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Blue Rodeo offers a modern day (anti-harper) protest song (And wins extra points for citing all the facts in the song and video with news links). [more inside]
posted by chapps at 10:42 PM PST - 26 comments

Breaking Cat News brings you a Special Report: Shelter Cats. [more inside]
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 10:05 PM PST - 102 comments

Eric "Bitty" Bittles was the 2010 Southern Junior Figure Skating Champion and played on a co-ed community hockey team in high school. Now he's a freshman at Samwell University and is on the men's hockey team. There's checking in college hockey. And Bitty is terrified of getting checked. So begins the cult-favorite web comic called Check, Please! [more inside]
posted by That's Numberwang! at 9:47 PM PST - 6 comments

The Fort of Young Saplings: Vanessa Veselka writes about family, the ownership of stories, and the meaning of military victory (or its absence) in the context of her father's adoption by the Kiks.ádi. (Veselka previously and previously, caution on the latter for sexual violence.)
posted by brennen at 8:45 PM PST - 4 comments

Grover the Waiter, or, why does he keep going to that restaurant:

• The Little And Big Hamburgers
• Dancing and Spanish
• Sandwich Like The Picture

Some classic Ernie & Bert:

• Fishing
• Purple Hand
• Radio and Band

And... MORE.... [more inside]
posted by JHarris at 8:19 PM PST - 43 comments

The decommissioning of the USS Simpson, a Perry-class frigate that sank an Iranian fast-attack craft in April 1988, means that there is only one ship left in the U.S. Navy that has sunk an enemy ship -- "Old Ironsides", a.k.a. the USS Constitution, which was launched in 1797.
posted by Etrigan at 7:31 PM PST - 24 comments

The Capital Times of Madison, WI follows city and university police minute by minute through a college football Saturday: out-of-control house parties, unexpected fire alarms, the game of "who lives here," BAC .273, and of course a little Big 10 football.
posted by escabeche at 6:09 PM PST - 21 comments

Filmmaker Pablo Fernandez Eyre recently made a discovery: Director Alfred Hitchcock and editor George Tomasini judged that a sequence which worked once would work twice, such as these two famous scenes from Psycho and The Birds. If you liked that, Eyre is fond of the side-by-side comparisons, such as these similar videos of The Good, The Bad and the Ugly and the Star Wars saga.
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 6:08 PM PST - 7 comments

"Immigration to my country harms me, it harms my family, it harms my people. Whoever invites or welcomes immigrants to Europe and Germany is my enemy,” says bioinformatician Gangolf Jobb, who has responded to the Syrian migrant crisis by revoking the license for his Treefinder software, one tool (among many) that help measure and visualize the evolutionary distances between organisms. [more inside]
posted by a lungful of dragon at 5:40 PM PST - 52 comments

I had trouble saying more than a few words at a time, my voice croaking and words slurred or over-pronounced. I stuttered and gasped. I started leaving out words that weren’t essential, breaking my sentences down into telegrams, paid by the word or even the letter. Big words were a thing of the past. Or, as I would have said it then: Big. Words. Gone.
posted by orchidfox at 5:35 PM PST - 11 comments

There is something that Ina Garten knows about what we want, or who we want to be, or how we want to feel.
posted by Lycaste at 4:19 PM PST - 29 comments

Breaking the Tragedy of the Horizon – climate change and financial stability: Bank of England Governor Mark Carney warns investors face 'huge' climate change losses - "The Financial Stability Board, an international body monitoring the global financial system that Mr Carney chairs, may recommend G20 countries make it easier for investors to compare the 'carbon intensity' of different assets." [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 3:11 PM PST - 9 comments

It's Sandstorm all the way down: accordion quintet, toy trumpet, Minecraft, floppy drives, kazoo, Mario paint, slowed down, tin whistle, marimba.
posted by jedicus at 2:37 PM PST - 40 comments

Pseudorandom ramblings from the Early Web, linked without the facility of Twine, and presented by some mysterious digital artist calling himself Martin Action. Later, about the time Geocities and First-generation sites were collapsing into bitrot oblivion, the Cauldron resurfaced on another domain, that of artist Paul Smedberg, with clues to the Cauldron's origins: "I made the first draft of this site before I had ever seen the internet, using a copy of Mosaic and a text editor on my home computer. What the site lacks in visual aesthetics, it makes up with sheer volume." Humble words from a clever Early Web denizen, but have you ever heard the Fanfare for the Uncommon Man? [more inside]
posted by colex at 2:32 PM PST - 7 comments

Aby Ngana Diop was a practitioner of taasu (alternately spelled "tassou"), a form of performance poetry practiced by female griots in Senegal. In the 90s, she was "a sought-after performer at the weddings and funerals of the rich and powerful" (according to a tangentially related article from The Verge). In 1994, she released her only widely distributed album, Liital, which fuses traditional taasu with the more modern mbalax, a popular style of Senegalese dance music. It's worth it for the title track alone. [more inside]
posted by escape from the potato planet at 1:52 PM PST - 6 comments

On September 11, pioneering pilot and aerial cinematographer, occasional cameo actor and air ambulance pilot Alan Purwin was killed in a plane crash in Colombia while working on a movie. The master of the dangerous art of aerial photography is memorialized by[WATCH ME] his friend and frequent collaborator, Michael Bay.
posted by the man of twists and turns at 11:54 AM PST - 6 comments

Everyone you know will be able to rate you on the terrifying ‘Yelp for people’ — whether you want them to or not
posted by Artw at 11:52 AM PST - 597 comments

On February 19, 1987, it was just another night at the Palomino, with Taj Mahal and The Graffiti Band playing some folk, soul, blues and maybe a bit of jazz. It wasn't unusual for some more major musicians to be in the crowd, but this night George Harrison, Bob Dylan, John Fogerty, and Jesse Ed Davis joined Taj and jammed, with Fogerty playing "Proud Mary" at the prompting of Dylan. But if you want to visit this iconic club today, you'll find yourself in front of Le Monge banquet hall. The Palomino is no more, but you can visit the Valley's legendary honky-tonk with an oral history of The Palomino, and a fan-made VH1 "Behind the Music" style documentary that includes some vintage clips and photos. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 10:14 AM PST - 9 comments

It's not about Advertising. It's about Consent [via mefi projