-door." via
posted by Sticherbeast at 6:49 PM PST - 7 comments

"'Being Elmo,' the crowd-pleasing [documentary film] profile of the man behind Elmo, arguably the most-loved Muppet on 'Sesame Street,' has been melting hearts on the festival circuit since premiering at Sundance this year, where it won the Special Jury Prize. ... [It's the] story of how puppeteer Kevin Clash came up through the ranks on sheer ambition and ingenuity to become one of the best in the business is an underdog tale of the best variety."* However, could it be that there is an Elmo backlash brewing? [more inside]
posted by ericb at 4:37 PM PST - 106 comments

The 12 coolest libraries in the world.
posted by anothermug at 4:11 PM PST - 77 comments

After the success of No Direction Home, Martin Scorsese has turned his documentary eye toward another 60s musician. On October 5 and 6, George Harrison: Living In The Material World will run on HBO in two parts. The film has already played some film festivals and gotten great reviews. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 3:41 PM PST - 44 comments

Nerd cats. Nerd Bastards. Nerd Armada. And the (very NSFW!) Bourgeois Nerd.
posted by misha at 3:19 PM PST - 26 comments

Wide-spread interest in crop circles started in the 1980s, but if you dig a bit, you'll find some older references to circles in the crops, without any notion of extraterrestrial involvement. The oldest of these examples is the Mowing-Devil of Hartford-shire, seen here in a woodcut from 1678. It is most common to find the first of four pages online, but the text continues, describing the interaction between the rich industrious farmer and his poor neighbour, resulting in a mysterious circle in crops appearing the following morning. A modern crop circle enthusiast went to great lengths to track down more information, but a closer reading of the text offers another interpretation.
posted by filthy light thief at 3:02 PM PST - 11 comments

American vs. British News Themes - from Bill Bailey's Remarkable Guide to the Orchestra
posted by lemuring at 2:51 PM PST - 12 comments

Movie trivia: If someone were to ask you the name of a 1966 mystery/thriller that was shot in London, included a Redgrave sister in the cast, and had a soundtrack composed by a jazz giant, you would have two choices for an answer. [more inside]
posted by perhapses at 1:56 PM PST - 16 comments

Which place looks safer? Which place looks more unique? Which place looks more upper-class? MIT is crowdsourcing a "perception network" to analyze people's subconscious judgments about urban spaces. Preliminary results for Boston, New York City, Vienna, Salzburg, and Linz (Austria). [more inside]
posted by desjardins at 1:51 PM PST - 45 comments

The latest issue of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula's Inspire magazine is finally here, with a special edition for the 10th anniversary of 9/11. This issue has gotten some traction in the media for its feature story, "Iran and the Conspiracy Theories" You can view excerpts at Public Intelligence, download the entire magazine as a PDF, or simply read the Iran article after the jump. Please note that this magazine contains images of 9/11 and other conflicts that may be triggers for some people. [more inside]
posted by 2bucksplus at 1:16 PM PST - 49 comments

Joni Mitchell recently and infamously called him a "plagiarist", and now, Bob Dylan's art show at Gagosian has aroused some similar suspicions. Did Gagosian simply market the exhibition incorrectly?
posted by ReeMonster at 1:11 PM PST - 102 comments

Looks like we may be waiting awhile for a new feature by David Lynch (or are we?), in the meantime here's a short The Three Rs, he has made as a trailer for Viennale Fest ‘11 (He's also got an album Crazy Clown Time coming out in November.)
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 11:25 AM PST - 20 comments

Metafilter has debated the necessity of the laugh track before; we even got called out by Craig Ferguson for allegedly mistaking a live studio audience for canned laughter. But do you know the history of the laugh track? (previously) [more inside]
posted by PhoBWanKenobi at 10:40 AM PST - 112 comments

Peter Orszag (previously of Obama's OMB) argues that circumventing democracy is the best way to save it, but Catherine Rampell isn't sold, and Uwe Reinhardt points out that technocrats base "science" on moral values.
posted by klangklangston at 10:39 AM PST - 91 comments

The descent of the Apollo 11, plotted with Google Moon Pictures from the actual moon landing side-by-side with Google Earth, as the lander descends. [via]
Also, try the Google Earth KML file for the Apollo 11 landing.
posted by Philosopher Dirtbike at 10:22 AM PST - 22 comments

Pasadena's visual history is digitized. [more inside]
posted by Ideefixe at 10:12 AM PST - 15 comments

How do I make my document look like it was written by an Cthulhu worshipping madman? Some LaTeX solutions.
posted by OmieWise at 9:06 AM PST - 60 comments

A professional display of no-handed bike moves.
posted by backseatpilot at 8:44 AM PST - 31 comments

MAX CAPACITY Dwells In The Videodrome. "Not so long ago, last summer to be precise, we featured MAX CAPACITY in an illustrated selection of the best 8-bit inspired pixel artists. Already at the time, the American artist stood out from the lot because of his instinctive and primal approach to digital material." Max's work is spread out across the Internet: on Tumblr, Flickr, Vimeo, YouTube, and his own webspace... [more inside]
posted by codacorolla at 8:11 AM PST - 1 comment

"Pretty much all haikyo that contain items related to the building’s past are interesting. On the odd occasion even empty structures are too. But while memory-filled houses and sorry-looking snake centres are fascinating in their own very different ways, there’s arguably something that little bit special about a long-abandoned school." An abandoned but perfectly preserved Japanese school. [more inside]
posted by jbickers at 7:42 AM PST - 10 comments

The once-secret Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) slouches toward signing on Saturday. ACTA is expected to raise constitutional issues in the U.S., raise soverenty issues in the E.U., give copyright holders extensive powers to impose DRM and identify alleged infringers, and increase health risks worldwide. In addition, the U.S. has launched the Trans Pacific Partnership agreement (TPP) to obtain what copyright provisions were stripped from ACTA. (see michaelgeist.ca, techdirt, or slashdot) [more inside]
posted by jeffburdges at 7:30 AM PST - 44 comments

After 33 years, it has been announced Andy Rooney will make his 1,097th - and final - 60 Minutes commentary this Sunday.
posted by Windigo at 7:26 AM PST - 105 comments

Martian Life's Last Stand in the Trenches? "Scientists have found water-bearing deposits on Mars that are out of step with what was happening elsewhere on the planet, raising the prospect that the sites could have hosted Martian life's last stand."
posted by Fizz at 7:14 AM PST - 24 comments

American Sabor: Latinos in US Popular Music is a currently traveling Smithsonian exhibition exploring the wide range of Latino artists and influences which have shaped American pop music genres since WWII, from Alice Bag to Flaco Jimenez to Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass to Joan Baez. The website is rich with maps, interviews, videos, and music samples.
posted by Miko at 6:10 AM PST - 10 comments

Are small theaters punching a ticket to oblivion? Radical changes in the traditional structure of the lab processing and exhibition sides of the film industry have been filling the lives of small theater operators with uncertainty and worry for the last few years. Will filmstock be the next Kodachrome? (And what will that mean for the future of film preservation?) [more inside]
posted by bubukaba at 3:44 AM PST - 36 comments

There is currently a far reaching retrospective at the MOMA in New York on painter Willem de Kooning, that most deeply European of the Abstract Expressionists who drew the international art world's attention to New York back in the post war years. He's most famous as the creator of one of the few paintings of the 20th century that stills retains the ability to shock. But, as this quite interesting MOMA website shows, there was a lot more to his enterprise than most people realize. My first post here by the way.
posted by Phlegmco(tm) at 12:00 AM PST - 19 comments

Science! (autoplaying video) The 42nd season of "Sesame Street," which premiered today, will be including a few new educational categories for preschoolers in its usual mix of lessons and parodies: STEM skills — Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. In addition to more scientifically accurate slapstick, characters will try experiments, build bridges and boats, launch rockets and think through problems that require trial and error, observation and data -- all problem areas for America's students. [more inside]
posted by zarq at 9:19 PM PST - 33 comments

Stephen King has confirmed he is working on a sequel to The Shining called Doctor Sleep. He discussed the book and read excerpts at George Mason University. The book features a new grown up Danny Torrance working as a hospital orderly, fighting vampires pirates, and using his powers to bet on horse races (which sounds familiar). Fans of Kubrick's film adaptation (which do not include King) were treated to a tribute in a recent Doctor Who episode that recreated a few rooms and corridors from the Overlook Hotel.
posted by Lovecraft In Brooklyn at 7:46 PM PST - 180 comments

Thanks to his work in television, especially The Benny Hill Show, Benny Hill is the most universally recognised of British comedians. [more inside]
posted by Trurl at 7:24 PM PST - 68 comments

Dr. Emily Lethbridge of Cambridge University is on a year-long research trip to document the settings of Icelandic Sagas. The short documentary Memories of Old Awake beautifully captures those dramatic landscapes, and you can read more about her research on her blog The Saga-Steads of Iceland: A Twenty-First Century Pilgrimage. (via) (previously)
posted by Horace Rumpole at 7:18 PM PST - 9 comments

Thunderlolcats (slty)
posted by Ad hominem at 7:13 PM PST - 37 comments

Don Draper invents Facebook. The video pulls from Mad Men‘s “The Wheel” episode — in which Draper conceives an ad campaign for the Kodak Carousel — and applies its dialogue to the Facebook Timeline. It was created by Eric Leist, a technology strategist with Allen & Gerritsen.
posted by sweetkid at 5:55 PM PST - 47 comments

American Juggalo is a look at the often mocked and misunderstood subculture of Juggalos, hardcore Insane Clown Posse fans who meet once a year for four days at The Gathering of the Juggalos.
posted by bryanzera at 5:42 PM PST - 135 comments

Over the summer, NPR solicited the input of its listeners to rank the top science fiction and fantasy books of all time. Over 60,000 people voted for the top picks which were then compiled into a list by their panel of experts. The result? This list of 100 books with a wide range of styles, little context, and absolutely no pithy commentary to help readers actually choose something to read from it. SF Signal comes to the rescue with this handy flowchart.
posted by Artw at 4:20 PM PST - 165 comments

The hacker group Anonymous has ventured into new territory today with the launch of Anonymous Analytics, a site specifically targeted at corporate fraud. Their first report [PDF] is a caustic, entertaining evisceration of Chaoda, a Hong Kong agricultural company which has seen a wave of smaller scandals over the past year. Their stock is not looking good [more inside]
posted by crayz at 2:43 PM PST - 101 comments

Slacker comedy/cosmic horror oddity John Dies At The End is being filmed by Don Coscarelli. And there's a trailer. So in a weirder turn of events than anything in the (already deeply weird) book it might actually happen. [more inside]
posted by Sebmojo at 2:31 PM PST - 26 comments

Flick Chicks, by Mindy Kaling of The Office fame.
posted by SkylitDrawl at 1:39 PM PST - 67 comments

"How come you ain't never liked me?" (SLYT)
posted by curious nu at 1:28 PM PST - 54 comments

Last week's season premire of Community featured a bumper crop of pop-culture parodies, including a Glee-style opening number, a 2001 homage (with excellent use of Old Chevy Chase) and most significantly, the Instant Meme of a 22-second take-off of Doctor Who*. In the few days since, the intersection of Community fans and Who fans have been reverse-engineering the 49 year run of "Inspector Spacetime" with a forum board, a TV Tropes page, and, of course, a tumblr.
* overshadowing the addition to the show's cast and college's faculty of John Goodman and Michael K. "Omar Little" Williams. [more inside]
posted by oneswellfoop at 1:16 PM PST - 143 comments

Smithsonian.com lists the top 10 books lost to time.
posted by reenum at 12:06 PM PST - 63 comments

Blind Man vs. Paper Money - the Blind Film Critic demonstrates the problems of using (American) paper money. Unsurprisingly, just getting cash out of an ATM poses its own problem. [more inside]
posted by desjardins at 11:36 AM PST - 46 comments

Lush climates alone do not account for the vast biodiversity in tropical rainforests. Research on treefrogs from around the world, covering 123 sites and gathering DNA sequence data for 360 species of treefrogs, has provided a new understanding of biodiversity in tropical rainforests: some groups of treefrogs have existed together in the Amazon Basin for more than 60 million years. A more recent publication supports this finding, noting that forests in Canada and Europe may have much more in common with tropical rainforests than previously believed, but tropical forests have not been subjected to glaciations and mass extinctions, allowing for much greater biodiversity.
posted by filthy light thief at 11:25 AM PST - 9 comments

RIP David Croft, writer / producer of some of Britain's most well known and loved sitcoms including Dad's Army, Are You Being Served?, It Ain't Half Hot Mum, Hi-de-Hi! and 'Allo 'Allo!
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 10:57 AM PST - 64 comments

The first scientific diving expedition in the Dead Sea has found freshwater springs on the seafloor, along with carpets of micro-organisms. The saltiest body of water on Earth is still dropping three feet every year.
posted by gottabefunky at 10:20 AM PST - 16 comments

Even after the Justice Department announced attempts to block AT&T's acquisition of T-Mobile, many see a heightened chance of it going through if T-Mobile is weakened. AT&T, Deutsche Telekom and T-Mobile have hired a bunch of former U.S. government officials to try to complete the deal, with Verizon's CEO cheering them on. Yesterday, T-Mobile's CMO Cole Broadman seems to have just blogged a major upcoming weakness - no iPhone 5. Sprint opposes the AT&T/T-Mobile merger, and is tying its fate to being the sole iPhone 5 carrier with unlimited data. Today Apple sent invites out for an event this coming Tuesday where the details of the next iPhone are set to be revealed.
posted by cashman at 10:04 AM PST - 44 comments

Who's Afraid of the Seven Times Table? Ernst Kummer, one of the great mathematicians of the late 1800s, was hopeless at arithmetic. He was giving an advanced maths lecture and in the middle of a complicated calculation he needed to know what six times seven was. “Um ... six times seven is ... six times seven . . .” A student put up his hand: “41, Professor.” Kummer chalked 41 on the blackboard. “No, no, Professor!” shouted another. “It’s 44!” Kummer gave the students a quizzical look. “Come, come, gentlemen. It can’t be both. It must be either one or the other!” [more inside]
posted by storybored at 9:17 AM PST - 167 comments

Last night, British ITV broadcasted "Exposure: Gaddafi and the IRA", a documentary which included this 1988 Provisional IRA footage the filmmakers found on YouTube. Unfortunately, the footage is actually and blatently from videogame ArmA 2. ITV has stopped streaming the documentary.
posted by East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabaddi Champion '94 at 9:09 AM PST - 25 comments

Knocked Up & Knocked Down Why America's Widening Fertility Class Divide is a Problem [more inside]
posted by modernnomad at 9:04 AM PST - 88 comments

A couple of Jehovah’s Witness' knocked on the door of secular parenting advocate Dale McGowan. What happened next is both funny and instructive, without being disrespectful or confrontational. Part 1 Part 2
posted by COD at 9:00 AM PST - 180 comments

What came next was 8 minutes of comic brilliance. On Kevin Pollack's Chat Show guests are invited to do a bad impression of Larry King reveling something embarrassing about himself. Many are very funny, but Gould's amazing comic riff should go down in comedy history. Keep an eye on Kevin as he nearly faints from hilarity.
posted by judson at 7:44 AM PST - 49 comments

The new Delicious launched yesterday, after being sold off by Yahoo to AVOS, the guys that founded Youtube. New with the relaunch are stacks, or curated themed lists of links. Previously.
posted by monju_bosatsu at 7:23 AM PST - 82 comments

Cosplay Fever lip dub: Raise Your Glass. Filmed at London Film & Comic Con. [more inside]
posted by kmz at 7:18 AM PST - 22 comments

"A day in the FBI was never like this before! You are Special Agent Dale Cooper and you’ve found yourself trapped inside of the Black Lodge, a surreal and dangerous place between worlds." Black Lodge is an Atari 2600-style action game for PC and Mac, created by Jak Locke as a love letter to both retro gaming and Twin Peaks. [more inside]
posted by jbickers at 7:15 AM PST - 36 comments

Some really ...outstanding... Simpsons cosplay.
posted by griphus at 7:10 AM PST - 28 comments

A shockingly frank appraisal from MSNBC of the unprovoked police attacks at the recent 'Occupy Wall Street' protest actions. [more inside]
posted by FatherDagon at 7:07 AM PST - 244 comments

Gairsoppa SS was a British Cargo Steamer of 5,237 tons built by Palmers, Hebburn, England for MOWT as the WAR ROEBUCK SS but completed as the GAIRSOPPA SS for the British India SN Co. On the 16th February 1941 she was torpedoed by German submarine U-101 and sunk. A lifeboat carrying the survivors travelled 13 days from the wreck off S. Ireland and came ashore in a battered condition at Caethillian Cove at The Lizard which is the most southerly point of England. Only one survivor, 2nd. Officer Robert Ayres, was to survive this final assault although 4 persons had been alive at the approach to the cove. [more inside]
posted by three blind mice at 5:50 AM PST - 9 comments

Security camera footage shows the Washington Monument shaking during the recent earthquake. [more inside]
posted by twoleftfeet at 2:27 AM PST - 47 comments

Logging out of Facebook is not enough - Nik Cubrilovic demonstrates how, even after logging out, Facebook tracks every page you visit on sites that integrate Facebook services [via]
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 1:49 AM PST - 120 comments

Roll Over America: a coast-to-coast mass Velomobile tour. [more inside]
posted by BlooPen at 9:46 PM PST - 8 comments

Perhaps you've managed to see PJ20 during its limited stand in select theaters. Perhaps you'll watch it when it airs on PBS late next month. Either way, you might be interested in seeing the press conference with all five members of the band plus Cameron Crowe [20m32s], the director of the documentary, which took place after the premiere of the film at Toronto International Film Festival. The press conference is also available in downloadable audio format. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 7:58 PM PST - 55 comments

The Ropes at Disney's - 1943 Employee Handbook. The good old days when women got twice as much sick leave, the Penthouse club was accessible by "men only! - sorry gals...", and a violation of the U.S. Espionage Act could get you fired.
posted by madamjujujive at 7:44 PM PST - 51 comments

Every gamer knows that strange feeling when videogames start bleeding into the real world. Some call it the Tetris Effect (Wiki entry), but a new study calls it 'Game Transfer Phenomena'. Sally Adee argues that this property, which she calls 'everting', could pave the way for a new integration with the Internet and the physical world. (This has nothing to do with this Eversion)
posted by Lovecraft In Brooklyn at 7:36 PM PST - 115 comments

Manhattan's enterprising, unsolicited window cleaners have often been used as squeegee straw men by aspiring (and entrenched) politicians. Mayoral candidate Rudolph Giuliani railed against the squeegee men in his 1993 campaign, but not without empathetically offering them a viable career alternative.

Once a fixture of NYC life, and even the milieu of a major motion picture [SLRottenTomatoes], squeegeesmithy was since relegated to uptown. But, as America's economic windshield has clouded, the squeegee men have returned in force. [more inside]
posted by obscurator at 5:18 PM PST - 68 comments

Cartoonist Pete Emslie misses colorful color films. [more inside]
posted by Ideefixe at 4:29 PM PST - 54 comments

I am sorry that Wangari Maathai, inspiring Nobel Peace Prize winner famous for tree-planting programme, has died.
posted by maiamaia at 4:21 PM PST - 28 comments

An Evening With American Dad! The cast and writing staff of American Dad! sits down at the Paley Center for an hour to discuss the creative process behind the show, the casting process, why Critters sucks, if we'll ever see Roger's home planet, how the recent "Hot Water" episode about a killer hot tub was originally intended to be the series finale, and so much more. [more inside]
posted by Servo5678 at 3:25 PM PST - 62 comments

What happens when you drop a slinky?
posted by empath at 3:12 PM PST - 82 comments

It's probably too late to take your Hasselblad aboard a Space Shuttle, but if the opportunity arises, read the Astronaut's Photography Manual (PDF) and you might capture photos like this one. Previously.
posted by Chinese Jet Pilot at 2:47 PM PST - 9 comments

After months of struggle to get his family out of Cuba, Orestes Lorenzo got his response. Raúl Castro, then Minister of the Armed Forces, declared "If he had the balls to steal one my MiGs, then he can come back and get his family himself!" In hindsight, that was probably the wrong thing to say. [more inside]
posted by Cobalt at 2:15 PM PST - 68 comments

No "He said, she said" [more inside]
posted by Jakey at 2:15 PM PST - 24 comments

Bob Cassilly, an industrial artist/sculptor from St. Louis, responsible for revitalization via art, has tragically died in a bulldozer accident while working on his last creation, Cementland.
posted by readyfreddy at 1:27 PM PST - 31 comments

So long Mr. Peppermint Generations of North Texas men and women remember Mr. Peppermint for his three decades of entertaining children. He passed away today. (Entertainment runs in his family).
posted by punkfloyd at 1:03 PM PST - 24 comments

BBC News asks independent trader Alessio Rastani "what would keep investors happy, make them feel more confident?" and gets a surprisingly honest answer: "Personally, it doesn't matter. See, I'm a trader. I don't really care about that kind of stuff. If I see an opportunity to make money, I go with that. So, for most traders, we don't really care that much about how they're going to fix the economy, about how they're going to fix the whole situation; our job is to make money from it. And, personally, I've been dreaming of this moment for three years. I have a confession which is I go to bed every night and dream of another recession, I dream of another moment like this." [SLYT]
posted by finite at 12:06 PM PST - 227 comments

Salve! Do you have trouble finding your way from Brindisium to Antium or planning a vacation at your villa in the Appenines because no one produces an online map with directions in good Latin these days? Well, be of good cheer, friend, OmnesViae has what you need. [more inside]
posted by ricochet biscuit at 11:56 AM PST - 23 comments

Why be the mayor of Starbucks when you can conquer your neighborhood with magic? Shadow Cities is a location-aware MMORPG for your IStuff.
posted by steambadger at 11:26 AM PST - 54 comments

There have been many comics adaptations of Lovecraft. These are some of them. (Some images NSFW.) [more inside]
posted by Zed at 10:31 AM PST - 34 comments

It's been missing from YouTube for almost a year, but finally someone has resurrected the iconic video of Patti Labelle building up to a massive "Over The Rainbow" explosion at a 1984 tribute to MLK Jr.
posted by hermitosis at 10:29 AM PST - 43 comments

'Doritos Creator Dead, to be Buried with Chips.' Arch West, a former Frito-Lay executive and creator of Doritos, will be buried with the chips that made him famous.
posted by Fizz at 9:42 AM PST - 119 comments

Since 1977, Nikon has held a Small World Photomicrography Competition, to showcase that which cannot be seen with the naked eye. This year's winner will be announced in November, but until October 31, we have been invited to vote for one of this years' 115 finalists to receive the 'Small World Popular Vote Award.' [more inside]
posted by zarq at 8:49 AM PST - 13 comments

The new music video for "Big Wheels" by Toronto pop/rap/rock/fun sextet Down With Webster is a masterpiece of 8-bit animation interwoven seamlessly with live action. [more inside]
posted by 256 at 8:33 AM PST - 11 comments

Fifty years ago today, Richard Feynman gave the first of his famous lectures at Caltech. [more inside]
posted by SNACKeR at 8:31 AM PST - 54 comments

Color footage of 1936 Berlin , in what appears to be a promotional film for the city before the 1936 Olympics. (SLYT)
posted by naturalog at 7:46 AM PST - 64 comments

For much of the time since their discovery in 1947, the Dead Sea Scrolls were the jealously guarded treasure of a select group of scholars. Now, thanks to a partnership between Google and the Israel Museum, five scrolls have been digitized and made available online.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 7:24 AM PST - 21 comments

Chris Phillips used to be a journalist and photographer, a public school teacher, and a college instructor with three master’s degrees. Today, at forty, he’s underemployed, deeply in debt, and completely ecstatic about how his life has turned out. While studying for a master of arts in teaching at Montclair State University in 1996, Phillips chanced to pick up Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, the seminal collection of existentialist and proto-existentialist texts that Walter Kaufmann compiled in 1956 as a means of preparing humankind for a genuinely philosophical form of life. Something Phillips read in Kaufmann’s introduction to the book soon sent him rocketing across America, visiting jails, hospices, nursing homes, and other public venues — all on his own dime. “I didn’t have any master plan when I started doing this,” he told me recently. (I’d tracked him down in Baltimore, though he lives now in Scottsdale, Arizona.) “I just had this little idea: Let’s give philosophy back to the people.” [more inside]
posted by cgc373 at 6:30 AM PST - 23 comments

Over the last two decades, Harold Hackett has sent out over 4,800 messages in a bottle from Prince Edward Island, Canada's smallest province along the Atlantic coastline. Every message asks for the finder to send a response back to Hackett, and since 1996 he has received over 3,100 responses from all over the world.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 4:29 AM PST - 46 comments

Jeb Corliss wingsuits his way through a mountain. Yes, through. (previous wingsuit fun)
posted by allkindsoftime at 2:16 AM PST - 52 comments

Plenty of Colour is a site devoted to colour inspiration: not only from shades (black, red, pink, and purple to start), but also colourful places and spaces and objects of desire. There's also ColourLovers, (mentioned many times previously on the blue), with the The Colors of Good vs. Evil.
posted by Bora Horza Gobuchul at 10:26 PM PST - 8 comments

North American English Dialects, Based on Pronunciation Patterns
posted by edgeways at 10:24 PM PST - 82 comments

Last summer the BBC did a series on "Americanisms," or how American English was "infecting" the Queen's English. Ben Yagoda responds and documents how in fact it's the other way around. He documents "Britishisms" on his blog.
posted by bardic at 9:26 PM PST - 202 comments

In 2008 a letter was excavated during an archaeological dig of a Peruvian colonial town abandoned for unknown reasons around the turn of the 18th Century. On the back of that letter were recorded several numbers and their names in a dead tongue, lost in the upheaval following the Spanish conquest of the Inca Empire. Even though this may be the only remnant of an entire language, there is quite a bit that linguists can glean from these fragments. For a brief overview of the findings of research by a joint American-Peruvian research group, read here. And here is the full journal article, which places these numbers in their historical and linguistic context.
posted by Kattullus at 8:50 PM PST - 11 comments

A few weeks ago the USA Weekend, an insert to USA Today, published some very bad advice on rejecting pay raises in order to avoid a higher tax bracket, eagerly confusing average taxes for marginal tax rates. Corrections were made. Meanwhile, worries over pay raises may reflect a more common fear based on a widespread misconception of progressive tax rates.
posted by Brian B. at 7:15 PM PST - 94 comments

Watching Doctor Who Is Like Having A Relationship With God
posted by Lovecraft In Brooklyn at 6:54 PM PST - 207 comments

Frédéric Back was born in 1924 in France, where he studied drawing and lithography. He was lured to Canada by Jack London's stories and Clarence Gagnon's paintings, as well as correspondence with a Canadian pen-pal. Back moved to Canada in 1948, married his pen-pal Ghylaine Paquin, and was hired by Radio Canada at the birth of their television network to create still images for display on and to promote moving pictures. The drawings lead to experiments with animations, which lead to a series of animated shorts, starting with the wordless short Abracadabra (9:23, YT) in 1970. You can read and see more about Frédéric Back on his extensive website, and see more animations inside. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 4:45 PM PST - 6 comments

To paraphrase a character in the film, The Black Hole walks "a tightrope;" if not between "genius" and "insanity," then certainly between "genius" and "banality". If you're looking at this movie as a Manichean exercise between darkness and light, then you can -- for at least a few hours -- entertain the "genius" part of that equation.
posted by Trurl at 3:18 PM PST - 105 comments

On the 25th March 2011, Mark Coop of 'Keep Calm and Carry On LTD' registered a trademark of the words Keep Calm and Carry On in an attempt to take control of the very British and now very famous, nostalgia invoking, wartime poster. The trademark has angered Barter Books (who discovered the poster), wartimeposters.co.uk (owners of an original poster) and Kerry Cade from Simply Printing 4U whose business was greatly affected by the trademark. Now, in true British Spirit, a group of wartime enthusiasts has come together in an attempt to overturn the trademark. [more inside]
posted by The Discredited Ape at 3:09 PM PST - 44 comments

Researchers have apparently found a way to prevent HIV from damaging the immune system. Johns Hopkins and Imperial reseachers have developed a chemical that breaks down the cholesterol membrane around HIV. This stops the virus intererfering with immune response, and may allow a vaccine that prevents infection. [more inside]
posted by jaduncan at 3:03 PM PST - 23 comments

They’re watching. And they can bring you down: Why the world is scared of hacktivists. [Via]
posted by homunculus at 10:58 AM PST - 93 comments

Great news: Broken Picture Telephone lives, it's called Teledraw!
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane at 10:49 AM PST - 30 comments

A Liberal Decalogue - Bertrand Russell
posted by thatwhichfalls at 10:16 AM PST - 31 comments

“If you spend enough time around something like baboons, you start to look at humans differently. For example, you find yourself paying a whole lot of attention to other guys and how big their canines are, thinking comparatively, or you look at somebody’s rump and you wonder how hard it would be to anesthetize them with a blowgun dart there.” Please allow me to introduce you to Robert Sapolsky, primatologist, neurobiologist, writer, teacher, world-renowned expert on stress and friend to baboons. [more inside]
posted by MonkeyToes at 9:58 AM PST - 29 comments

Bears Love Pumpkins
posted by The Whelk at 9:09 AM PST - 25 comments

You're probably most familiar with the phenomenon when it appears like this (well until that wizard starts showing off) but did you know that vortex rings can also be created by dolphins? [more inside]
posted by PapaLobo at 8:29 AM PST - 21 comments

The Will Joines-directed video for Com Truise's "BrokenDate" is a pitch-perfect tribute to the 80s/90s cyberpunk aesthetic, with nods to Blade Runner and Tron, among others. The track is taken from the artist's latest album, Galactic Melt.
posted by beaucoupkevin at 8:13 AM PST - 37 comments

2011 Veterinary Practice News X-ray Contest Winners (runner-ups, PDF)
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 8:03 AM PST - 51 comments

Women in Saudi Arabia to vote and run in elections: Women in Saudi Arabia are to be given the right to vote and run in future municipal elections, King Abdullah has announced. [more inside]
posted by infini at 7:00 AM PST - 51 comments

Man: A Course of Study (MACOS) was a social sciences educational curriculum designed in the late 1960s. The course examined the commonalities between human behavior and that of several animal species, and culminated with a series of short films documenting the lives of the Netsilik Eskimo people. Although many school systems initially adopted MACOS, it was largely abandoned after a campaign of opposition from conservative Christians, who saw it as a Trojan horse for the indoctrination of secular humanism and cultural relativism in the public schools. The 2004 documentary Though These Eyes looks at creation of MACOS and the controversy surrounding it.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 5:18 AM PST - 17 comments

A playful mystery has been unfolding in Atlanta for a few months now, and has spread to other cities. Packages have been anonymously mailed to various writers, bookstores, publications and organizations around the city. [more inside]
posted by Maaik at 11:24 PM PST - 14 comments

"The Phonte mixtape to end all Phonte mixtapes. 70 tracks, 78 minutes, covering the past 10 years of my career all mixed and selected by DJ Flash." Phonte is a singer, rapper, one third(ish) of the rap group Little Brother, and the collaboration Foreign Exchange.
posted by cashman at 9:54 PM PST - 4 comments

Red Song King Hao Di (Good Brother) sings "Without the Communist Party There Would Be No New China" (traditional recording), "The Words of Chairman Mao are Memorized by Heart” (info and lyrics), "Lake Water". [more inside]
posted by griphus at 9:29 PM PST - 25 comments

How did hookworm infections slow the economy of the postbellum South? Do body mites play a role in diseases such as rosacea? Did fermenting seal flippers in Tupperware instead of traditional containers increase Native Alaskan botulism rates? Body Horrors is the blog of microbiologist Rebecca Kreston, who aims to explore the intersection of infectious diseases, the human body, public health and anthropology.
posted by emjaybee at 8:30 PM PST - 35 comments

The Smallest Hotel in the World [autoplay of 'La Traviata'].    So here's the story: it's 1728 and you live in Amberg, a little Bavarian town somewhere north of Munich. You and your lady friend really, really want to get married, but there is a little snag; the council laws permit only homeowners to marry, and you're still stuck renting a place. But all is not lost! You pick up a little strip of empty land between two other buildings - just 2.5 meters wide. You run up a quick wall on the front, another on the back, slap a roof on top, and presto - you're a homeowner. The council falls for it, and allows you to get married. [more inside]
posted by woodblock100 at 8:25 PM PST - 28 comments

Greek Crisis Exacts the Cruelest Toll. 'Two years into Greece's debt crisis, its citizens are reeling from austerity measures imposed to prevent a government debt default that could cause havoc throughout Europe.' 'The most dramatic sign of Greece's pain, however, is a surge in suicides.' 'Recorded suicides have roughly doubled since before the crisis to about six per 100,000 residents annually, according to the Greek health ministry and a charitable organization called Klimaka. About 40% more Greeks killed themselves in the first five months of this year than in the same period last year, the health ministry says.' [more inside]
posted by VikingSword at 5:59 PM PST - 101 comments

Oh hello, I'm Las Vegas high school student Manuja Gunaratne and I built this aircraft using trashbags and helium. Btw, I put a GPS tracker on this thing and had a digital camera takes pictures during the entire flight. Check out Project T.B.A.C. [more inside]
posted by Foci for Analysis at 5:06 PM PST - 18 comments

In northern Afghanistan, here are goats, horses, men and dusty plains, and they have been there ever since Genghis Khan and his Mongol horde swept into the neighborhood in the 13th century. Their game, then, is simple. Men on horseback grab a goat from a chalk circle, carry it around a pole and drop it into another circle. No downs or innings. Sometimes there are teams, and sometimes there aren't. Sometimes the field is 200 meters by 200 meters, and sometimes it isn't. And the goat might be a calf, but it's always dead, with its head and hooves cut off. Grab the goat, bring it around the pole and put it in the circle. That's buzkashi.
posted by nevercalm at 4:58 PM PST - 28 comments

The band Thulebasen succeeds in matching a rambling audio side with just as rambling visuals. I have never seen anything like this before. Seriously! It's a monster!
posted by Sexy Motherfucker at 3:30 PM PST - 28 comments

Superheroes are for girls too! (sltumblr) "Superheroes aren't just for little boys. Here you'll find lots of images of little girls from past and present who also love them." We've been talking a lot about gender and comics on MeFi lately, especially with respect to superheros. Here is a tumblr full of righteous babes. [more inside]
posted by mandymanwasregistered at 12:29 PM PST - 46 comments

This guy is really good at dancing. SLYT. Watch in fullscreen if possible.
posted by (Arsenio) Hall and (Warren) Oates at 11:56 AM PST - 160 comments

The World's Shortest Cat The World's Longest Cat [more inside]
posted by The Whelk at 9:01 AM PST - 65 comments

In honor of Jim Henson's 75th birthday, let's celebrate bein' green: Kermit. Ray Charles. Kermit and Ray Charles. The Boston Pops. Lena Horne and Kermit. Lena Horne. Oscar the Grouch. Bob McGrath. Audra McDonald. Chuck Findley and the Metropole Orchestra. Shirley Horn. Cibelle. Frank Sinatra. Thurl Ravenscroft. Van Morrison. Sophie Milman. Andrew Bird. Big Bird.
posted by ChuraChura at 7:56 AM PST - 18 comments

The 100,000-item Victorian curio collection other museums refused to take. 'The “merman”, a chimera made from bits of fish, fowl and monkey, is identified as “possibly Dutch or Japanese, possibly a Javanese ritual figure, possibly 1801-1900”. A paper label classifies it under veterinary medicine.'
posted by shii at 6:45 AM PST - 43 comments

So you are a hired assasassin, but what happens when it turns out the victim you are supposed to kill is a childhood friend and / or someone you fall in love with? Well obviouisly you fake-up evidence of your killing with the help of a machette under the armpit and lots and lots of tomato ketchup...
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 3:11 AM PST - 37 comments

Video footage of the legendary Doctor Fox lecture. "The lecture that Myron L. Fox delivered to the assembled experts had an impressive enough title: 'Mathematical Game Theory as Applied to Physician Education'. Those responsible for running the University of Southern California School of Medicine's psychiatry department's continuing education programme had taken themselves off to Lake Tahoe in northern California for their annual conference and a continuing education program. There, Fox - who was billed as an 'authority on the application of mathematics to human behaviour' - presented the first paper. His polished performance so impressed the audience of psychiatrists, family doctors and general internists that nobody noticed that the man standing at the lectern wasn't really Myron L. Fox from the Albert Einstein School of Medicine but Michael Fox a movie actor who though having considerable experience in playing doctors in TV shows didn't know the first thing about game theory." [Via]
posted by homunculus at 11:31 PM PST - 37 comments

Not in Our Town [autoplay 1hr PBS video]: the story of how the community of Patchogue, NY responded to the murder of Marcelo Lucero [more inside]
posted by peeedro at 8:47 PM PST - 8 comments

Climate Wizard enables you to access leading climate change information and visualize the impacts anywhere on Earth. This web-based program allows you to choose a state or country and both assess how climate has changed over time and project what future changes are predicted to occur in a given area.
posted by netbros at 8:18 PM PST - 7 comments

On March 15, 1993, The Truth Commission for El Salvador published its report From Madness to Hope: the 12-year war in El Salvador. The Commission attributed the assassination of Archbishop Óscar Romero to the death squads, as well as the deaths of the victims of the El Mozote Massacre. ... Five days after the commission issued its report, the Legislative Assembly of El Salvador approved an amnesty law covering all the violent events of the war.
posted by Trurl at 8:11 PM PST - 5 comments

Won't You Be My Neighbor? Mr. Rogers singing his immortal theme song "Won't You Be My Neighbor?" at different stages of the program's life from 1967 to 2000. So take your coat off, put on your sweater, and sing along.
posted by zooropa at 7:04 PM PST - 59 comments

"There is nothing quite like the gasp that escapes your mouth as you walk through three small buildings on a residential street here and find yourself mutely stared at by 1,400 eyes and grinned at by hundreds of painted lips over leathery chins." The Vent Haven Museum in Fort Mitchell, Kentucky is a place where ventriloquist dummies go to retire. [more inside]
posted by jessamyn at 6:05 PM PST - 29 comments

61-year-old Diana Nyad is back in the water. Again. (previously) American endurance swimmer Diana Nyad is making her third attempt (and second in as many months) to swim from Cuba to Florida without a shark cage, a distance of 103 miles. Her previous attempt failed after a crippling asthma attack. At the time, she swore she wouldn't try again, but a week later she was already having second thoughts. You can track her progress here.
posted by BlahLaLa at 5:49 PM PST - 26 comments

Google's at it again! Less than one month after saluting Freddie Mercury with an interactive doodle on his 65 Birthday (Previously), today's Doodle is another interactive salute, to Jim Henson, who would have been 75 on Saturday the 24th. Google kicked things off a bit early on Friday night, and will leave the Doodle up through the 24th. An art director at Henson's company reports that it's especially apt as Henson was prone to doodling in idle moments.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 5:41 PM PST - 45 comments

Meg Whitman: Excerpts from new HP CEO's first talk with investors. Hewlett-Packard stock hits 6-year low on Whitman's first full day. 'The dip, which hit the lowest price since May 2005, reflected investors' continued doubts about Whitman's fitness to run the global computing giant.' [more inside]
posted by VikingSword at 5:37 PM PST - 60 comments

Worried about paying for shotgun shells and chainsaw lubricant when the zombies eventually come? Zombie Apocolypse Insurance Company, LLC (ZAICO) has you covered. [more inside]
posted by Terminal Verbosity at 2:46 PM PST - 19 comments

In February of 2011, eleven students that attended UC Irvine and UC Riverside went to a fundraising speech featuring Israeli Ambassador to the U.S., Michael Oren, at the UC Irvine campus. During Oren's speech, students would stand up, shout an objection to Oren's speech, and then would allow themselves to be escorted by security, essentially causing a "heckler's veto." They were arrested, charged, and today found guilty of disrupting Oren's speech. [more inside]
posted by jabberjaw at 2:38 PM PST - 57 comments

Two men say they're Jesus, one of them must be wrong. "In 1959, Dr Milton Rokeach, a social psychologist, received a research grant to bring together three psychotic, institutionalised patients at Ypsilanti State Hospital in Michigan." All three believed that they were Jesus, and the doctor believed he should play god.
posted by bitmage at 2:00 PM PST - 79 comments

Pole Dancing Dance Off. (via coed magazine) [probably NSFW] Also on the blue before (Chinese) (Indian Gymnastics - Pole) (US Pole Dancing Federation 2009) More USPDF links (2011 West Highlights) (2010 East Highlights) (2011 Promo Vid)
posted by MechEng at 1:46 PM PST - 45 comments

The Doom Roguelike is really much better than it has any right to be, and has come a long way over the last four years of development. Its spacey sister is the Aliens Roguelike (previously). Here are some tutorial videos to get you started, and mefi's own JHarris' review of DoomRL from 2007.
posted by kaibutsu at 1:04 PM PST - 11 comments

Birdy Nam Nam is four f*cking guys, named for a reference from the 1968 movie The Party. They are a quartet of French turntablists, consisting of Crazy B, DJ Pone, DJ Need, and Little Mike. They've spun solo and together at the 2002 DMC competitions, where they took the team championship title. In 2005, they released an album made from turntable-manipulated samples, but they weren't studio-only tracks. They were also performed live, though some tracks featured additional live musicians. A 2007 live album followed, keeping the same over-all turntablism sound as their first album. Their second album was largely produced by French produceder/DJ Yunksek, and the sound changed accordingly into an album of delightful French dance music, but they kept (generally) to the turntables to create their songs. The band has released their third album, now working with Para One, another French producer/DJ. Their sound has gone on a slightly new path, with another bizzare music video to accompany their sound. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 1:04 PM PST - 27 comments

Wired takes a look at some pop culture legends that elude fans and collectors.
posted by reenum at 12:58 PM PST - 65 comments

Some time late tonight or early tomorrow morning, NASA's UARS (a satellite deployed in 1991 to study the ozone layer) will fall to the Earth. The odds of it hitting you are about 1 in 20 trillion, but the odds of it hitting somebody somewhere is about 1 in 3,200. The Planetary Society Blog has a nice writeup as well. Follow along yourself with NASA or the Center for Orbital Reentry Debris Studies. [more inside]
posted by kmz at 12:30 PM PST - 74 comments

In 1977-1978, a public access TV show called Public Access Poetry featured leading poets from across the country (Ted Berrigan, Ron Padgett, Eileen Myles, John Yau, Brad Gooch, just to name a few). [more inside]
posted by mattbucher at 11:42 AM PST - 5 comments

IMF Data Mapper v 3.0 [more inside]
posted by infini at 11:25 AM PST - 6 comments

National Geographic's Water Footprint Calculator [more inside]
posted by crunchland at 11:07 AM PST - 29 comments

Like a "modern-day pirate," 75-year-old Ray Ives has been diving for sunken treasure for decades. Wearing an ancient, bronze-helmeted diving suit, he searches the ocean floor and keeps a huge collection of marine salvage (including antique cannon balls, 'bottles, bells, swords, portholes and diving gear') in a shipping container "museum" at a British marina.

Ray: A Life Underwater: Vimeo / YouTube. (A short film documentary.) [more inside]
posted by zarq at 11:05 AM PST - 5 comments

Metafilter Favorite Stephen Fry announces that he is now the president of mental health charity MIND, in part because of his 2006 documentary: The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive. [more inside]
posted by Potomac Avenue at 10:57 AM PST - 24 comments

Mr. Destructo (previously) discusses the inscrutable twitter bot named horse_ebooks, a Russian spam account that communicates entirely through snippets of ebooks and is more hilarious (1, 2, 3, 4), confusing (1, 2, 3, 4) and philosophically poetic (1, 2, 3, 4) than any non-spambot on the internet.
posted by cobra_high_tigers at 10:19 AM PST - 34 comments

The Guardian recently reported that, according to the 2011 edition of the Times Atlas, a new island called Uunartoq Qeqertaq has emerged off the coast of Greenland due to a 15% loss in glacial cover since 1999. However, glaciologists were quick to point out that this was deeply improbable. Ejo Schrama, a professor at TU Delft whose research interests include satellite mapping of Greenland, has posted a copy of a letter subscribed by several scientists at the Scott Polar Research Insititute expressing displeasure/disgruntlement with the publishers of the atlas (the linked post has been continually updated as events have warranted, so keep an eye out). The publishers have issued a semi-apologetic statement, but why was the mistake made in the first place? ScienceInsider thinks they might have worked out the answer (see the update in the second half of the article).
posted by Dim Siawns at 9:35 AM PST - 31 comments

Behold! The trailer of ZOMBINLADEN -The Axis of Evil Dead for your viewing pleasure [SLDM] [more inside]
posted by vivelame at 9:30 AM PST - 13 comments

My machine converts words into cocktails. And, yes, it does work. Now I can literally taste the flavor of my words. [more inside]
posted by zamboni at 9:07 AM PST - 39 comments

H'ween parent filter Halloween is for little kids, but it's also for scares. I found this to be helpful in determining when it's appropriate for the twixt to meet.
posted by Straw Cab at 6:37 AM PST - 34 comments

Taxpayers in the San Francisco area spend $2,762,295 each year in junk food subsidies, but only $41,950 each year on apple subsidies. [LATIMES] A new report released this week has found that, among the billions of dollars spent each year in federal subsidies for commodity crops, a steady flow of these taxpayer dollars are going to support high fructose corn syrup and three other common food additives used in junk food. The report, “Apples to Twinkies: Comparing Federal Subsidies of Fresh Produce and Junk Food” by CALPIRG and the U.S. PIRG Education Fund, studies the interesting question of whether the nation's problem with obesity is fueled by farm subsidies.
posted by Fizz at 5:49 AM PST - 35 comments

Irishman dies of 'Spontaneous Human Combustion'.
posted by veedubya at 5:43 AM PST - 132 comments

Mukimono [wiki] is the artistic carving of mangoes, pumpkins but mostly watermelons, watermelons, watermelons and more watermelons into beautiful and maybe even fractal patterns. Not to be confused with Lynchian [previously] carving of foul-mouthed potatoes. [MLYT]
posted by FrereKhan at 5:31 AM PST - 4 comments

Food Fight: Does Healthy Food Have to Be More Expensive? In which the blog Get Rich Slowly chronicles an argument about nutrition vs cost and then invites readers to chime in.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 4:27 AM PST - 127 comments

Your Friday morning smile, Simon's Cat.
posted by HuronBob at 2:59 AM PST - 18 comments

Twilight Zone San Francisco - "Why Is Everybody Here? Doesn't anybody works in this town?" (From a show Killing My Lobster Conquers the Galaxy)(SLYT)
posted by growabrain at 11:16 PM PST - 44 comments

"Menagerie" is a series of 10 polygonal animal paintings by Laura Bifano, inspired by her love of nature and classic 8-bit video games. [Via]
posted by homunculus at 11:01 PM PST - 21 comments

The Hummingbirds were one of Sydney's greatest indie pop bands. They debuted with the single Alimony and in 1989 released LoveBuzz, featuring 14 tracks of sparkling jangle pop. It spawned the single Blush, which was a minor success, but the failed and the band broke up in 1993. They were vindicated by history when LoveBUZZ made #65 on the 100 Best Australian Albums Of All Time. This year the band reunited for a set at the iconic Big Day Out Festival and a show in Sydney. They were also immortalized in the Modern Giant song The Band's Broken Up (members of the Hummingbirds later joined members of Modern Giant to form The Aerial Maps). [more inside]
posted by Lovecraft In Brooklyn at 6:23 PM PST - 54 comments

"I Found This Star On The Ground." The Flaming Lips' newest song is six hours long and available online. [more inside]
posted by Joey Michaels at 5:56 PM PST - 104 comments

UC Berkeley researchers have successfully used functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to decode and reconstruct people’s dynamic visual experiences - in this case, watching Hollywood movie trailers.
posted by gman at 5:37 PM PST - 59 comments

To mark the 40th anniversary of his famous band, Roger Taylor is organizing The Queen Extravaganza, a tribute tour intended to "bring the glorious music and live experience of Queen to a new generation of fans in cities across North America in 2012." Two days after video auditions began, fans are saying the perfect vocalist has already been found. [more inside]
posted by The Winsome Parker Lewis at 5:07 PM PST - 77 comments

Dorothy Gambrell of Cat And Girl fame spends an awful lot of time talking about education, class, debt, money, and the hollow promise of aspirational media to discuss how much she hates Good Will Hunting
posted by The Whelk at 4:21 PM PST - 106 comments

The Big Sexy Problem with Superheroines and Their 'Liberated Sexuality'
posted by desjardins at 3:35 PM PST - 226 comments

This week has seen a lot of discussion of the American criminal justice system and its failings, and a lot of concern about what can be done to fix it. In 1947, a working class black man looked like he was about to have the full weight of the system brought down on him for taking justice into his own hands. But after Chicago leftists - including labor unions, religious leaders, artists, civil rights activists & others - launched a movement, James Hickman was set free after an all-white jury, in a trial presided over by a white judge, failed to convict, and the DA chose not to re-try because of the magnitude of public support for Hickman. According to a review in The Nation, a new book tells the story in a way that turns the typical right-wing biases of the true crime genre on their head. [more inside]
posted by univac at 2:44 PM PST - 11 comments

Sandy Peterson, creator of Call of Cthulhu, reviews Call of Cthulhu
posted by Artw at 1:36 PM PST - 106 comments

Australian Aboriginals were the first explorers, DNA research shows [more inside]
posted by mumimor at 1:15 PM PST - 32 comments

Starting Tuesday, AT&T and T-mobile subscribers will be taking their calls on the subway platforms, and possibly, on the train itself. Subscribers riding along the 14th Street corridor should be able to use their phones on the A, C, E, F, L, M, No. 1, 2 and 3 platforms. There is also expected to be service on the C and E platforms at 23rd Street. It it not clear yet if service will also work between stations, but we're sure we'll all find out soon enough. All stations are expected to be outfitted with cell service by 2016.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 12:35 PM PST - 59 comments

One of the most radically original TV shows in recent memory is Louie. It's written, directed, edited, and produced by comedian Louis C.K., who stars as a (thinly) fictionalized version of himself. The A.V. Club recently sat down with Louis C.K. to talk through the show's second season, episode by episode. He sheds light on many aspects of the show, including the much-discussed Dane Cook episode. Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4. (Louis C.K. previously: 1 2 3 4)
posted by naju at 12:26 PM PST - 84 comments

Mansoor 'Tiger' Ali Khan, erstwhile Indian cricket captain, has died. His legacy evokes a previous era in Indian history: a last-generation Royal blinded in one eye as a young man, he captained the Oxford then the Indian teams (his father had played for Oxford and England before captaining India), and married movie actress Sharmila Tagore with whom he had children who went on to become movie stars themselves. Some memories of a man known for his cricketing skill, style and charisma.
posted by the mad poster! at 12:17 PM PST - 20 comments

The Texas Parks & Wildlife Department maintains a Flickr account with a wide range of pictures from the state. Two of the more recently posted sets show the extent of the drought Texas is currently suffering: Bastrop Fire and 2011 Texas Drought.
posted by monju_bosatsu at 12:08 PM PST - 23 comments

Located 100 miles south of Grand Junction, Colorado, at the end of Highway 97 is a small community of Nucla. There is one remaining pharmacy, the Apothecary Shoppe, where you can find Don Colcord, the town druggist, the closest this town has to a doctor. He's also the bowling league president (and he certifies the lanes annually), announcer for Nucla High football games, and he has his pyrotechnics-display license for the local fireworks on the Fourth of July. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 12:04 PM PST - 14 comments

It's long been thought that there is a high incidence of autism (and autism-related disorders like Asperger's) in IT fields. Now one company is looking to turn that into sales. [more inside]
posted by Chrysostom at 11:43 AM PST - 33 comments

Ira Glass talks about how RadioLab is made, and why it's so different from everything else.
posted by garlic at 11:42 AM PST - 88 comments

"It is this failure of political will both in the EU and US which is starting to make the contemporary economic scene resemble that of the 1930s. " The Eurozone and the US are heading into a bad economic decade, argues John Lanchester (wiki). [more inside]
posted by doctornemo at 11:34 AM PST - 49 comments

Neutrinos discovered to be faster than light at CERN. If confirmed, these results will overturn a century of one of the most basic assumptions in modern physics. 'Thousands of experiments have been undertaken to measure' the speed of light 'ever more precisely, and no result has ever spotted a particle breaking the limit. But Antonio Ereditato of the Orion collaboration and his colleagues have been carrying out an experiment for the last three years that seems to suggest neutrinos have done just that.' [more inside]
posted by VikingSword at 11:01 AM PST - 254 comments

Tomorrow, Friday the 23rd of September 2011, Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas will go before the UN and set out his request for formal recognition of the state of Palestine. There are many problems with this, and not just for the Palestinians... [more inside]
posted by dougrayrankin at 10:52 AM PST - 98 comments

There's some fascinating engraving and illustration to be seen at the Museum of Insurance. (Better than watching paint dry. Seriously)
posted by OmieWise at 10:22 AM PST - 9 comments

The Guardian has launched what they term "Bankers: An Anthropological Study." One of their first discoveries? People really hate bankers. Daniel Davies - Left of Center Finance Guy, Twitterer, and Crooked Timber Blogger attempts a defense. "But who's the real criminal? Its me, isn't it?"
posted by JPD at 10:04 AM PST - 35 comments

PAX Primer in The Morning News. MeFi's own Matthew Baldwin of Defective Yeti fame offers up a thoughtful review of the Penny Arcade Expo (PAX) in The Morning News.
posted by BigHeartedGuy at 9:39 AM PST - 21 comments

[...]There was still talk of snipers, of a counterattack by Qaddafi’s men, of a fifth column of “sleeper cells” lurking inside the capital. Victory had come too easily. Only weeks earlier, the rebels seemed in disarray, and Qaddafi’s forces, having withstood more than four months of NATO air strikes, seemed poised to hold out for many more. Then, on Aug. 20, a planned uprising broke out in Tripoli, as the ragged rebel army converged on the city from various directions. The final battle, expected to last weeks, was over in two days. Qaddafi and his top lieutenants fled almost immediately. Now it was hard to know who was a killer and who a mere dupe.[...]
The Surreal Ruins of Quaddafi's Never-Never Land, Robert F. Worth (Note: nytimes. Via longform.com)
posted by JHarris at 9:08 AM PST - 13 comments

Do you miss the game, Lemmings? Would you like to play Lemmings again? How many lemmings can you handle? How many more lemmings? [more inside]
posted by phunniemee at 8:59 AM PST - 58 comments

The latest (and greatest?) New World Trade Center visualization video. Silverstein Properties recently released footage of the construction and a visualization of the finished New World Trade Center. WTC Tower 1(Freedom Tower) is slated to be finished in early 2013 and it will mark another chapter in the ever evolving Manhattan skyline.
posted by rageagainsttherobots at 8:30 AM PST - 38 comments

Team Clonc demonstrate the correct way to ride your Brompton bicycle.
posted by SyntacticSugar at 7:45 AM PST - 23 comments

TV Fact Checkers "Behind every smart TV show, there is a tireless script coordinator, technical adviser, researcher or producer who makes sure the jargon is right, the science is accurate and the pop culture references are on-point." This week, Wired "is speaking with fact-checkers behind the fall TV season’s geekiest shows." [more inside]
posted by zarq at 7:30 AM PST - 72 comments

"I think Christians have gotten a bad name because of Christians. Like, I don’t blame other people for the rap that Christians have." Yvette Nicole Brown, who plays Shirley on Community, talks faith, fandom, and show business with the A.V. Club.
posted by psoas at 7:05 AM PST - 60 comments

While former mayor Richard M. Daley's 2008 selloff of all 36,000 of Chicago's parking meters to LAZ Parking has resulted in some pain for drivers, such as steep rate hikes and the end of free Sundays and holidays, none is weirder than the installation of over a thousand parking meters in the middle of a deserted urban prairie. They were recently replaced by the latest electronic payboxes, many of which are still awaiting their first customer.
posted by theodolite at 5:47 AM PST - 105 comments

Guinea pigs are sociable animals and Swiss law prohibits owners from keeping the furry rodents on their own. But what happens when one dies? Don't fret, just call Priska Küng, who runs a 'rent-a-guinea pig' service.
posted by ArmyOfKittens at 4:44 AM PST - 57 comments

"The prominent literary critic Marjorie Perloff has recently begun using the term 'unoriginal genius' to describe this tendency emerging in literature. Her idea is that, because of changes brought on by technology and the Internet, our notion of the genius—a romantic, isolated figure—is outdated. An updated notion of genius would have to center around one's mastery of information and its dissemination. Perloff has coined another term, 'moving information,' to signify both the act of pushing language around as well as the act of being emotionally moved by that process. She posits that today's writer resembles more a programmer than a tortured genius, brilliantly conceptualizing, constructing, executing, and maintaining a writing machine." --Kenneth Goldsmith on why "genius" is an archaic concept, and how literature in English has fallen half-a-century behind advances in visual arts and music
posted by bardic at 3:57 AM PST - 44 comments

In a video (possibly triggering) posted a month before his death, he recalls what his wife said after they watched Baz Luhrmann's Romeo and Juliet : "I wonder if she would have still done it, if she had waited for a thousand days." 1000 days after his wife's death, Mark Rife took his own life. [more inside]
posted by book 'em dano at 12:45 AM PST - 108 comments

Walt Harrington's profile of the 43rd POTUS, Dubya and Me.
posted by Silo004 at 12:26 AM PST - 48 comments

She won the World Championship less than a year after turning professional. She is undefeated in her event. She has repeatedly broken her own world record. Sports Illustrated calls her the world's greatest female athlete. [more inside]
posted by Trurl at 9:38 PM PST - 44 comments

Everyone knows how to draw a stickman. This cool game brings your stickman to life!
posted by rozomon at 6:21 PM PST - 56 comments

Imagine a remote, forested island in the largest body of freshwater in the world. Now imagine living on that island and being a part of one of the most unique and challenging artist residencies in the world. Rabbit Island is that island, and with your help, Rabbit Island will become that residency.

The 90 acre Rabbit Island, initially a Kickstarter project, has become a reality. Follow the blog or Flickr feed from this uninhabited island-turned-artist-collective.
posted by Foci for Analysis at 6:13 PM PST - 45 comments

The Outdoor Co-ed Topless Pulp Fiction Appreciation Society (NSFW) is exactly what it says on the tin. They'll have more reading material now that modern day pulp imprint Hard Case Crime has has returned.
posted by Lovecraft In Brooklyn at 4:35 PM PST - 99 comments

A giant equation is taking form over the course of a few days, on a 46-ft tall "chalkboard" at the corner of Crosby and Broome in NYC. Sponsored by Dow Chemical, it's a mathematical brain teaser with the significance of each term left for the solver to discern. In the first term, for example, the '755' is the length in feet of each side of the great pyramid. Solutions to pieces of the puzzle can be submitted via twitter to @GiantChalkboard. I'm not clear about the commercial aspect of this, or even what exactly "solutionism" is. But if you're a math/puzzle nerd, you'll likely waste lots of time on enjoy it.
posted by ancillary at 4:07 PM PST - 47 comments

Simply the Worst. Film blog Reverse Shot is looking this month at the worst (by various criteria) films of some major directors, including the Coen Brothers' The Ladykillers, Wes Anderson's The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, Woody Allen's Anything Else, and more.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 3:18 PM PST - 239 comments

"In a dramatic move, Canongate has defied Assange's wishes and secretly printed thousands of copies of The Unauthorised Autobiography, by Julian Assange, copies of which have been shipped amid strict security to booksellers in preparation for imminent release." [more inside]
posted by memebake at 1:18 PM PST - 125 comments

We've seen some gorgeous images (and some videos) of aurora borealis on the blue, but have you seen aurora borealis with a full moon? "The aurora has to be bright and strong to be visible on the blue sky created by the moon. This does not happen so very often, which makes pictures like these extremely rare." [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 11:57 AM PST - 14 comments

Stackoverflow grapples with the many spellings of "Gaddafi." Thank God programmers are on the case, because everyone else is confused by the 112 possibilities (even with this chart)! Even Dr. Demento weighed in.
posted by grumblebee at 11:22 AM PST - 51 comments

R.E.M. call it a day. "... as lifelong friends and co-conspirators, we have decided to call it a day as a band."
posted by danwalker at 10:57 AM PST - 328 comments

Stocklogos has a very brief look at the development of some famous logos, and makes some rather tongue-in-cheek suggestions as to their possible futures.
posted by Dim Siawns at 10:55 AM PST - 29 comments

"A lawless drug nightmare erupted on my street after Saturday night's OSA concert featuring the band called Widespread Panic."
posted by griphus at 10:20 AM PST - 109 comments

Counting is one of the first and simplest concepts most people are taught. But when you get beyond simple 123s, counting can become an advanced subject all its own. Essentially the science of counting, combinatorics is a key component of everything from abstract algebra to probability (PDF). [more inside]
posted by kmz at 10:16 AM PST - 37 comments

"What Every Woman Should Know" by Susie Cagle on Cartoon Movement provides an illustrated investigation of "crisis pregnancy centers" like First Resort. (via)
posted by mrgrimm at 10:07 AM PST - 40 comments

That Used to Be Us Tom Friedman has long beaten the English Language like a mule. His new book, "That Used to Be Us" is no exception. [more inside]
posted by Ironmouth at 9:53 AM PST - 55 comments

Photofly is a cloud based service that will construct 3D models of objects based off of a handful of digital photographs. The NYT ran this story in June providing a bit more detail. Photofly can be used to capture People (more, more, and more), Places (so on, and so forth), and Things (etc., etc., etc). It's also been used to create unreal effects in this music video. Shaan Hurley, of autodesk, explains the technology in this video.
posted by codacorolla at 9:45 AM PST - 15 comments

"it's a hard sell to executives to suggest an FPS with no shooting, but this is definitely the sort of game we should be making, as an industry." Warco: an FPS where you hold a camera instead of a gun. Ars Technica has a writeup.
posted by rebent at 9:42 AM PST - 41 comments

"This system could produce hydrogen anyplace that there is wastewater near sea water," said Bruce E. Logan, Kappe Professor of Environmental Engineering. "It uses no grid electricity and is completely carbon neutral. It is an inexhaustible source of energy." [more inside]
posted by Chrysostom at 9:11 AM PST - 82 comments

Subterra is a 34 acre estate surrounded by pastoral Kansas hills located 25 miles west of Topeka. The site holds a powerful and ominous past now transformed to an uplifting vision of our potential future. Once, an Atlas E intercontinental ballistic missile with a 4 megaton warhead was housed in the protective underground cavern. Now the missile is gone and the launch control structure is converted into spacious living space with an eclectic spirit of peace.
posted by Gator at 8:52 AM PST - 18 comments

Oz and Ends is a blog about fantasy literature for kids. My favourite part of the site is the "Weekly Robin" feature, which muses on the well-known kid sidekick(s), from storytelling props and costume design to origins and possible futures.
posted by sevenyearlurk at 7:24 AM PST - 3 comments

How many arms have held you, and hated to let you go, how many, how many, I wonder, but I really don't want to know.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 7:05 AM PST - 10 comments

Realtime face substitution SLVimeo
posted by Tom-B at 6:58 AM PST - 35 comments

How many people flew on the Space Shuttle?
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 6:37 AM PST - 35 comments

How many photographs are there?
posted by seanyboy at 6:10 AM PST - 29 comments

What's that you say? Kpop? Don't you have to be on a permanent sugar buzz to listen to that stuff? Correct connaisseur. But if you don't have pigtails and think you might enjoy some crisp beats along with the happy happy sounds, check out Areia Creations and its remixes of Korean hits. Reliably better than the originals, and a nice introduction into what is and has been hot on the Korean charts. Very addictive. [more inside]
posted by litleozy at 5:50 AM PST - 3 comments

How many continents are there?
posted by twoleftfeet at 5:34 AM PST - 48 comments

Due to being sanctioned for unruly fan behaviour, the football match between Turkish teams Fenerbahce and Manisaspor was due to be played in an empty stadium. Until someone in the Turkish Football Federation had the idea to only allow women and children under 12 to attend. [more inside]
posted by PenDevil at 3:35 AM PST - 102 comments

Oil prices remain stubbornly high. Daniel Yergin from CERA has an opinion piece published in the WSJ: There Will Be Oil. The Peak Oil community react in depth. Bonus : Robert McFarlane in the NYT on flex-fuel for energy security.
posted by bystander at 3:29 AM PST - 83 comments

At the vanguard of the neo-classical metal genre in the 1980's was the singular Jason Becker, a young guitarist who was known for his progressive compositions (slyt) and technical prowess (slyt; yes, that's a yo-yo; yes, he's yo-yoing and playing guitar at the same time). Following a stint in Cacophony with Marty Friedman and the release of his solo album Perpetual Burn, Becker was recruited by David Lee Roth to replace the departing Steve Vai on the upcoming album A Little Ain't Enough. Just one week after joining the band, Becker's meteoric trajectory was reversed in dramatic fashion with the diagnosis and sudden onset of Lou Gehrig's Disease. [more inside]
posted by troll at 3:24 AM PST - 8 comments

Living in a post-modern, information-rich world should lead us to more civility rather than less – thought this might be interesting to readers - Both Nietzsche and Brecht understood the temptations of arguing in rage, but did not follow their own prescriptions; we should learn from their example.
posted by hopefulmidlifer at 12:11 AM PST - 28 comments

An alternative Lorem Ipsum generator. [NSFW language] [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 11:00 PM PST - 23 comments

U.S. Alleges Full Tilt Poker was Ponzi Scheme. The Justice Department has filed suite against popular online poker site Full Tilt Poker, asserting that money players believed to be stored in their accounts was actually diverted to the site's owners, with money from new players being used to pay off bets when necessary. Reaction from the poker community when the site was first shut down in April. Reaction now. Always good for a contrarian spin, Deadspin says the Ponzi scheme is really all the Justice Department's fault.
posted by escabeche at 10:00 PM PST - 77 comments

Pasta alla carbonara (usually spaghetti, but also fettuccine, rigatoni or bucatini) is an Italian pasta dish based on eggs, cheese (pecorino or parmesan), bacon (guanciale or pancetta), and black pepper. [more inside]
posted by Trurl at 9:26 PM PST - 105 comments

"Internet Essentials" is a $10/month internet plan available to any family with one child eligible for free lunches at American public schools. [more inside]
posted by modernnomad at 5:32 PM PST - 106 comments

From the start of Bill Lancaster writing the original script to the final edited cut of the film, The Thing underwent some serious changes. A lot of footage ended up littering the cutting room floor. The Collector's Edition DVD gives us a look at some of the Outtakes and Deleted Scenes, but it falls shy of showing us what really was cut. - Deleted Scenes from The Thing and other assorted goodies at Outpost 31.

There is also a prequel of some kind.
posted by Artw at 5:21 PM PST - 38 comments

Occupy Wall Street is an event comprised of anti-corporate non-violent protests that are being promoted by a range of groups including the AdbustersMedia Foundation and a New York City group called General Assembly. Months ago a plea was put out to diverse political and activist groups urging them to descend on Wall Street on September 17th and take part in long-term occupation of the area in the spirit of the Arab Spring rebellions. [more inside]
posted by stagewhisper at 5:17 PM PST - 250 comments

Starting with a fresh box of twenty-four Crayola crayons I measured each with an i1 pro spectrophotometer to create a set of spectral power distributions (SPD) of the reflected light.
posted by rhapsodie at 4:54 PM PST - 18 comments

Byliner and The Atavist might be heralding a change in how and how much longform article authors are paid.
posted by reenum at 4:32 PM PST - 14 comments

Found via this comment by Concordia on this AskMe, I want to give a wider welcome to Emotional Bag Check - a site that pairs up those having a tough time, with those who are inclined to lend an ear - with the additional feature that with each piece of advice comes a song chosen by the advice-giver.
posted by greenish at 4:31 PM PST - 16 comments

repl.it is an online environment for interactively exploring programming languages. Supported languages.
posted by juv3nal at 4:26 PM PST - 21 comments

Too Many Dicks on The Daily Show. Two of my favorite things together at last. (YT)
posted by Nathanial Hörnblowér at 3:36 PM PST - 63 comments

This interview with Maurice Sendak on NPR is worth a listen. Sendak has just published his first book in 30 years. Bumble-ardy was written while his partner was dying in order, he says, "to save myself". be sure to hang in until the end of the interview, have some tissue handy.
posted by tomswift at 2:47 PM PST - 30 comments

Reamde - Neal Stephenson's much anticipated book, has just been released. Perhaps you can ask Neal questions at one of his book-signings. I know I've got some questions about Bitcoin and what he thinks of his 1995 predictions now with the latest happenings over at Mt Gox. :)
posted by jackspace at 2:07 PM PST - 164 comments

Hank Williams III has had a rocky relationship with his label, Curb Records, from the beginning, when his first album with them was an album with his grandfather and father, "thanks to the wonders of 21st century digital overdubbing." A decade and a half later, Hank 3 was free from Curb Records, though the label snuck out one last album, even though the contract was over. It was actually an old album from a decidedly non-country style, but that didn't stop Curb from offering it as a Hank III album at a fire-sale discount, ensuring Billboard Country charting. That was in June of this year. Jump ahead to September: Hank 3 released three albums over four CDs, spanning his broad musical styles and beyond. CD1: country (of sorts); CD2: haunted ambient soundtrack and Cajun-tinted country, with guests (like Tom Waits); CD3: cattle-core; CD4: doom rock.
posted by filthy light thief at 11:34 AM PST - 87 comments

mongolia! This summer, a pair of teenage photographers visited Mongolia and took Polaroids of Mongolian nomads, for the nomads to keep. This video shows them with their snapshots. [more inside]
posted by Philosopher Dirtbike at 9:50 AM PST - 24 comments

The ongoing student demonstrations in Chile began as a protest over the costs, profits, and fairness of higher education there. They have since attracted other segments of Chilean society venting frustration over wages, health care, and other issues. Uniting the protesters is common dissatisfaction with hugely unpopular President Sebastian Pinera and social inequality...
posted by Surfin' Bird at 9:42 AM PST - 13 comments

In 1991, Troy Davis was convicted and sentenced to death for the 1989 murder of policeman Mark MacPhail in a Savannah, Georgia parking lot. Since then, seven of the nine prosecution eyewitnesses have recanted all or part of their testimony, with some citing pressure from the police to make false statements. An exception is Sylvester "Redd" Coles, who made the initial report of Davis’s guilt, and is regarded by the defense as the chief suspect. New witnesses have sworn affidavits that Coles confessed the crime to them. An array of figures have called for a stay of execution, including death-penalty supporters Senator Bob Barr and former FBI director William S. Sessions. Today, the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles denied clemency; barring action from the District Attorney, Davis is set to be executed by lethal injection tomorrow at 7pm. [Previously]
posted by East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabaddi Champion '94 at 8:27 AM PST - 412 comments

The 2011 MacArthur “Genius" Fellowships have been announced ('07, '08, '09, '10 on the Blue). Among the recipients is Chicago-based architect Jeanne Gang. The 82-story Aqua Tower is her first skyscraper, and stands as the tallest building in the world designed by a woman.

"You know, a lot of architects get into fetishized objects,” she said to me. “But when you can design anything you want without actually having to make it, you do wild things that can’t work. And that’s not what I want to do.”
posted by obscurator at 7:51 AM PST - 66 comments

The Indomitable Language: How the Cherokee Syllabary Went from Parchment to iPad
posted by overeducated_alligator at 7:05 AM PST - 21 comments

"I never felt like passing out in a warehouse and I never felt treated like a piece of crap in any other warehouse but this one," Goris said. "They can do that because there aren't any jobs in the area."

The Allentown newspaper The Morning Call investigates life inside of one of Amazon's newest warehouses. [more inside]
posted by Toekneesan at 6:35 AM PST - 261 comments

There is no right answer.
Damned if we do impose sanctions on Syria. And damned if we don't.
Foreign companies are enriching Assad's brutal regime – but even the Syrian people are divided on the issue of sanctions.
This piece was written by George Monbiot after he had publicly asked for feedback What do you think – should we impose sanctions on Syria?
The moral line is unclear, but I'm writing a column next week about this issue and would appreciate some of your input.
Useful background : Geopolitics of the 2011 Syrian Uprising. Some voices from the street. (Previous 1; 2; 3; 4 ).
posted by adamvasco at 6:19 AM PST - 32 comments

Was your favorite childhood book written by a radical lefty? Scholars reveal the socialist history of 20th century American children's literature. Discover the myriad connections between midcentury American socialism and Crockett Johnson (Harold and the Purple Crayon), Syd Hoff (Danny and the Dinosaur), and the authors of many of the Little Golden Books and I Can Read Books.
posted by Miko at 5:41 AM PST - 55 comments

Teaching Kids News Timely, relevant news articles for kids, educators in the classroom and parents at home. How to Use This Site: On TKN you’ll find original news articles on topics that are timely, relevant and intriguing. They are written for an elementary and intermediate school audience (grades 2-8) and can be used easily by kids, parents, and teachers.
posted by Fizz at 5:09 AM PST - 6 comments

The Dark Side of the Placebo Effect: When Intense Belief Kills.
posted by homunculus at 2:34 AM PST - 66 comments

Immediately following the repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell, a previously-closeted gay soldier stationed in Germany calls his father to come out of the closet. (SLYT)
posted by mightygodking at 10:36 PM PST - 66 comments

It's a bit old, but there's nothing on the Blue about the Eight Track Museum in Dallas, TX which opened this Valentine's Day. Such an oversight must be redressed. The museum's curator, Bucks Bennett, didn't start collecting 8-track tapes until 1988, long after the format has ceased being viable. As of this year, Bennett has about 3000 tapes in his collection, one of which you really, truly need to see (though whether or not you actually want to hear this tape is a decision best left to you, Gentle Reader). [more inside]
posted by stannate at 9:34 PM PST - 27 comments

"Jean Paul Gaultier's World of Inspiration" - a profile by Susan Orlean [more inside]
posted by Trurl at 9:21 PM PST - 6 comments

“Light painting (also known as light drawing or light graffiti) is a photographic technique in which exposures are made usually at night or in a darkened room by moving a hand-held light source or by moving the camera. In many cases the light source itself does not have to appear in the image. The term light painting also encompasses images lit from outside the frame with hand-held light sources. The first known photographer to use this technique was Man Ray in his series "Space Writing" created in 1935. The photographer Ellen Carey discovered Man Ray's signature signed by penlight nearly 74 years after the pictures had been taken” (wiki) [more inside]
posted by growabrain at 8:39 PM PST - 9 comments

"As noted elsewhere, more men have walked on the moon than have successfully photographed the analemma." (details) [more inside]
posted by jessamyn at 8:15 PM PST - 50 comments

What's the matter? CIA got you pushing too many pencils? SLYT.
posted by nicolas léonard sadi carnot at 8:09 PM PST - 10 comments

The Other Mad Men. It's been accepted more or less as a truism that black people didn't work on Madison Avenue in the 1960s. But facts are stubborn things. There were black people in advertising even then, some (a few) in high places. Contrary to the popular assumption, blacks in that era met with success and challenges on Madison Avenue, like everywhere else.
posted by sweetkid at 7:55 PM PST - 27 comments

Things Could Be Worse. [more inside]
posted by subbes at 7:08 PM PST - 45 comments

This little girl just had surgery to correct her cleft palate. Watch as she sees her "new" smile for the first time, and prepare to experience sheer, pure joy with her. SLYT. [more inside]
posted by tristeza at 6:57 PM PST - 58 comments

If you live in New Jersey, you can see what your home and the surrounding area looked like from above in the year 1930.
posted by candasartan at 6:45 PM PST - 25 comments

Just over five months after the ban came into force, the Guardian reports on the impact of France's so-called burqa ban on niqab-wearing women.
posted by hoyland at 5:26 PM PST - 183 comments

Why am I showing you a Best Buy flyer? Because it's from around this time, 15 years ago. [via]
posted by cashman at 4:50 PM PST - 233 comments

Chext is a site that enables the user to enter transactions and track their bank balance via SMS. People sharing a bank account can also get updates when money is spent from the account by the other person. [more inside]
posted by reenum at 3:34 PM PST - 29 comments

Paul Lukas found hundreds of Manhattan Trade School for Girls "report cards" from the early 1900's and has posted several of them online. [more inside]
posted by gman at 2:50 PM PST - 44 comments

By processing a million songs in twenty minutes, and using the Stairway detector Paul discovered many songs that Slow Build "more" (up to 29) than Stairway to Heaven (which gets only a 9). [via] [more inside]
posted by morganw at 2:37 PM PST - 42 comments

The Knight XV from Conquest Vehicles: For when you absolutely, positively need a luxury ride that can withstand the Apocalypse. With a limited production run of only 100 vehicles, this luxury armored SUV - inspired by the Gurkha military vehicle - costs a paltry $310,000 USD; its nearest competitor, the Dartz Pombron, has no base price listed (estimated cost: $1.5 million USD). [more inside]
posted by Unicorn on the cob at 2:22 PM PST - 55 comments

A summer day, a dirt road, heat thick as steam from a boiling pot. Along the shoulder are verdant trees, shadows, the hum and croak and whistle and buzz of the woods. This is Clarksville, Texas, 1910. And here is Frank Jones, who will one day, decades from now, years after his death, be among the most recognized African-American self-taught artists.

[more inside]
posted by zamboni at 1:46 PM PST - 4 comments

Read the latest Daniel Pinkwater novel before it's published. As he has done with his last three novels , children's author, NPR commentator and pet lover Daniel Pinkwater is serialising his latest novel, Bushman Lives. [more inside]
posted by cottoncandybeard at 12:29 PM PST - 26 comments

The secretive NRO celebrated 50 years of spying from space with a one-day surprise public exhibition of a just-declassified KH-9 Hexagon "Big Bird" imaging satellite. Between 1963 and 1986, a constellation of KH-7 Gambit, KH-8 Gambit 3, and KH-9 Hexagon satellites, all revealed after a half-century of secrecy, returned high-resolution film exposures of Cold War targets from orbit by parachute.
posted by Chinese Jet Pilot at 11:33 AM PST - 47 comments

The American Folk Art Museum in New York City is said to be considering dissolution and dispersal of its outstanding collection of folk and outsider art.
posted by xowie at 11:30 AM PST - 23 comments

Will Your Favorite Star Survive Color? This article from a 1935 issue of the Hollywood fan magazine Photoplay breathlessly anticipates a new standard of screen beauty due to the spread of Technicolor motion pictures. You can read or download the whole magazine, for free, legally, at the Media History Digital Library. [more inside]
posted by theatro at 11:20 AM PST - 32 comments

By now we all know how to pimp our grilled cheese sandwiches, but maybe that's just not your style. Maybe you're like me, and enjoy the simple pleasure of a melts-just-right Kraft Single, but don't like the long list of unpronounceable ingredients. Well, today is your lucky day: America's Test Kitchen comes up with a recipe for DIY American Cheese.
posted by phunniemee at 10:44 AM PST - 160 comments

YA authors asked to 'straighten' gay characters. Two YA authors posted about their unhappy experience with trying to find an agent for their book that includes gay characters. Soon, a representative of the previously unnamed agency (though also not the actual agent in question) posts a rebuttal. Debate flies back and forth in the comments, on Twitter, and on various blogs, with writers coming forward with their own experiences. (1 2 3, among many others.) Cleolinda has a detailed and informative summary of the whole situation. (Previously.)
posted by kmz at 10:19 AM PST - 55 comments

After nearly 200 years of rest, Mount Tambora is rumbling again and spewing ash. The last eruption of Mount Tambora was in 1815 and at the time was the largest eruption in the world since 180 AD. The massive amount of volcanic ash kicked into the stratosphere (around 160 cubic kilometers of ejecta were released) cooled Earth's temperature by over a degree Fahrenheit and caused "The year without a summer". In comparison, the 1980 eruption of Mount Saint Helens released around 1 cubic kilometer of ejecta.
posted by chakalakasp at 10:09 AM PST - 48 comments

St. Peter's was a seminary built near Cardross, on the outskirts of Glasgow. It is remarkable for its modernist design, the architects having drawn significant inspiration from Le Corbusier's brutalist monastery at La Tourette, and has been A-listed by Historic Scotland. During its construction, the Second Vatican Council recommended that priests should be trained and educated in the communities they were to serve; the quasi-monastic setting of St. Peter's thus meant it was obsolescent before its completion. Although it was briefly adapted to serve as a rehabilitation centre for drug abusers, it was abandoned in the 80s and, by 2008, found itself on the World Monument Foundation's list of most endangered sites (PDF, see p.58). There has been recent talk of the Scottish Government funding a £10m restoration project, but it is not entirely clear if the restoration is intended to turn the building into an arts centre, a museum or an 'intentional modernist ruin'. [more inside]
posted by Dim Siawns at 9:50 AM PST - 19 comments

Are wet-induced wrinkled fingers primate rain treads? (Nature's summary) In the words of a famous bathtub philosopher, pretty neat, huh? Warning: may trigger rhytiphobia.
posted by elgilito at 9:27 AM PST - 19 comments

Did you know that two guys once flew a Cessna for 64 days, without landing? They apparently refuelled from a moving pickup truck with a hose. Did you also know of the monks from Mt. Hiei, Japan who run 900 marathons in 6 years? To qualify, they do 30 km. a day for 100 consecutive days. I did not know these things when I woke up on Friday, but Now I Know. [more inside]
posted by Cobalt at 8:59 AM PST - 27 comments

Things Apple Is Worth More Than
posted by noaccident at 8:31 AM PST - 63 comments

Retro Muppet Concert Posters (Five total, one for each character). Beautifully simple and possibly available as posters for sale soon.
posted by mathowie at 8:06 AM PST - 44 comments

Musical Guide to the Malls of Dubai. By Rohit.
posted by thirteenkiller at 7:59 AM PST - 17 comments

Locke, Johnson, Kierkegaard, Freud, and dozens of other historical figures on the subject of obsessive-compulsive disorder. [more inside]
posted by Iridic at 7:43 AM PST - 8 comments

"I messed up. I owe everyone an explanation." Netflix has lost 26% of its value after raising prices and splitting their DVD and streaming services (previously); they'll lose lose 600,000 subscribers by September 30 instead of gaining the 400,000 they predicted. Now Netflix is spinning off their DVD-by-mail service into a separate web site, Qwikster. [more inside]
posted by kirkaracha at 6:46 AM PST - 399 comments

There were sexual revolutions before the sexual revolution.
posted by Obscure Reference at 6:33 AM PST - 41 comments

Reel African is a new video-streaming site showing licensed African productions, films, series and documentaries, including The XYZ Show, the African Spitting Image. Also some MTV. Free to watch, with adverts inserted in the content. Promo trailer. Variety write-up. Via.
posted by criticalbill at 6:09 AM PST - 11 comments

Nigella talks dirty. Jamie talks dirty. DLYT, NSFW
posted by Ahab at 5:55 AM PST - 30 comments

InForm: Turning Data into Meaning. An exhibit at the Adobe Museum of Digital Media.
posted by OmieWise at 5:33 AM PST - 9 comments

The year was 1929, and Noah Lewis was blowing the hell outta the harmonica. [more inside]
posted by flapjax at midnite at 4:08 AM PST - 7 comments

The Only Pair of Matching Singing Bird Pistols
posted by twoleftfeet at 4:03 AM PST - 40 comments

An experiment done in the 1990s exposed children to various levels of lead. The lawsuit filed in 2001 by the parents of over 100 participants accuses the Kennedy Krieger Institute that the scientists knowingly used the kids as test subjects in toxic dust control study. [more inside]
posted by hat_eater at 3:08 AM PST - 42 comments

"The weapons also have levels, and if you are not at the level needed to wield a weapon, you are unable to use it. This does not make a hell of a lot of sense when the weapon in question is a knife or a pipe or an axe, especially when you have been wielding all of the above quite adroitly for hours. What on earth does a Level 4 Pipe even mean, anyway? Worse yet, the weapons are all subclassed, so you are not just finding a Level 4 Pipe; you are finding a Flimsy Level 4 Pipe or a Homemade Level 4 Pipe, the differences of which are utterly unclear." --Tom Bissell on why a new zombie game sucks due to its reckless "Gamification," and why this means your future will also suck
posted by bardic at 12:25 AM PST - 95 comments

You've read The Backstroke of the West; now WATCH The Backstroke of the West! (MLYT, some NSFW language. The first minute or so of video is missing, but the rest of the movie is there in its full glory.)
posted by cthuljew at 11:20 PM PST - 6 comments

Autistic and Seeking a Place in the World. Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter Amy Harmon spent a year observing a young man with autism named Justin Canha, who took part in a new kind of “transition to adulthood” program for special education students at Montclair High School in NJ. The experimental program was intended to ready him for an independent life as an adult and integrate him into the community. [more inside]
posted by zarq at 7:55 PM PST - 22 comments

Modern straight razor users are known to favor them for a variety of reasons. (related)
posted by Trurl at 5:28 PM PST - 117 comments

Guilt A film about filial obligations. Based on a short story by Judy Butnitz.
posted by empath at 4:33 PM PST - 2 comments

An awful lot of running Chameleon Circuit are a band formed to record songs about Doctor Who, in much the same style as Harry and the Potters. [more inside]
posted by running order squabble fest at 3:33 PM PST - 24 comments

Vladimir Jankijevic is a technical oriented artist at ‘Elefant Studios’ in Zürich. Here’s are his Various Fluid Experiments, Walts Rubber Mask, The Osiris project. His Vimeo channel includes other silent shorts. More examples of the Lagoa Multiphysics Simulation Software. His website [more inside]
posted by growabrain at 3:23 PM PST - 5 comments

NASA artist Herbert "Bert" Winthrop, has died at 95. [more inside]
posted by Ideefixe at 1:04 PM PST - 9 comments

Gamers solve molecular puzzle that baffled scientists. The structure of a protein causing AIDS in rhesus monkeys had not been discovered in 15 years of attempts. Players of a videogame did it in ten days. Foldit, the game in question. Abstract. Previously, previously.
posted by East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabaddi Champion '94 at 12:21 PM PST - 53 comments

The decline of post-modernism- a short(ish) essay.
posted by ClanvidHorse at 11:47 AM PST - 35 comments

Capitalism is an unparalleled vehicle for meeting human needs, improving efficiency, creating jobs, and building wealth. But a narrow conception of capitalism has prevented business from harnessing its full potential to meet society's broader challenges. The opportunities have been there all along but have been overlooked. Businesses acting as businesses, not as charitable donors, are the most powerful force for addressing the pressing issues we face. The moment for a new conception of capitalism is now; society's needs are large and growing, while customers, employees, and a new generation of young people are asking business to step up. The purpose of the corporation must be redefined as creating shared value, not just profit per se. This will drive the next wave of innovation and productivity growth in the global economy. It will also reshape capitalism and its relationship to society. Perhaps most important of all, learning how to create shared value is our best chance to legitimize business again. ~ Creating Shared Value by Michael Porter & Mark R. Kramer (PDF) [more inside]
posted by infini at 11:29 AM PST - 27 comments

Did Zombies Roam Medieval Ireland? Two 8th-century skeletons with stones shoved in their mouths suggest that the people of the time thought so.
posted by Fizz at 11:20 AM PST - 43 comments

"If we, as a global audience, focus solely on violence and militarism, we reinforce the notion that they are the most effective form of action. On the other hand, if we pay more attention to nonviolent or unarmed efforts, we strengthen the legitimacy and influence of those choosing to use these means." [more inside]
posted by notion at 10:01 AM PST - 9 comments

Carolyn Porco is the leader of the Imaging Team on the Cassini-Huygens mission. Watch as she extolls the wonders and discovery about two of Saturn's most interesting moons, Titan and Enceladus. [more inside]
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 7:34 AM PST - 25 comments

Migrations Map elegantly visualizes migration data for every single country using an interactive world map. [more inside]
posted by Foci for Analysis at 7:11 AM PST - 32 comments

A new book says women have been marginalized in Obama's White House, according to an article in the Washington Post. Former communications director Anita Dunn is quoted as saying the White House "fit all of the classic legal requirements for a genuinely hostile workplace to women." The book also quotes an unnamed official saying that "the boys' club" was not "just Larry [Summers] and Rahm [Emanuel]," but that Obama himself was responsible: "The president has a real woman problem." [more inside]
posted by John Cohen at 7:02 AM PST - 113 comments

If ever a band demonstrated a sense of humor, it's the Foo Fighters. Watch them decide to take on the Westboro Baptist Church in a manner that completely confuses them. When the Westboro Baptist Church decided to picket a Foo Fighters concert, the Foo Fighters happily entertained then with a new tune, "Keep it Clean."
posted by kinetic at 6:44 AM PST - 78 comments

The new season of Fringe begins on Friday, Sept 23, and Fox wants to tease and prepare you. Teaser playlist (5 videos): Where Is Peter Bishop?. Recap playlist (12 videos): Past + Present + Future [hosted by John Noble]. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 6:16 AM PST - 49 comments

Seattle mourns the passing of Electron Boy, otherwise known as Erik Martin. Erik died at home on Friday, from a rare form of cancer called paraganglioma. He was 14. Previously on Metafilter.
posted by Sublimity at 5:18 AM PST - 33 comments

How does it feel to fly over planet Earth from the perspective of the ISS? A timelapse movie by James Drake, compiled from pictures drawn from the incredible Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth. Place the video in HD and fullscreen for the full effect. via [more inside]
posted by Bora Horza Gobuchul at 11:38 PM PST - 27 comments

So you've come to terms with it: George Lucas doesn't give a shit about you. Maybe it was the minor edits to the re-releases, like Han shooting second, or one of the recent Blu-Ray additions with Darth Vader shouting Nooooo at the end of Return Of The Jedi, or maybe you liked the movies, except for silly characters like the Ewoks or Jar Jar Binks. However it happened, you are pining for the early version of Star Wars you remembered before all those changes, or maybe you're dreaming of a version without some of the schmaltzy stuff. Dream no more, the Fan Preservers and Fan Editors are making your wishes real. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 8:13 PM PST - 153 comments

The [Online] Museum of Obsolete Objects is a cute little YouTube page with an ever-increasing selection of objects to choose from, that then brings up a pithy video narrated by a computerized voice.
posted by cashman at 3:40 PM PST - 29 comments

The State of France has banned prayers in public starting Friday in a move widely seen as being targeted at (what might be) the largest Muslim community in Western Europe. [more inside]
posted by Avenger at 2:56 PM PST - 254 comments

Live from Zilker park - the Austin City Limits Music Festival! Now playing: Alison Krauss & Union Station, and on the other channel Young the Giant. Live on YouTube.
posted by evilmomlady at 2:17 PM PST - 12 comments

Mike Daisey, monologuist, author and gadfly, will be streaming the live performance of his 24 hour monologue, All Hours of the Day, from 6 PM PST today until 6 PM PST tomorrow. He remains cagey about what precisely the show is about, but early reports indicate that bacon will be involved. [more inside]
posted by Phlogiston at 2:15 PM PST - 21 comments

Move Your Kids to Russia and Toss Them Into School Clifford Levy and Julie Dressner moved their 3 kids from Park Slope to Russia. Instead of putting their kids in an international school, they decided to let the kids learn Russian in a Russian school. [more inside]
posted by k8t at 2:06 PM PST - 42 comments

Moymoy Palaboy is a popular Filipino comic and singing duo who upload lip sync videos to YouTube. Someone took their cover of the Backstreet Boys "Everybody" and uh... well... see for yourself. (Via) [more inside]
posted by zarq at 12:45 PM PST - 24 comments

How to track down a scammer. Two weeks ago, "Ken", a writer at the politics/law/gaming blog Popehat, got a fax in the vein of the toner scam - an invoice from a company he'd never done business with, hoping that the firm would pay the bill anyway out of sheer ignorance. Instead, he decided to use the name and contact information on the fax to expose every detail he could find about their operation. After a series of in-depth searches he found quite a lot - from real names and addresses to criminal records - and wrote up his methodology in detail to help others do the same.
posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 12:45 PM PST - 22 comments

Character actress Frances Bay has passed away at the age of 92. You may recognize her from Happy Gilmore, the work of David Lynch (Twin Peaks, Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart) and Seinfeld.
posted by brundlefly at 10:54 AM PST - 15 comments

Oh, my. These cows are ready to do the Charleston (with some practice, perhaps). These curious cows are only mildly skittish and love to exercise. Some light fun for a Saturday afternoon.
posted by glaucon at 10:49 AM PST - 15 comments

In their 25 year career San Fransisco-based Kronos Quartet might be most famous for creating the go-to dramatic movie trailer music but they've recently courted controversy with their latest album, 9/11, with Steve Reich (NPR First Listen). The album is another in a long line of collaborations with composers such as Phillip Glass, Terry Riley, and Pēteris Vasks. And like any good instrumental ensemble, they've covered Hendrix, Sigur Ros, and Tom Waits. Oh, and they've been on Sesame Street. [more inside]
posted by The Whelk at 10:29 AM PST - 30 comments

Kitchens of the Future! [SLYT]
posted by Fizz at 10:26 AM PST - 22 comments

Henry Miller was a prolific and influential writer, and possibly one of the most written about American writers of the 20th century. [no less than 92 posts on MF about Henry Miller] He was also an admired painter [previously] and all around well traveled cat. Opinions of Henry Miller the author and the man, are many and varied, but one thing is certain, he is a darned entertaining fellow.
Ubuweb.com [previous ubu citings] has recently added three recordings of conversations with Henry made in the period 1957-1964. These join two previously available albums of him reading from his own works, and expounding his views in his lucid and amusing Brooklyn accent.
posted by Abinadab at 8:59 AM PST - 11 comments

Drag star Varla Jean Merman is the new spokesmodel for Fleet enemas. Her commercials: Part 1, Part 2, cabaret version. Previously: Varla's Schoolhouse Rock.
posted by hermitosis at 7:48 AM PST - 42 comments

"Earlier this year my estranged father passed away. Among his limited possessions was a box of VHS tapes. They included strange footage hidden away for years." [more inside]
posted by xchmp at 5:05 AM PST - 106 comments

Archie out of context.
posted by sveskemus at 3:01 AM PST - 43 comments

On the eve of the show's second season debut, My Little Ponies creative director and former showrunner Lauren Faust was kind enough to grant a retrospective interview looking back at season 1. (Previously, previously and previously.)
posted by ZeusHumms at 10:39 PM PST - 105 comments

Carl Jung: Taking inner life seriously. An eight-part series on the thought of Carl Gustav Jung from the Guardian's How to Believe series (previously.) Jung's relationship with his patient, student, and rumored lover Sabina Spielrein, and his mentor Sigmund Freud is the subject of a new film, "A Dangerous Method." [Via] [more inside]
posted by homunculus at 10:10 PM PST - 12 comments

Saint John’s Abbey and University today announced the historic completion of The Saint John’s Bible, the only handwritten and illuminated Bible commissioned by a Benedictine Monastery since the advent of the printing press more than 500 years ago.

You can explore this beauty online. NPR ran a story on the The Saint John’s Bible back in 1995. A short documentary about the Bible. The Library of Congress's online exhibition.
posted by Foci for Analysis at 9:28 PM PST - 23 comments

Did you watch Pon Pon Pon and find it a little too drab for your liking? Pon de Floor just not colorful enough for you? Well, you'll be happy to know they've been combined together. Warning: it's catchy, and slightly NSFW. [more inside]
posted by codacorolla at 9:12 PM PST - 10 comments

Mime is an art. Mime is a craft. Mime is movement as complex as moonwalking, or as simple as nodding one's head to say yes. Often I've heard mime defined as non-verbal communication. (a negative term) I prefer to define it simply: Mime is visual communication. The basic techniques of Mime are explained by YouTube videos.... [more inside]
posted by twoleftfeet at 9:06 PM PST - 32 comments

Not a lot of people know that today is Owain Glyndwr Day. "Welsh prince Owain Glyndwr led a successful people's rebellion against England's iron-fisted rule in the early 15th century and arguably became the most famous and highly regarded figure in Welsh history." [more inside]
posted by Yakuman at 8:09 PM PST - 22 comments

The French romantic thriller “Diva” dashes along with a pellmell gracefulness, and it doesn’t take long to see that the images and visual gags and homages all fit together and reverberate back and forth. It’s a glittering toy of a movie... This one is by a new director, Jean-Jacques Beineix... who understands the pleasures to be had from a picture that doesn’t take itself very seriously. Every shot seems designed to delight the audience. - Pauline Kael, 1982 [more inside]
posted by Trurl at 7:31 PM PST - 33 comments

Stop Forwarding That Crap To Me
posted by hippybear at 5:46 PM PST - 98 comments

An unauthorized Angry Birds theme park has opened in China. There is also a Blizzard-themed park called Joyland.
posted by finite at 4:57 PM PST - 36 comments

The Observer ran a series of columns by Richard Geefe, a writer whose work was interrupted by his promise to himself and his editors that he would kill himself before the end of November 1999. First, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth, eleventh, and the posthumous twelfth. Reaction in The Independent. [more inside]
posted by Sticherbeast at 3:57 PM PST - 14 comments

Plug in a search term, and get nonstop videos. Naturally, the first thing I typed was "kittens."
posted by desjardins at 3:51 PM PST - 30 comments

Amerigo Gazaway combined the music of Fela Kuti and De La Soul to create Fela Soul. All the tracks along with liner notes and album commentary are available free for download here. [more inside]
posted by gman at 2:55 PM PST - 30 comments

Why A Heterosexual, Married, North Carolinian Father Of Three Cares About LGBT Equality. Married father of three boys writes eloquently about the reasons why he opposes the proposed constitutional amendment banning any legal relationship recognition for same-sex couples. The amendment goes before voters in May primary election, when heavy Republican turnout is expected. Meanwhile Senator Goolsby says that it is all about "empowering voters" "so no activist judge is able to decide on his or her own what marriage is." [original]
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 2:42 PM PST - 38 comments

The Zoöpraxiscope was an invention by Eadweard Muybridge, an English landscape and travel photographer, and eccentric.
He was the man who made Pictures move and was commissioned to try and capture the movement of horses and later produced his famed studies on movement which are now being collected online;
Male nudes and Female nudes. (previous) NSFW.
posted by adamvasco at 1:39 PM PST - 6 comments

Marina Abramovic's 2010 MoMA exhibit, "The Artist Is Present" (previously) meets 1980s Sierra adventure games. (No word yet on whether the game has made anyone cry.) Thoughts from the creator.
posted by naju at 1:33 PM PST - 25 comments

I did put a keycam on my rotorhead (Three dee MP-EXL) vertically to optimize. (slyt)
posted by swift at 1:20 PM PST - 17 comments

John Stamos' Guide To Cuddling offered without comment (via).
posted by cjorgensen at 1:02 PM PST - 35 comments

The Guns of James Bond SLYT. There's also a list.
posted by VikingSword at 12:16 PM PST - 29 comments

Mentalpong — Pong designed to drive you mental. (via)
posted by randomination at 12:07 PM PST - 24 comments

Haven't been addicted to a flash game in a while? Take on Swords and Potions, where you tackle the under-appreciated other side of the RPG universe: being a shopkeeper! There's a lot to this game, so here's the wiki if you need help, and don't worry about your productivity- turns take time to regenerate so you can't get stuck playing all day.
posted by BuddhaInABucket at 11:50 AM PST - 28 comments

Cycads are an odd bunch of plants. Abundant in the Jurassic period, these old-timers have not evolved much, and are either all male or all female (dioecious), where the the overwhelming majority of plant species are now cosexual (hermaphroditic or monoecious). Some of these plants are still prolific, but there are some rather solitary specimens, including Encephalartos woodii, the loneliest plant in the world. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 11:02 AM PST - 20 comments

“It’s misery, misery, misery, misery, euphoria.” (NYMag) Code kids break out of basement. Love the photos.
posted by maggieb at 9:32 AM PST - 39 comments

Feeling nostalgic? olduse.net is Usenet, updated in real time as it was thirty years ago. Also available over NNTP. [more inside]
posted by kmz at 9:08 AM PST - 15 comments

Hartwick College, a small school in New York's Catskills, is the beneficiary of a trust that “could ultimately shatter the nation’s financial structure.”
posted by reenum at 8:33 AM PST - 72 comments

While courts say you can wear them in a snowstorm if you want to, yesterday was the last acceptable day to wear straw hats unless you're willing to offend someone and risk your life. Top hats and Sheath Skirts might be risky too.
posted by drezdn at 7:45 AM PST - 61 comments

Jottify is "a new space for writers to share, read and sell". [more inside]
posted by Acey at 4:52 AM PST - 36 comments

Varieties of irreligious experience - modern believers "may not accept the idea of God as an actually existing entity, so arguments for atheism will not disturb them"
posted by Gyan at 4:50 AM PST - 854 comments

To My Someday Daughter, an article on Finkelgate and women in gaming by Geordie Tait.
posted by SkylitDrawl at 1:48 AM PST - 84 comments

Dogu are stylized clay figures from the prehistoric period of Japanese history. After Erich von Däniken popularized his 'ancient astronauts' ideas, Dogu became associated with alien visitors and appeared in many videogames.
More information from The Met and Wiki.
posted by Lovecraft In Brooklyn at 10:30 PM PST - 23 comments

A new lecturer has joined the faculty of Trinity College: Dr. Conan T. Barbarian. Among the courses he will teach are "Vengeance for Beginners" and "Deciphering the Riddle of Steel."
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 9:51 PM PST - 46 comments

Florence Nightingale's Statistical Diagrams. Famous as the mother of modern nursing, she was also an immensely talented applied statistician and visual information artist. These skills were instrumental in persuading 19th century British health authorities to improve hospital hygiene. She originated a graph type now known as “Nightingale's Coxcomb” and used it to dramatic effect. Examples of these graphs were presented in her monograph, “Notes on matters affecting the health, efficiency and hospital administration of the British army” published in 1858. That same year she became the first female fellow of the Statistical Society of London (now Royal Statistical Society). An animation of the coxcombs here. The Nightingale Crimean War coxcombs are considered by some to be one of the three best graphics in history. [more inside]
posted by storybored at 9:46 PM PST - 30 comments

Floating Worlds is a new book detailing the never-before-seen correspondence between illustrator Edward Gorey and author Peter F. Neumeyer, who collaborated on three children’s books between September 1968 and October 1969. During that period, they regularly sent each other letters and postcards, many of which Gorey embellished with illustrations. [more inside]
posted by flyingsquirrel at 8:47 PM PST - 8 comments

La parenthèse urbaine. A stop-motion journey around an abandoned Paris railway line (SLV)
posted by The Discredited Ape at 7:52 PM PST - 8 comments

Got a bit of free time this weekend? Have a hankering to make some art? Here's just what the doctor ordered - a (wordless) YouTube video on how to make a real lithograph on your kitchen table, using aluminum foil, butter, and Coke. French artist Émilion has also prepared a short manual on the process in English (pdf).
posted by woodblock100 at 7:35 PM PST - 29 comments

The number of restrictions on abortion enacted on state-level has increased dramatically since the 2010 midterm elections. Remapping Debate presents an interactive graph visualizing the various states' restrictions. [via Feministing]
posted by Bukvoed at 7:22 PM PST - 26 comments

Donald Thomas "Tom" Scholz (born 10 March 1947) is an American rock musician, songwriter, guitarist, pianist, inventor, and mechanical engineer, best known as the founder of the hard rock band Boston. He is also the inventor of the Rockman guitar amplifier. [more inside]
posted by Trurl at 7:18 PM PST - 59 comments

You probably thought this dear was alive. And this coyote was alive. And this pheasant was alive. NOPE. They're dead. They've been taxidermized by Chuck Testa. Ojai valley taxidermy. [more inside]
posted by Ahab at 7:18 PM PST - 41 comments

Butch Sightings is a social interaction art project that was inspired by my interest and appreciation for butches & studs (females and/or women who appear masculine, queer, old school, dyke, bulldagger, aggressive [AG] and other terms to be added as I come across them). [more inside]
posted by serazin at 7:00 PM PST - 51 comments

Microsoft announced today that Internet Explorer 10, part of Windows 8 and a massive UI and structural redesign, will come in two flavors: a desktop app that will continue "to fully support all plug-ins and extensions, " and the flagship version intended for touchscreen devices called Metro, which will be as "HTML5-only as possible, and plug-in free". Specifically, Metro won't support Adobe Flash. [more inside]
posted by 2bucksplus at 5:17 PM PST - 157 comments

'Dinofuzz' Found in Canadian Amber. Dinosaur Feathers Found in Amber Reinforce Evolution Theories.
posted by homunculus at 5:15 PM PST - 27 comments

The Pig With The Froggy Tattoo [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 4:37 PM PST - 25 comments

The ever-lower cost of motion control technology is allowing amateurs to create increasingly spectacular films of timelapse astrophotography: the latest work from Randy Halverson, Eric Hines and Ágúst Ingvarsson. (Full-screen viewing is highly recommended). [more inside]
posted by Bora Horza Gobuchul at 3:52 PM PST - 24 comments

This week Pat Robertson (controversial as always) addressed an uncomfortable question. What are we obligated to do when our spouse becomes completely incapacitated? This is a relatively common situation for the elderly, one person declining faster than the other, but the same questions remain as with a couple in their thirties. Do you live with celibacy, divorce or commit infidelity? Dan Savage’s rules on cheating include a pass for caregiver/spouses in this situation to preserve the marriage. Things can become more difficult when the sexual relationship does not end after a partner becomes infirm.
posted by Blisterlips at 3:05 PM PST - 91 comments

Drew Gardner is an English photographer with a wide range of interests (Eccentrics, Guinness records) though perhaps his most beguiling collection is of Descendants, portraits of, well, descendents of the rich and powerful in some of their most iconic poses. Bonus video of Helen Pankhurst being set up as her great grandmother Emmeline, with audio of the great suffragette herself
posted by IndigoJones at 2:57 PM PST - 11 comments

Novelist and H.P. Lovecraft biographer Michel Houellebecq is missing. Houellebecq was due to give a reading from his new work Le Carte et le Territoire, in the Netherlands on September 12th. [more inside]
posted by Kitty Stardust at 2:23 PM PST - 49 comments

An office space right out of sci fi by Kubrick. Apparently, the employees at SuperGroup are all science fiction fans. So they hired a design firm to turn their office into something out of 2001 A Space Odyssey and Star Trek.
posted by Bunny Ultramod at 2:21 PM PST - 43 comments

Red is a simple Flash game. Shoot the descending circles. Some are big and slow, some are small and quick. Shoot the power-ups to collect them. Soon you'll have a shield and some auto-turrets to help you clear the screen. But beware: it gets harder and more frantic as the wind increases. How long can you survive? A fun Missile Command/Asteroids hybrid. (Via reddit)
posted by BitterOldPunk at 11:45 AM PST - 27 comments

A team of astronomers monitoring data from the Kepler, a craft designed to identify potenially habitable stars, have just announced today that they have located one orbiting a double star system (NYT Link). Early data suggests it's a gaseous planet, but it is also within the range considered "sustainable for life". Still, if there's no life there, Kepler's got over a thousand other exoplanets to check out. Officially, the newly-discovered planet is named "Kepler 16b," but astronomers have already nicknamed it "Tatooine".
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 11:34 AM PST - 56 comments

In February 2011, every teacher in Providence, Rhode Island was pink slipped. Not all 1,926 of them got fired, of course, but with the district facing a $40 million deficit, anything is possible. The district says it needs flexibility, just in case. Every school district in the United States faces its own version of what’s happening in Providence. However, “IMAGINATION: Creating the Future of Education and Work” is focused not on how we got here but rather how we can move forward from here immediately even as the education system continues to struggle. [more inside]
posted by netbros at 11:03 AM PST - 47 comments

The Atlantic Cities is a new site launched today by the Atlantic. It's about cities.
posted by parudox at 10:31 AM PST - 23 comments

The cockatoos are talking, and they're borrowing our words. Wild cockatoos, native to Australia, have been heard to utter English phrases. Escaped or freed pet birds pass phrases to others as they move up the hierarchy of their flock, as explained in an 8 minute news clip (MP3 linked in the page) featuring an interview with Martyn Robinson at the Australian Museum. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 10:21 AM PST - 79 comments

Chat History: a story of love, loss, and IM.
posted by gwint at 10:19 AM PST - 29 comments

"..what musicians might lack in verbosity, they more than make up for with vitriol. And UK musicians are far bitchier than US ones (or, perhaps, the UK music press just delights in reporting on insults)." [more inside]
posted by foxhat10 at 10:13 AM PST - 74 comments

The FBI is teaching its counterterrorism agents that “main stream” [sic] American Muslims are likely to be terrorist sympathizers; that the Prophet Mohammed was a “cult leader”; and that the Islamic practice of giving charity is no more than a “funding mechanism for combat.”

While the FBI's monitoring of Muslims and infiltration of mosques in the United States is nothing new, this is the first time I've seen any of documents they use to train some of their agents. [more inside]
posted by gman at 9:11 AM PST - 79 comments

Jon Stewart and the Burden of History.
posted by valkyryn at 8:27 AM PST - 122 comments

Public Service Announcement: Over is Right. Under is Wrong.
posted by schmod at 7:35 AM PST - 97 comments

Hot on the heels of Amusingly Horrible Things Moms Have Said: The Bracket , it's Amusingly Horrible Things Significant Others Have Said: The Bracket
posted by griphus at 7:00 AM PST - 77 comments

Does the fact that our brain knows our intentions before we do negate free will? [SLNature]
posted by FrereKhan at 6:53 AM PST - 172 comments

A new US-oriented front page for the Guardian online, reflecting a 'new digital operation based in New York'. US visitors to the .co.uk front page will be redirected to .com, but you can choose which version to see at top left. [more inside]
posted by Segundus at 5:58 AM PST - 36 comments

Alligator Boots Behind the scenes of the never-aired 'hip-hop puppet show.' From Kanye West and the producers of Crank Yankers. (Via the AV Club.)
posted by box at 4:34 AM PST - 14 comments

Marc Andreessen thinks Software is Eating the World
posted by vanar sena at 4:32 AM PST - 86 comments

Norwegian 'wild man' faked famed blog while living in a Swedish hotel. Kristoffer Clausen is trying to survive for one year in the Norwegian wilderness. His only food will be what he can hunt, fish or collect from the nature. This is a video from his first sucesful hunt. (warning: successful hunt.) Here is his blog. [more inside]
posted by three blind mice at 3:51 AM PST - 33 comments

Professor Augustus S. F. X. Van Dusen, Ph.D., LL.D., F.R.S., M.D., M.D.S.^* is a fictional character in a series of detective short stories and two novels by Jacques Futrelle. Van Dusen was also known as "The Thinking Machine" for his application of logic to any and all situations. Most of Futrelle's stories are online. Futrelle himself went down with the Titanic.
posted by twoleftfeet at 2:50 AM PST - 20 comments

Bogan Ipsum
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 11:46 PM PST - 16 comments

A Message To Women From A Man: You Are Not "Crazy"
posted by SkylitDrawl at 10:09 PM PST - 233 comments

After a long dormant period, the newest version of the Ur-Quan Masters has been released for basically every operating system. The game is a legal port of the original code of Star Control 2, a space-based RPG/shooter/adventure hybrid which, despite being two decades old, maintains a strong cult following, including for its alien races and their distinctive theme music. You really should play it.
posted by blahblahblah at 8:12 PM PST - 104 comments

Metropolitan stencilsmith Banksy certainly doesn't lack predecessors, possible auxiliary identities, or rival "street artists." (or MeFi posts: 1, 2, 3, etc.) His biggest rival, a shoe repairman from the East End called ROBBO, has gained an extensive support network, calling itself Team Robbo (music upon loading).

"Graffiti Wars [47:00]," part of (UK)Channel 4's "Street Summer" series, documents the rattle-can battle between Banksy and Robbo, as well as the debates among Councils and residents over what to do with it all. Robbo's art career was taking off; he was commissioned to promote, and attended the Berlin Film Festival (in disguise), displayed and sold his work at the revered Pure Evil Gallery, all the while sparring with Banksy... [more inside]
posted by obscurator at 7:33 PM PST - 20 comments

The Economist reports on 40% youth unemployment in Spain. While Europe's bankrupt countries are making the headlines, Der Spiegel claims that the real problem is a lack of entry-level jobs across the continent which is giving rise to violent protests. The Guardian points to reemphasis on manufacturing as a way to save Europe's (and America's) economy. But will this work in the long term?
posted by shii at 7:27 PM PST - 29 comments

'Few Americans today can name more than one or two current boxers, but boxing once stood at the center of American life. It has become a ghost sport, long discredited but still hovering in the nation’s consciousness, refusing to go away and be silent entirely. But there was a time when things were very different. Boxing's history winds a thread through the broader history of the nation.'
posted by zarq at 6:44 PM PST - 92 comments

"Change Proposed for State's Electoral Vote Process." Gov. Tom Corbett and state Senate Majority Leader Dominic Pileggi are proposing that Pennsylvania divide up its Electoral College votes according to which candidates carried each Congressional district, plus two votes for the statewide winner. Talking Points Memo says that under the proposed plan Obama would have received only 11 of the state's 20 electors in 2008; Dave Weigel and Nick Baumann say gerrymandering could mean that in 2012 Obama could actually wind up with a minority of the state's electors even if he carries the state. GOP-led legislatures in other states, such as Wisconsin and Michigan, could make similar moves. But could this be a bridge too far for some members of the state's GOP caucus? [more inside]
posted by gerryblog at 5:15 PM PST - 127 comments

"The Ship Song Project - Sydney Opera House reinterprets Nick Cave's iconic song." (SLYT) Performed by Neil Finn, Kev Carmody and The Australian Ballet, Sarah Blasko, John Bell, Angus and Julia Stone, Paul Kelly and Bangarra Dance Theatre, Teddy Tahu Rhodes and Opera Australia, Martha Wainwright, Katie Noonan and The Sydney Symphony, The Temper Trap, Daniel Johns and the Australian Chamber Orchestra. [more inside]
posted by malibustacey9999 at 4:22 PM PST - 42 comments

Hobo nickels, while apparently especially popular with hobos, are a form of art involving recarving coins. Some are quite the works of art. Some people are very particular about them. People form organizations to collect and discuss them. Previously and previously.
posted by GenjiandProust at 4:17 PM PST - 22 comments

If cats ran the telecom company (in a world of cats), it would sort of look like look exactly like this. (via the boing) One of you will spend the evening either transcribing this into English, or putting subtitles on it, I just know you will. Please let me know when you're done.
posted by tomswift at 2:41 PM PST - 31 comments

21 year old Brandon Wright found himself trapped under a burning BMW after his motorcycle collided with it on a highway outside Salt Lake City. What happened next has to be seen to be believed.
posted by scalefree at 1:35 PM PST - 172 comments

"As a black woman, I don’t identify with and relate to most of the non-black characters I see on TV, much less characters of my own race. When I flip through the channels, it's disheartening. I don’t see myself or women like me being represented. I’m not a smooth, sexy, long-haired vixen; I’m not a large, sassy black woman; an angry Post Office employee. I’m an awkward black girl." [more inside]
posted by lesli212 at 11:31 AM PST - 181 comments

NSFW Rugby - Naked New Zealand Fellows (Action Shot Slideshow from Norway's largest newspaper) [more inside]
posted by Glinn at 10:41 AM PST - 68 comments

How Will Shortz Edits a New York Times Crossword Puzzle
posted by SpiffyRob at 10:22 AM PST - 62 comments

"Wash U Photo Captions" back online after copyright challenge. Washington University in St Louis redesigned their website, and senior Alex Christensen found the photos kinda cheesy. So he started the Wash U Photo Captions Tumblr to poke fun. ("On Thursday mornings, the nerds are allowed to leave the lab.") But Tumblr shut it down, citing copyright violations, until Christensen got legal help. Now it's back, with gems like this and this. [more inside]
posted by epersonae at 10:21 AM PST - 35 comments

What does a Higgsless universe mean for science? The Higgs Boson is quite important to the standard model of physics. If it exists, it plays a major role in explaining how particles acquire mass. There’s a distinct possibility that the Higgs Boson may not even exist. Stephen Hawking made a famous bet that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) wouldn't find it. So far both the LHC and Tevatron, another massive particle accelerators have both searched much of the energy ranges we expected to find the Higgs with no luck. So, then, what does it mean if we don’t find the Higgs at all?
posted by 2manyusernames at 9:55 AM PST - 91 comments

Yellowface: A Story In Pictures - A chronicle of Asian/Middle Eastern characters as performed by white actors. (Previously on MeFi)
posted by hermitosis at 6:44 AM PST - 161 comments

At first, nothing happened. But after 10 days, hell broke loose in his hospital room. He began shaking with chills. His temperature shot up. His blood pressure shot down. He became so ill that doctors moved him into intensive care and warned that he might die. His family gathered at the hospital, fearing the worst. A few weeks later, the fevers were gone. And so was the leukemia. - (NYT Link)
posted by Slap*Happy at 6:22 AM PST - 62 comments

FallingFalling
posted by slater at 5:48 AM PST - 30 comments

Three days late, The War Nerd looks back on 9/11 and mourns.
posted by clarknova at 2:37 AM PST - 79 comments

Sperm Donors: Limited or Limitless? And who should decide? Is it an ethical question, a biological question, a social/political question, an economics question, or something all about money?
posted by emhutchinson at 12:08 AM PST - 35 comments

It's been exactly five years since Charlie Fink and his musical band of friends - his brother Doug on drums, Tom "Fiddle" Hobden on violin, Matt "Urby Whale" Owens on harmonium and bass and Laura Marling on backing vocals - first appeared on the London nu-folk circuit, their moniker a conflation of a famous indie film and its director: Noah and the Whale. [more inside]
posted by progosk at 11:46 PM PST - 7 comments

Bob Turner, "a little-known Republican businessman from Queens" (who is also a former producer for the Jerry Springer show) has become the first Republican elected to New York's Ninth Congressional District since the 1920's. Democrats traditionally have a 3-to-1 advantage over Republicans in the district, which makes this upset even more ... upsetting. Many consider the loss of a Democratic stronghold to be a referendum on the Obama Administration itself. Nate Silver with more analysis. [more inside]
posted by Avenger at 11:27 PM PST - 75 comments

Doodle Or Die! A massively multiplayer Pictionary-style game. Your drawings are used as fuel for the next player's guesses, which are then used as suggestions for the next player's drawings, which are then used for the next player's guesses, and so on. [more inside]
posted by Magnakai at 9:07 PM PST - 73 comments

Clifton Fadiman's Lifetime Reading Plan, 3rd Edition (not to be confused with Clifton Fadiman and John S. Major's Lifetime Reading Plan, 4th Edition) [more inside]
posted by Trurl at 7:17 PM PST - 34 comments

Coming Apart: After 9/11 transfixed America, the country’s problems were left to rot. "No national consensus formed around 9/11. Indeed, the decade since has destroyed the very possibility of a common narrative."
posted by homunculus at 6:30 PM PST - 60 comments

Burke + Norfolk . Photographs from the War in Afghanistan, by John Burke and Simon Norfolk (previously).
posted by wilful at 5:30 PM PST - 13 comments

Flabby Physics!
posted by dunkadunc at 5:21 PM PST - 33 comments

For all the outrage, the real scandal is not that students are getting illegally paid or recruited, it’s that two of the noble principles on which the NCAA justifies its existence—“amateurism” and the “student-athlete”—are cynical hoaxes, legalistic confections propagated by the universities so they can exploit the skills and fame of young athletes. The tragedy at the heart of college sports is not that some college athletes are getting paid, but that more of them are not.
posted by gerryblog at 4:53 PM PST - 50 comments

The Kindle is changing its name to ... Kindle. W(T)F?
posted by anothermug at 4:39 PM PST - 152 comments

Creed Crusher, or Spiritual Mill for Pulverizing Creeds &C. is an 1867 poster by Dr. T. L. Lewis. In it, a pair of cherubs grind the religious and educational institutions of 19th-century against a an allegorical globe of philosophy dominated by the Great Ocean of Spiritualism. Below, Lewis quotes himself no less than four times. Similarly weird is the anthropomorphic map of Europe by Schmidt. (Both via the Big Map Blog previously)
posted by KirkJobSluder at 3:05 PM PST - 24 comments

How Fast Can China Go? On June 30, China had the first official run of a $32 billion high-speed train line between Shanghai and Beijing. "Faster (820 miles in 288 minutes) and sleeker than any other, the needle-nosed CRH380A symbolizes China’s accelerating pace, even as it faces questions about safety, and taps into an ancient rivalry with Japan." On page four, the article discusses what happened less than a month afterwards on July 23rd: the country's first accident involving a bullet train that killed 40 people near Wenzhou. As a result, 54 high speed trains were recalled, train speeds were reduced and an overhaul of the high-speed rail system was launched by Chinese authorities. [more inside]
posted by zarq at 2:54 PM PST - 24 comments

'Wi-fi refugees' shelter in West Virginia mountains There are five billion mobile phone subscriptions worldwide and advances in wireless technology make it increasingly difficult to escape the influence of mobile devices. But while most Americans seem to embrace continuous connectivity, some believe it's making them physically ill. [more inside]
posted by modernnomad at 2:42 PM PST - 111 comments

Hot on the heels of the stunning revelation that Twining's had changed the 180-year-old recipe for Earl Grey tea, the Telegraph continues its reporting on the decline of British civilization with word that HP Sauce -- condiment of choice in millions of bacon butties around the United Kingdom -- has been brought "in line with changes in consumer tastes."
posted by villanelles at dawn at 2:32 PM PST - 74 comments

Massive Evangelical movement spearheaded by right wing activist pastors to affect the 2012 election. There's 'a growing movement of evangelical pastors who are jumping into the electoral fray as never before, preaching political engagement from the pulpit as they mobilize for the 2012 election. This new activism has substantial muscle behind it: a cadre of experienced Christian organizers and some of the conservative movement's most generous donors, who are setting up technologically sophisticated operations to reach pastors and their congregations in battleground states.''"The Christian activist right is the largest, best-organized and, I believe, the most powerful force in American politics today," said Rob Stein, a Democratic strategist who recently provided briefings on the constituency to wealthy donors on the left. "No other political group comes even close."' [more inside]
posted by VikingSword at 2:09 PM PST - 75 comments

Extreme tidying up. Swiss artist/comedian Ursus Wehrli (auf Deutsch) sorts his alphabet soup, makes living histograms out of his fruit salad, and in his TED talk poured Pollock's paint back into the can.
posted by madcaptenor at 1:56 PM PST - 12 comments

Elizabeth Warren will announce her entry into the Massachusetts Senate race tomorrow morning. Warren, who created, but was not confirmed to head, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, is seeking to replace Scott Brown (R), who won Ted Kennedy's seat in 2010. Brown remains rather popular in Massachusetts, and Democrats weren't at all confident any of the current candidates had much chance to knock him off. The hope is that Warren and her pro-consumer bona fides can ride the expected wave of high Democractic voter turnout in the general. [more inside]
posted by schoolgirl report at 1:30 PM PST - 74 comments

The Marvels and the Flaws of Intuitive Thinking, an Edge Master Class with Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman. Follow-up discussion with Leda Cosmides, John Tooby, and Steven Pinker. (previously)
posted by AceRock at 1:26 PM PST - 6 comments

According to PC Magazine, Microsoft will release a developer preview of Windows 8 at 6pm Pacific time. [more inside]
posted by Ad hominem at 1:21 PM PST - 132 comments

Warner Brothers Hotfile sues Hotfile Warner Brothers for copyright fraud.
posted by griphus at 12:36 PM PST - 16 comments

Datamachine slow? To get back the original speed on Your hard drive it's necessary to Defragment it. There are several of different species of software to make this happen, but the most excellent way to do it is a hardware defragmentation. You'll only need some basic data-mechanical-skills to be able to defraggle your motherdisc!
posted by 2or3whiskeysodas at 12:30 PM PST - 53 comments

"24 Hours of Reality will focus the world’s attention on the full truth, scope, scale and impact of the climate crisis. To remove the doubt. Reveal the deniers. And catalyze urgency around an issue that affects every one of us.” — Al Gore on the worldwide event to broadcast the reality of the climate crisis. The Climate Reality Project will live stream starting at 7pm CT on September 14. [more inside]
posted by netbros at 12:26 PM PST - 46 comments

He rides with biker gangs! He shoots whales with a crossbow! He does piano recitals for charity! He bends frying pans with his bare hands! It's Vladimir Putin, Action Man. [more inside]
posted by Bora Horza Gobuchul at 11:23 AM PST - 85 comments

Nerdy Day Trips aims to bring you the best in disused power stations, abandoned nuclear bunkers, lighthouse museums and solar observatories from around the world.
posted by Hartster at 11:21 AM PST - 14 comments

The Midnight Show riffs on Twilight and advertises cars while giving NSFL advice and teaching us how to love our dogs, but not our children. Most importantly they keep us safe with their PSAs
posted by Knigel at 10:25 AM PST - 6 comments

Quincy Jones sat in the Tenafly, New Jersey den of 16-year-old vocal student Lesley Gore, playing demo after demo, looking for the right song to cut for her first record. Out of over 200 tapes, Jones and Gore had moved only one to the "maybe" pile, and so that song, It's My Party, was recorded on March 30, 1963 in a Manhattan studio. After the session Mercury president Irving Green warned Gore not to get her hopes up, but Gore gratefully told him that it had been a great experience anyway, and it was okay if he didn't want to release it. However, later that evening Jones learned that Phil Spector had just recorded "It's My Party" for The Crystals, so Jones rushed back to the studio to press 100 test copies of the single and immediately mailed them to key radio stations across the country. [more inside]
posted by swift at 10:22 AM PST - 69 comments

Richard Hamilton, early pop artist, has died age 89. [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 10:07 AM PST - 12 comments

The Cartoon Color Wheel Somebody with too much time on their hands created a color wheel of cartoon characters ... now I'm curious to know the pantone number for Grape Ape.
posted by busillis at 10:05 AM PST - 13 comments

The Authors Guild, the Australian Society of Authors, the Union Des Écrivaines et des Écrivains Québécois (UNEQ) along with 8 individual authors (including Fay Weldon) has sued the university consortium HathiTrust over its plans to allow internal institutional access to book scans that HathiTrust members received from Google which HathiTrust believes to be orphaned works. As usual, MeFi's own James Grimmelmann has the best analysis of the suit.
posted by Toekneesan at 9:43 AM PST - 10 comments

U.S. Poverty Rate, 1 in 6, at Highest Level in Years (NYT) - An additional 2.6 million people slipped below the poverty line in 2010, census officials said, making 46.2 million people in poverty in the United States, the highest number in the 52 years the Census Bureau has been tracking it, said Trudi Renwick, chief of the Poverty Statistic Branch. That represented 15.1 percent of the country. The poverty line in 2010 was at $22,113 for a family of four. (related)
posted by infini at 9:40 AM PST - 121 comments

Sure, the diamond planet is real.. ..if you believe the liberal media. One of the scientists involved in making this discovery (actual abstract here) discusses how his experience would have been different if he was a climate scientist. [more inside]
posted by lumpenprole at 9:27 AM PST - 79 comments

For China, yesterday marked the Mid-Autumn Festival, when Chinese at home and abroad gather to worship the Moon Rabbit, carry paper lanterns, and eat mooncakes. From its humble beginning as an agitprop-stuffed pastry, the mooncake has become a strong futures commodity in the People's Republic. Accordingly, authorities are stepping in; apparently everyone wants a piece of the pie cake.
posted by obscurator at 9:14 AM PST - 31 comments

Ludum Dare is an annual video game development contest where the contestants have 48 hours to complete a game. This year's theme was Escape and 599 games were submitted. The winning solo and team created games have been announced. You can download all games and even view their source code. If you want to experience the awesomeness of real-time game development, check out the time-lapse videos. [more inside]
posted by Foci for Analysis at 9:10 AM PST - 9 comments

Good morning little schoolgirl, good morning little schoolgirl, can I go home with you? Tell your mama and your papa, I'm a little schoolboy too.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 7:56 AM PST - 44 comments

Flash Fun Friuesday! In The Painter, you have to shoot paint around an empty world in order to find your exit.
Note: there is a slight loading problem. If it doesn't load the first time, refresh the page and it should be just fine.
posted by phunniemee at 7:42 AM PST - 9 comments

How well do you see color?
posted by ArmyOfKittens at 7:21 AM PST - 216 comments

Remembering Bill Monroe, the “father of bluegrass,” on what would have been his 100th birthday. [more inside]
posted by Miko at 7:05 AM PST - 13 comments

The nature and wildlife photography of Nicolas Dory.
posted by OmieWise at 6:55 AM PST - 5 comments

Yields of 2-year Greek government bonds have been skyrocketing today, and are currently at 76%. Credit default swaps show Greece with a 98% chance of default. Confidence in the Eurozone as a whole has been tanking recently after a series of setbacks that leave a political solution looking increasingly unlikely. There was a timely, gloomy discussion on RT yesterday on European and worldwide political/economic prospects
posted by crayz at 6:12 AM PST - 172 comments

The Quadratic Equation, Dr. Seuss Style.
posted by veedubya at 3:46 AM PST - 21 comments

Today is the 0x100 th (or, in decimal, 256th) day of the year, which makes it Programmer Day. Programmer Day is a day to celebrate Programmers and thank them for all that they do. Or don't do? Unless that's Programmers' day., or is it Programmer's Day? [more inside]
posted by Obscure Reference at 1:13 AM PST - 42 comments

The Magdaline Laundries (Joni Mitchell) An interview with a survivor - "Why are you here, you're only a child?" The last Laundry closed in 1996 (the wiki).
posted by tomswift at 9:03 PM PST - 34 comments

When a cowboy says 'women,' he means two different kinds: There's the real kind and then there's the kind in his mind.
A song by Dan Reeder, for your edumatainment.
posted by kaibutsu at 8:37 PM PST - 13 comments

“My country should have control over Google, Skype, Yahoo, etc.,” he said by e-mail. “I’m breaking all encryption algorithms and giving power to my country to control all of them.” Is an independent Iranian hacker trying to help his government spy on its people?
posted by beisny at 8:34 PM PST - 23 comments

Trippy Sugar Rush: Munchies for your stones, by Alexandre Dubosc. More on Viemo, flickr. A bit like some of the old culinary films by PES, but slicker
posted by growabrain at 8:15 PM PST - 9 comments

In the spirit of taking things too far, here is a fully functional 5-dimensional analogue of Rubik's cube.
posted by Trurl at 6:48 PM PST - 50 comments

Japan: Six months after the tsunami. [more inside]
posted by Wyatt at 5:07 PM PST - 30 comments

"You know something very bizarre is going on in Hollywood when the movie Rise of Planet of the Apes tells more about the black experience in America than The Help." Max Gordon reflects on the truths that Hollywood can't talk about openly, and the dangers involved in sugarcoating the past.
posted by invitapriore at 4:14 PM PST - 156 comments

Have trouble figuring out who your third cousin twice removed is versus your second cousin thrice removed? Imagine if your family was Chinese. The rules for Chinese family relation names are complex and incredibly specific, though there are patterns that can help out (e.g. tang2 vs biao3). A research paper provides some cultural context. [more inside]
posted by kmz at 3:16 PM PST - 21 comments

Toyota Motorsport GmbH set a new lap record for an electric vehicle at the legendary 20.8km Nürburgring Nordschleife circuit in Germany with a time of 7 mins 47 seconds. WARNING: it's basically an advert for Toyota, but a cool one. [more inside]
posted by philip-random at 2:51 PM PST - 85 comments

"Perhaps twenty or thirty people in England may be expected to read this book." G.H. Hardy's review of Whitehead and Russell's Principia Mathematica, published in the Times Literary Supplement 100 years ago last week. "The time has passed when a philosopher can afford to be ignorant of mathematics, and a little perseverance will be well rewarded. It will be something to learn how many of the spectres that have haunted philosophers modern mathematics has finally laid to rest."
posted by escabeche at 2:37 PM PST - 29 comments

We create and sell reproductions of dust jackets for rare and collectable books

Facsimile Dust Jackets LLC is the sole funding for Mark Terry’s “Dust Jacket Archives” project. Our goal is to scan and archive images of as many vintage dust jackets as we can. We feel these dust jackets are an important part of our heritage. [more inside]
posted by zamboni at 2:02 PM PST - 25 comments

"A wonderful brain interprets something differently from what it actually is, but it doesn't mean it's made a mistake. It took the information it had and did it's best job." Those are but two tricks from Jerry Andrus (1918-2007), self-taught magician and illusionist, and one of great renown amongst other magicians. But he was more than a slight-of-hand man: he was also a poet, philosopher, inventor, humanist, agnostic, and skeptic. There are an impressive number of videos of him online, these are but a few to get you started down the rabbit hole: Jerry Andrus is visual poetry (Google video / YT, 28 minutes) :: Jerry Andrus at the Magic Castle (G.vid, 49 min), Jerry Andrus at 83 his Optical Illusions (G.vid, 41 min) :: Jerry Andrus and Ray Hyman on Uri Geller (YT, 26 min) :: James Randi on Jerry Andrus (YT, 5 min) :: James Randi - who was Jerry Andrus? :: James Randi describes Jerry Andrus. The last two clips are from Rex Young, a young illusionist who has recreated many of Andrus' illusions on his YouTube channel, and made some of his own.
posted by filthy light thief at 12:55 PM PST - 25 comments

The artists of Draw2D2 are given two "geeky things" based on a monthly theme, and then have two weeks to create mash-up illustrations. Art is posted every other Thursday at 12:00pm EST, with a poll for the public to vote for their favorites. Artists with the most votes can show their process in a spotlight post. [more inside]
posted by zarq at 12:36 PM PST - 13 comments

Don’t Come to the Dark Side: Acquisition Lessons from a Galaxy Far, Far Away [PDF] would seem like ordinary Star Wars fanfic, if it wasn't published in the military's usually sober journal for defense aquisitions. The lessons for the Department of Defense seem quite real, however, especially given the $31 septillion cost of the Death Star, compared to the much cheaper x-wing.
posted by blahblahblah at 11:27 AM PST - 61 comments

Unholy alliance of convenience: 7-11 Amazon delivery lockers (US / UK).
posted by stbalbach at 10:46 AM PST - 157 comments

Cinevault has over 1000 full length streamable movies, most from the golden age of Hollywood.
posted by crunchland at 10:26 AM PST - 32 comments

Over 35 musical saw players travel from as far away as India and Japan to play and honor the musical saw. The NYC Musical Saw Festival aims to preserve the past, honor the present, and shape the future of the musical saw through performances, workshops, and compositions created for the musical saw. Will the musical saw ever receive the recognition and respect that it deserves?
posted by rageagainsttherobots at 9:00 AM PST - 34 comments

Clarke Quay Singapore, The Cement Factory, Takasugi-an, Nobis House, Kew House, Rolex Learning Centre, Central Park, Walt Disney Concert Hall, Containers of Hope, Museum of Liverpool, Busan Opera House, The Meera House, Nakahouse

OpenBuildings is an collaboration community dedicated to architecture where you can browse buildings by collections, people/firms, city guides or their vicinity to you.
posted by Foci for Analysis at 8:29 AM PST - 2 comments

How to Make Smart Decisions in Less than 60 Seconds: For each alternative, ask "Is this really me?"
posted by shivohum at 7:22 AM PST - 157 comments

The age of Steam - Three minutes and forty one seconds of wistful fun (sylt)
posted by the noob at 7:04 AM PST - 13 comments

SNL Writer Mike O'Brien invites celebrities into the closet for 7 Minutes in Heaven. [more inside]
posted by splatta at 6:57 AM PST - 32 comments

"Driving Jersey represents and reflects the most misunderstood and misrepresented place and people in all of America." In this series of calmly paced, short documentaries featuring profiles, atmosphere, landscape, and interviews, filmmakers Steve Rogers and Ryan Bott travel 21 counties to capture some of the true character and cultural nuance of the Garden State. [more inside]
posted by Miko at 6:55 AM PST - 54 comments

Greg Kloehn - The Custom Elite Dumpster Home
posted by Meatbomb at 5:24 AM PST - 33 comments

In the year 2040, America's economic collapse is complete, the cloud has been repossessed, and Westerners are forced to take jobs that no one in the East will do. Chinese documentary program Window on the World investigates the sad state of affairs. [more inside]
posted by CharlesV42 at 4:13 AM PST - 68 comments

Slow is a short film by Darius Clark Monroe that's won best Short at the 2011 Martha's Vineyard African-American Film Festival. You can watch it on Vimeo. [NSFW: Nudity, bad words, reefer] [more inside]
posted by artof.mulata at 12:26 AM PST - 18 comments

The Digital Antiquarian discusses ludic narrative and has been filling in by bits and pieces an amazing history of recreational computing and adventure gaming. The Rise of Experiential Games traces the development of Wargames from H.G. Wells' (!) wargame for toy soldiers, Little Wars, to Avalon Hill's Squad Leader; he discusses the development of Dungeons and Dragons (part 2, 3) led to the first CRPGs on PLATO. He'll tell you things you didn't know about Oregon Trail (part 2, 3, 4, 5, postscript, the 1975 source code!), Hunt the Wumpus (part 2), Colossal Cave Adventure (part 2, 3, 4, 5), Eliza (part 2, 3), Scott Adams' games (part 2, 3, 4, 5), the TRS-80 (part 2, 3), the 2 adventuring cultures of university minicomputers and home PCs, and their unlikely bridging. [more inside]
posted by Zed at 11:14 PM PST - 18 comments

"[H]ow interesting... to bring to life the clothes in children’s artwork, designs by children too young to be influenced by commercial fashion... I asked three girls to draw the outfits they imagined, and then I turned them into clothes."
posted by ocherdraco at 9:16 PM PST - 58 comments

Monopoly City Streets was a fun global game of Monopoly played with real streets that only lasted a few months, under heavy demand. Two years later a possible successor has appeared on the horizon. Foursquaropoly. [more inside]
posted by cashman at 7:11 PM PST - 13 comments

John Cunningham Climbing Ben Nevis, 1976 (slyt, 8:09)
posted by villanelles at dawn at 7:04 PM PST - 16 comments

"That shy mysterious poet Arthur Stace
Whose work was just one single mighty word
Walked in the utmost depths of time and space
And there his word was spoken and he heard
ETERNITY, ETERNITY, it banged him like a bell
Dulcet from heaven sounding, sombre from hell."
- Douglas Stewart
posted by Lovecraft In Brooklyn at 6:43 PM PST - 4 comments

Egg City Radio is what became of the great Post-Punk Junk blog [previously]. And it's still a treasure trove if you're looking for shared out-of-print albums and live sets--not only from Post-Punk but also many other genres as well. [ECR previously ^(via), -er, -est]
posted by not_on_display at 5:36 PM PST - 10 comments

Lightning dances in my head.
I am not beautiful and I am not magic yet.
I'm a victim, yeah.
I've got news for you honey; I got pregnant with birds who sing prettier than you.
I could be the sunlight in your eyes.
My country bleeding me; I will not stay in your arms.
You have a pool in your chest. Tap it.
Everything is better when you're driving on the median.
There is a natural sound that wild things make when they're bound. [more inside]
posted by kaibutsu at 5:00 PM PST - 15 comments

Code Hero is a game designed to teach programming. It uses the first-person shooter idiom, where you are armed with a Code Gun that shoots JavaScript. It reminded me a little of hacking the Gibson.
posted by sigma7 at 4:39 PM PST - 117 comments

The maqam al-'iraqi is considered the most noble and perfect form of the maqam. As the name implies, it is native to Iraq; it has been known for approximately four hundred years in Baghdad, Mosul, and Kirkuk. The maqam al-'iraqi has been passed on orally through the Iraqi masters of the maqam, who cultivate the form especially in Baghdad. The maqam is performed by a singer (qari') and three instrumentalists playing santur (box zither), juzah (spike fiddle), and tablah or dunbak (goblet drum).
posted by Trurl at 4:08 PM PST - 4 comments

Tania Blanco is a modern artist who shares her time in France and Spain. She says of her collection Sleepdrunk Vademecum, "The body is made up of a large set of rounded painting formats. Medical instruments, high precision technology, scientific devices, anatomical models, clandestine laboratories and human representation become the object of study and thought. The bizarre represented objects reflect a mixture of past and future, and an ambiguous clinical atmosphere flows in them. On many of these painted surfaces, a soft cool-cold gradient isolates the represented elements and gives a non-gravitational character to the compositions." [via]
posted by netbros at 3:00 PM PST - 3 comments

Original Pronunciation (OP) "...performance brings us as close as possible to how old texts would have sounded. It enables us to hear effects lost when old texts are read in a modern way. It avoids the modern social connotations that arise when we hear old texts read in a present-day accent." The site includes transcripts of Shakespeare plays and other writings with IPA notations, indicating how to pronounce them in OP. It also includes some audio recordings. [more inside]
posted by grumblebee at 2:28 PM PST - 37 comments

HappeningRightNow-Filter: New York's Wordless Music Orchestra is premiering an orchestral arrangement of William Basinki's Disintegration Loops live from The Temple Of Dendur. Stream here.
posted by 2or3whiskeysodas at 1:22 PM PST - 16 comments

Systems, networks, and strategies is a math course being developed and taught this semester at the San Francisco Art Institute, by Lee Worden. The course-outline-in-progress is online at the linked wiki, including links to course materials like "the two-in-one-out game," "Places to intervene in a system," on-line flocking simulations, and "street math in graffiti art."
posted by escabeche at 1:20 PM PST - 43 comments

Bizarrely unsettling tape art. [SLVimeo]
posted by phunniemee at 11:19 AM PST - 43 comments

'The stories about epidemics that are told in the American press—their plots and tropes—date to the 1920's, when modern research science, science journalism, and science fiction were born.' This is the story of how the media back then (January, 1930) helped fuel fears about a parrot-fever pandemic, and the subsequent public backlash. (Via) [more inside]
posted by zarq at 8:52 AM PST - 24 comments

Kids today won't know the shrill cry of a 9600 baud, or the magical "doodleeedoo" of a 28.8 modem. Help preserve our digital history. Join us in recording your best impression of a "modem handshake" sound.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 7:24 AM PST - 65 comments

The Akai MPC family of instruments combine drum machine, sampler, and sequencer. They've dominated hip hop production for the past couple decades, inspired newer bigger grid based controllers (previously), and have also allowed the finger drummers of the world to take their craft to the next level. [more inside]
posted by p3t3 at 7:19 AM PST - 26 comments

Patti Smith: "I always enjoyed doing transgender songs. That's something I learnt from Joan Baez..." From a little bio-girl's plea "I'm A Boy", through "Lola" and a "Walk On The Wild Side", to Smith's transstraight take on "Gloria", songwriters dig trans people. Much earlier still, The Charmer took his shot at Christine Jorgensen, who "went abroad, and came back a broad", with "Is She Is Or Is She Ain't". The Charmer, no "Sweet Transvestite" himself, also plays a mean fiddle (Mendelssohn actually). ♫ "And if you want some fun, take Oh Bloody Blotter." ♫ [more inside]
posted by Ardiril at 4:07 AM PST - 53 comments

Ten years later, one of the greatest mysteries arising from 9/11 has been solved: the guy who faked the 'tourist guy atop the WTC while the plane approaches' picture has come forward.
posted by oneswellfoop at 3:56 AM PST - 72 comments

The expressive web What it says on the tin. HTML5 CSS3 and the modern browser.
posted by the noob at 3:53 AM PST - 39 comments

Snapperfest in Rising Sun, Indiana, is a yearly event revolving around catching wild Snapping Turtles. It is a contest where men grab a wild Indiana snapping turtle by the tail, run the length of a field and then force the terrified turtle's head out of the shell Then they try to get their hand wrapped around the the turtle's neck and hoist it over their head. The Indiana Department of Natural Resources' position is that cruelty laws do not apply to wild animals. [more inside]
posted by katinka-katinka at 3:48 AM PST - 70 comments

1973's Messiah of Evil (aka Dead People, aka Revenge of the Screaming Dead) (trailer) is arguably the greatest Lovecraftian arthouse zombie movie ever to be written and directed by Oscar-nominee friends of George Lucas. [more inside]
posted by Kandarp Von Bontee at 10:48 PM PST - 8 comments

If you are an East Coast baseball fan, there are two reasons to stay up past your bed time: 1) Your local nine are on a West Coast road swing 2) To indulge in one of the true joys of baseball: Listening to Vin Scully call a baseball game. In the October edition of GQ, Scully looks back on some of his most memorable calls, in a career that started in 1950 when the Dodgers called Brooklyn home. If reading Scully's recollections isn't enough for you, The website includes audio of the calls in question. [more inside]
posted by dry white toast at 8:06 PM PST - 27 comments

Despite previously stating that plus sizes were not their targeted demographic, troubled clothing store American Apparel recently announced a contest looking for a plus-sized model. Nancy Upton responded with a series of provocative photos (Photographs NSFW: 1, 2 3) mocking the contest. Unexpectedly, Nancy won the contest after bringing in the highest user vote. (American Apparel previously on Metafilter)
posted by SkylitDrawl at 7:59 PM PST - 206 comments

Tomorrow, September 11, 2011, all Americans will, in their own way, in observances public and private, pay tribute to... their grandparents. [more inside]
posted by flapjax at midnite at 7:03 PM PST - 43 comments

What then happens is an unbelievable series of Kafkaesque email threads, out-of-office messages, invented holidays, bizarre threats, secret handshakes. If you’re lucky, and very very persistent, you might end up with a CD of it, along with a note saying that “this never happened” and “don’t tell anybody you have this.” Nico Muhly on the difficulty of listening to one's own work.
posted by villanelles at dawn at 7:02 PM PST - 11 comments

Today marks the 45th anniversary of the first airing of the first episode of the first show starring Space Ghost. That series ran from 1966 to 1968, and was followed up by Space Stars from 1981 to 1982. Skip ahead another couple decades, and Space Ghost returned to TV, but he finally found his calling. Space Ghost: Coast to Coast was a talk show, broadcast from Ghost Planet, and featuring a wide array of guests who were interviewed on a wider range of topics. SG:C2C ran from 1994 to 2004, starting on Cartoon Network, then moving to Adult Swim in 2001, and finally to jumping from TV to the internet, where it was on GameTap from 2006 to 2008. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 5:44 PM PST - 78 comments

The Holy Grail of Ubiquitous Plain-Text Capture [more inside]
posted by Trurl at 3:48 PM PST - 51 comments

3 year old junglist's take on Congo Natty's track. Also try the DJ Zinc Remix.
posted by sweetkid at 3:42 PM PST - 8 comments

The September 11 attacks spelt the end of the 'systems novel' and the rise of a more diverse and meaningful literary landscape. The systems novel has been put to the test here and although it predicted the world we would live in, it cannot be used to capture it today. This end of the systems novel is, however, not such a bad thing; it marks a necessary end to a fiction about a kind of fiction. ... it bears repeating: the end of the systems novel is a good thing because it is a chance to remind American readers that the most interesting things often happen at the margin. In this case the margin would be at the fringes of American power. [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 2:39 PM PST - 22 comments

The Breaking Winds Bassoon Quartet perform hits by Cee Lo Green, Lady Gaga, Owl City, and even (wotta concept!) manage to sneak in some classical music. (MLYT)
posted by The Ardship of Cambry at 2:39 PM PST - 20 comments

From 2008 to present J. Chastain has written a dark, surreal web comic that's been called Demon Planet and Monster Killers. The most current story arc finds the current protagonists Percy Genjin and Donald Kong trapped inside of the lost Nintendo cartridge of 'Rally Rally'. They order pizza, they blog, they get into fights, they text, they slowly and painfully give asexual birth to car-like creatures. [more inside]
posted by codacorolla at 1:12 PM PST - 8 comments

Coverage ten years ago by the only two news sources that matter: The Onion: Holy Fucking Shit, Attack on America and The Daily Show (though in hindsight Jon Stewart was rather overly optimistic). A headline in this week's Onion is rather trenchant as well: Nation Would Rather Think About 9/11 Than Anything From Subsequent 10 Years.
posted by kmz at 1:05 PM PST - 40 comments

Journalist Ben Hammersley gives the UK's cybersecurity specialists his view of how the Internet is changing the world: "We expect everything. And we expect it on our own terms."
posted by kristi at 12:35 PM PST - 28 comments

"Imagine a day where most newspaper comics are Funky Winkerbean. That’s what’s happening this Sunday." Tomorrow, the funnies will be anything but as 93 US newspaper comic strips will be devoted to remembrances of 9-11. Profound or profane?
posted by ocherdraco at 10:43 AM PST - 117 comments

Henry Segerman creates mathematical sculptures using 3D printing: Round Möbius Strip, Hopf Fibration, Half of a 120-cell, Rectified Tesseract, Tesseract and 16-cell, Hilbert Curve, Knotted Cogs, Round Klein Bottle [more inside]
posted by Foci for Analysis at 10:24 AM PST - 11 comments

Slightly Darkened Streets of Tokyo [SLYT] By fading back and forth between scenes of pre- and post-quake Tokyo, this time-lapse video by YouTube user darwinfish105 shows how the metropolitan night-scape has been affected by Japan's ongoing power shortages and conservation efforts.
posted by Fizz at 9:05 AM PST - 10 comments

Justice at Hershey's students on a cultural exchange program say Hershey treated them like serfs. [more inside]
posted by Lanark at 8:22 AM PST - 58 comments

Astronomy Photographer of the Year The Royal Observatory has announced the Astronomy Photographers of the Year for 2011. A BBC slideshow talks you through the category winners, casting more light on the judges decisions. [more inside]
posted by biffa at 4:55 AM PST - 20 comments

The best animated gif about hats you'll see this year.* by Micaël Reynaud, who has other cool morphing things on his Google+ page, as well as videos, photos, drawings and stuff. If your animated gif tastes go more to abstract/geometric/optical-illusion/seizure-triggering (that's a warning), check out david ope on tumblr (where you expect to find the gifs).

* may load slowly; be patient to get maximum 'wow'
posted by oneswellfoop at 3:37 AM PST - 21 comments

Obama to Congressional Republicans: pass this jobs bill, or take the blame. The Economist has the details of the plan. Paul Krugman describes the plan as significantly bolder and better than expected. Good news and bad news: Obama's plan would work, but GOP won't pass it. Why not? [more inside]
posted by russilwvong at 12:09 AM PST - 211 comments

On his way out, this reject gives some inspirational, but Rocky advice to the other contestants. While such profound advice is not usually associated with reality television, the viral spread of such an intriguing motivational speech reveals how HNNNNGGG HNNNNGGG HNNNNGGG HNNNNGGG HNNNNGGG HNNNNGGG HNNNNGGG HNNNNGGG HNNNNGGG HNNNNGGG HNNNNGGG HNNNNGGG HNNNNGGG HNNNNGGG
posted by Knigel at 11:35 PM PST - 73 comments

Army soldier, model, or zookeeper: an A to Z of What People Don't Get About My Job. [more inside]
posted by divabat at 11:22 PM PST - 43 comments

In March, indie game designer Jason Rohrer (previously) created a video game, called Chain World, intended to evoke feelings of the sacred and spiritual. The game gains its aura from its uniqueness: there is only one copy, and an individual can only play it once. Then, Chain World ended up on eBay, and everything changed. [more inside]
posted by a sourceless light at 5:44 PM PST - 59 comments

It appears a preview of the 1.8 update to Metafilter favorite Minecraft has been "leaked" to 4chan. [more inside]
posted by Ad hominem at 4:58 PM PST - 78 comments

It's that time of year again, time to witness of the parade of sartorial excess that is The Miss Universe 2011 National Costumes! (previously) (via)
posted by The Whelk at 4:30 PM PST - 230 comments

Want to run for president in Kyrgyzstan? Better bone up on your Kyrgyz language skills. The 83 declared candidates are being tested, on live television on how well they can use the country's official language. Five grammar mistakes, and you're out. (Clearly, the election commissioners are prescriptivists.) The intent, it appears, is to weed out politicians with Russian educations.
posted by beagle at 3:34 PM PST - 30 comments

Sari fashion photography (related) [more inside]
posted by Trurl at 3:29 PM PST - 21 comments

On August 2, 2007 Oakland Post editor Chauncey Bailey was assassinated on his way to work by Your Black Muslim Bakery. The Chauncey Bailey Project collects together the many twists and turns in the stories of Bailey's murder and of the bakery itself, while continuing to investigate. KQED provides a primer on the case. [more inside]
posted by hoyland at 3:18 PM PST - 19 comments

Metronomy (rhymes with economy) is a musical group fronted by the Brit Joseph Mount, who hails from the town of Totnes, in the county of Devon. The names behind Metronomy have changed over the course of three albums and a slew of EPs and singles, but throughout Mount has been at the center. You can stream the three albums, plus two EPs and a few more singles. If it's too much to sort through, you can stick with the clips on their YouTube account, or read through more details inside to decide where to start. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 2:40 PM PST - 12 comments

The TV show. Part 1, Part 2 (both SLYT's)
posted by obscurator at 2:20 PM PST - 13 comments

This 26-Year Old Founder Is Raising $100 Million To Take On Giants Like Microsoft. As a 20 year-old college student, Aaron Levie created Box.net, together with Dylan Smith. It was launched from his dorm room in 2005, 'with the goal of helping people easily access their information from any location'. [more inside]
posted by VikingSword at 2:05 PM PST - 45 comments

"Broken Angel isn’t architecture - it’s outsider art." A profile of Arthur Wood, whose lack of formal training did not prevent him from adding six stories of wild additions to the two-story Brooklyn tenement building he bought for $2,000 in 1971. [more inside]
posted by whir at 9:48 AM PST - 62 comments

High Arctic Relocation. In the 1950s several Inuit families were relocated from the relatively balmy Inukjuak, in northern Quebec, to settlements in what are now called Grise Fiord and Resolute in the far north of Canada with few resources to survive the extremely harsh climate. [more inside]
posted by dabug at 9:27 AM PST - 23 comments

Ten insulting words you should know. And a good deal of words you may wish you didn't. (SFW unless mild swear words count).
posted by londonmark at 9:21 AM PST - 56 comments

The Challenge of Teaching 9/11 "The events of September 11th are being discussed, taught, and commemorated in high school classrooms throughout the nation this week. And in many of those classrooms, the students are increasingly too young to have many actual memories of their own of that day’s events. I visited two high school classes in the San Francisco Bay Area to see how teachers are approaching the topic, what the students know and don’t know, and how they feel about the events surrounding that day."

‘Who’s Osama bin Laden?’: Teaching 9/11 to Muslim youth "In the ten years since Sept. 11, many Muslim Americans feel they’ve had to deal with rising discrimination. Those who remember 9/11 at least understand how this started. But there’s a new generation of Muslim Americans who don’t. They were too young in 2001, or they weren’t yet born. But these children aren’t too young to perceive discrimination. At least one local Islamic school is still working through how, exactly, to teach its young students about 9/11."
posted by nooneyouknow at 9:09 AM PST - 84 comments

Mel Gibson and Joe Eszterhas have announced their latest, Warner Bros.-backed epic: a film about 'legendary Jewish warrior' Judah Maccabee. American Jewish leaders are plotzing. Rumors about a Maccabee movie were raised in 2004, but nothing ever came of them. Back then, at Christopher Hitchens' direction, Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic met with Gibson to (sorta, but not really) talk him out of it. [more inside]
posted by zarq at 9:04 AM PST - 130 comments

Under Suspicion at the Mall of America The Mall of America calls its counterterrorism unit RAM, or Risk Assessment and Mitigation. The unit is staffed with private security personnel. [more inside]
posted by modernnomad at 8:53 AM PST - 93 comments

Waking up, full of Awesome
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 8:45 AM PST - 60 comments

"It begins with a freshly showered person riding naked for hours on a clean, washed horse inside a two-meter-high 'forest' of marijuana. Afterwards, the human body and that of the horse are covered with a thick layer of resin mixed with sweat. This produces a substance that is usually dark brown in color, which is then thoroughly scraped off the human and horse's bodies." The Chu (sometimes Chui or Chuy) valley produced much of the marijuana available in the Soviet Union, and continues its unique harvest to this day. Via The World on PRI (audio link). [more inside]
posted by codacorolla at 8:44 AM PST - 61 comments

Six Dialogues with Leuco by Cesare Pavese. The Flood, The Beast & The Witches, three dialogues by Cesare Pavese. Poems. Poems. Poems. Poems.
posted by OmieWise at 8:33 AM PST - 1 comment

WhyTheNose is a photo blog devoted to spreading joy thru the simple act of wearing clown noses.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 4:41 AM PST - 30 comments

Dance dance: Iceland, Switzerland, Finland, Spain, Greece, Lithuania, Canada, England, France, Austria, Prussia, Russian Revolution, Italian Revolution, German Revolution, Japanese Revolution, Chinese Revolution, American Revolution.
posted by twoleftfeet at 4:20 AM PST - 12 comments

Assessing Janette Sadik-Khan, New York City's Transportation Commissioner. [more inside]
posted by beisny at 3:54 AM PST - 45 comments

Two hours north of Kabul is the Panjshir Valley. Remote, rugged, and filled with beautiful scenery, it is also the birthplace of Ahmad Shah Massoud who was assassinated ten years ago today, though his legend lives on. [more inside]
posted by ob1quixote at 9:55 PM PST - 19 comments

Barizogon ("bitter condemnation") is a 1992 indie Japanese docudrama about Fukushima Daiichi and Daini nuclear power plants and is a dramatization of the life and "accidental" death in 1989 of the whistle-blowing Nao--a twenty-six-year-old who takes on crooked campaigning and a cover-up at the unsafe nuclear plant where everyone in Okuma works. The movie is available (with subtitles) on YouTube: Part 1. The whole series of YouTube videos are collected on this blog. [more inside]
posted by KokuRyu at 9:46 PM PST - 5 comments

Observe a classy penguin. It's worth it. Take time. If you don't expect something big huge and exciting, usually, um... [more inside]
posted by kaibutsu at 9:04 PM PST - 29 comments

Jurors in the rape trial of NYPD officers Kenneth Moreno and Franklin Mata voted to acquit, stunning many who believed the evidence in the case was sufficient to win a conviction. [more inside]
posted by palomar at 8:34 PM PST - 123 comments

Sextortion /sekˈstɔː(r)ʃ(ə)n/ noun The extortion and/or blackmail of an individual, wherein the item or service requested/demanded is the performance of a sexual act.

He seeded P2P networks with popular-sounding song titles that were actually malware; when someone downloaded and executed the file, their machine was infected and would open itself to his control. He took over 129 different computers for a total of 230 victims. Forty-four of the victims were juveniles. How an omniscient Internet "sextortionist" ruined the lives of teen girls. [Sextortionism, previously discussed on Mefi (working link to Sextortion at Eisenhower High article and an update).]
posted by Jasper Friendly Bear at 8:22 PM PST - 32 comments

In a regular spot on the show called The Pitch, ABC Television’s The Gruen Transfer (previously) this week asked two ad agencies to come up with a pitch for why religion should be banned. Here are the pitches in SYTL format.
posted by the noob at 8:14 PM PST - 47 comments

Mike Rowe remembers his high school music teacher, Fred King. [more inside]
posted by Balonious Assault at 7:50 PM PST - 12 comments

Cute babies escaping from safety gates. (MLYT) [more inside]
posted by Deathalicious at 7:44 PM PST - 59 comments

For over one hundred years many Mohawk peoples, including Randy Horne, have been iron workers, building bridges and skyscrapers around North America. Because of their status as First Nations peoples aboriginal ironworkers from Kahnawake and Akwesasne have the right to work in both Canada and the U.S.A.. Many workers continue to do so, commuting to New York to rebuild the site their relatives worked on in the early 1970s.
posted by Cuke at 7:35 PM PST - 14 comments

The Nike Mag (the automatic lacing shoe from the 1989 film Back to the Future II) is here. Marty Mc, err, Michael J. Fox will appear on the David Letterman show tonight, as all of the proceeds from sales are going to Parkinson's research. [more inside]
posted by cashman at 6:53 PM PST - 42 comments

swatrick payze is a weird Scottish man whose animated/puppeted videos are highly amusing. (Possible tiny cartoon nudity, if that is a worry.) Here is a photo of him. He has also recently put out a book (with an accompanying ad.) [more inside]
posted by zusty at 5:36 PM PST - 18 comments

Nyan Cat. Kitten watching Nyan Cat. Cat watching Kitten watching Nyan Cat. [Via]
posted by homunculus at 3:43 PM PST - 69 comments

Internet and telecom infrastructure in northern Canada is so bad it threatens the whole region. That’s the conclusion from a new report cited in a Globe and Mail article, which notes: “The government of Nunavut bought new digital cameras to produce photos for driver’s licences. But the photo files were too large for local E-mail systems and so must be loaded onto memory sticks and flown to Iqaluit for processing.” [more inside]
posted by joeclark at 1:23 PM PST - 78 comments

Hundreds of angry longshoremen stormed through a grain shipping terminal in Longview, Wash., early Thursday and held security guards at bay while descending on a disputed train full of grain, cutting brake lines and dumping cargo. - Serious and sometimes violent direct action aimed at a new west coast shipping facility by a local union, supported by members from the Seattle area.
posted by Slap*Happy at 1:12 PM PST - 394 comments

Your NFL team probably has cheerleaders. But this team's cheerleaders had a movie made about them. And because they're from a place where they like to do things big, when that movie was broadcast, it was viewed on 60% of the televisions in use at the time. [more inside]
posted by Trurl at 12:43 PM PST - 72 comments

For years, there was a rumor of practical joke recorded during the shooting of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Specifically, Instead of Indy being whipped by a Thuggee slave-driver, Barbara Streisand came in, wearing a dominatrix outfit, and starts lashing Indy with his own whip. Then Carrie Fisher jumped to Indy's defense, and director Irving Kershner criticized Steven Spielberg's directing of the scene. Well, it's not just a rumor (YT 1:25, with transcript).
posted by filthy light thief at 12:31 PM PST - 49 comments

Dog vs. Rattlesnake. Dog loses. But there is hope for other dogs. "At home, I lit candles in prayer, pleading to the universe that she would make it. I slept fitfully, realizing that this was her battle. I couldn’t will her to survive. Even so, I offered a psychic bargaining chip, promising her a trip to the ocean, which she had never seen, if she pulled through this." And, she did.
posted by Xurando at 11:54 AM PST - 11 comments

(Warning: spoiler) Tom Ridge is a little teapot.

Take a cognitively dissonant walk down memory lane with the NYT's 9/11 puzzle.
posted by obscurator at 9:52 AM PST - 55 comments

Top Score: A radio program (and podcast, rss here) about video game music, from Classical Minnesota Public Radio. (Via this Joystiq Show episode which is also highly recommended for video game music lovers.)
posted by kmz at 9:49 AM PST - 5 comments

After Yelp "walked" (and Google was caught using their "reviews without attribution"), Google has "acquired" "Zagat Survey", touting it as the "cornerstone of our local offering".
posted by griphus at 9:46 AM PST - 43 comments

Tony Casdagli took on a passion for needlework from his father - a POW who learnt to sew as a means of smuggling out messages past German censors.
posted by mippy at 9:27 AM PST - 6 comments

Every Disney Princess has an inner queen, girl. slyt belleganza
posted by Ambrosia Voyeur at 9:17 AM PST - 25 comments

Architectural theorist David Gissen has recently been travelling through France to learn about wine. His dedicated Twitter account @100aocs has attracted the attention of sommeliers, importers, and winemakers. Edible Geography caught up with Gissen to discuss wine, wine culture, geography, and Gissen's re-thought wine map of France based on Metro maps such as London's Tube map. How Wine Became Metropolitan: An Interview with David Gissen.
posted by shakespeherian at 8:47 AM PST - 8 comments

Better This World is a documentary about two activists from Austin who joined a group heading to protest the 2008 Republican convention. Their problem was that they prepared molotov cocktails at the last minute, and one of their ring-leaders was an FBI informant. Legal nightmare ensues. Aired on PBS September 6, it can be viewed online until October 6.
posted by Brian B. at 7:29 AM PST - 109 comments

These are collections of art inspired outfits for women (I, II, III, IV, V, VI).
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 4:39 AM PST - 28 comments

Orson Scott Card adapts Hamlet into poorly written anti-gay screed. Welcome to Hamlet's Father. Gone are Shakespeare's language and philosophy, replaced with Card's trademark homophobia. Spoiler alert: Old King Hamlet was gay, and he molested everybody and turned them gay too!
posted by Faint of Butt at 4:30 AM PST - 361 comments

The Golden Laws of Prosperity
posted by scalefree at 4:16 AM PST - 42 comments

"Every Sunday, the New York Times publishes the wedding announcements of the most promising, wealthy, talented — and only very occasionally inbred — couples in the whole wide world. (Oddly enough, two-thirds of them hail from within a 30-mile radius of Manhattan.) If life is a contest, these people are already winning. But by how much, and in what order?"
posted by SkylitDrawl at 11:52 PM PST - 66 comments

A lady, back in 1957, addressing the camera in an elegant evening gown, fit for some grand society ball, had this message for the oldsters: "Now, whatever you think of rock and roll, I think you have to keep a nice, open mind about what the young people go for." She then proceeded to announce Buddy Holly and the Crickets, who obligingly performed their hit Peggy Sue for the ballroom dancers' pleasure and edification. That same Buddy Holly would've been quite the oldster himself, had he lived to see today, his 75th birthday. So, if you have a little time on your hands today, you might like to learn more about Buddy by viewing The Real Buddy Holly Story 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10. Cause, hey, Buddy was not only one of the most unique and vital voices of the early days of rock'n'roll, but he wore the same glasses that every other hipster in Berlin is wearing right now.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 10:02 PM PST - 59 comments

Cryogenic Husk features themed mixtapes, mostly of the metal or punk variety. Check out mixes based on being shipwrecked, Egyptology, or Nikki Sixx in '87.
posted by Lovecraft In Brooklyn at 7:42 PM PST - 11 comments

There are few boardgames that the connoisseurs over at BoardGameGeek hate with as much passion as Monopoly. But many of them are drooling over a custom Monopoly set Elisabeth Redel made for her boyfriend. It's a gorgeous version themed to Bethesda's Fallout 3. Behold, Fallout Monopoly.
posted by Legomancer at 5:56 PM PST - 125 comments

Project Gutenberg founder Michael S. Hart, who first conceived of ebooks in 1971, has died at age 64.
posted by maud at 5:39 PM PST - 92 comments

"People cover one part of their bodies with record sleeves which gives an illusion and just looks great." That is all.
posted by kinnakeet at 5:19 PM PST - 36 comments

"STANDING THERE on the dais, consider the world as a series of concentric rings of loyalty. The people in the nearest ring, those in the front row, are owed the most. You should speak first to them. And then, in the next measure, to the room itself, which is the next ring, and only then to the physical world outside, the neighborhood, the town, the place, and then, just maybe, to the machinations of life-muffling institutions." from How to Give a Eulogy. [more inside]
posted by storybored at 5:14 PM PST - 19 comments

From the Salon review: "There [is] all kinds of pop culture iconography floating around in Walter Hill's "Streets of Fire": rock stars; outlaw biker gangs; neon marquees; Dick Tracy-style police cars; diners that serve up coffee in Syracuse china; silent, tough-guy heroes; bars that are rowdy dives and bars meant for quiet, solitary drinking; leather; a battered wallet photo of someone's sweetheart; lovers' reunions; lovers' breakups; dusters; convertibles; pompadours; guns. "Streets of Fire" is nothing but iconography, an attempt to boil down 30 years of pop to its familiar essence and then contain the whole thing in a comic-strip B movie... If chrome could bleed, it would look like the colors that run together in the streets of this movie." [more inside]
posted by I_Love_Bananas at 5:13 PM PST - 62 comments

40 Noises That Built Pop [parts 2 • 3 • 4]
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane at 4:53 PM PST - 76 comments

In 1989, The Columbia University Seminars on Media and Society (later called the 'Fred Friendly Seminars') produced a ten-part series entitled Ethics in America, hosted by Fred W. Friendly [obit]. The show, which aired on PBS, featured prominent American thinkers of the time -- including psychologists, philosophers, doctors, lawyers, theologians, professors, business leaders, district attorneys, politicians, journalists, and a supreme court justice -- engaged in round-table debate concerning hypothetical ethical dilemmas. It was reprised in 2007 as Ethics in America II. Both incarnations [I; II] are viewable for free at Lerner.org, which describes the original version thus: This series uses the Socratic method to build analytical skills and examine ethical questions. The programs aim to sharpen moral reasoning without favoring a particular position by exploring ethical dilemmas in legal, political, medical, corporate, and military arenas. Panelists include Antonin Scalia, Faye Wattleton, and Peter Jennings. [more inside]
posted by troll at 4:52 PM PST - 15 comments

Someone claiming to be an attorney is attempting to scrub the Internet of "private, obscene, lewd and pornographic photographs" of Colton Haynes, the star of MTV's new series Teen Wolf. Turns out, however, that the photos are neither private, nor obscene, nor porographic: they were part of a playful photo-spread published by XY Magazine in March of 2006. Or as Queerty so elegantly puts it, "XY Boytoy All Grown Up & Having Legal Regrets Now That He's On MTV." Markedly different, they point out, than when Real World star Dustin Zito tried to scrub out his gay porn past.
posted by hermitosis at 3:52 PM PST - 34 comments

With the closure of Borders across the nation, what is one to do when nature calls? Just as AirBNB and CouchSurfing have solved the problem of renting out your spare room, why not rent out your bathroom to strangers with CLOO!
posted by wcfields at 3:51 PM PST - 34 comments

Comic blogger Chris Sims, of the Invincible Super-Blog fame, has been making a convincing case over the last year or so at Comics Alliance for Funky Winkerbean being the most depressing long form comic ever written.
posted by rtimmel at 2:47 PM PST - 80 comments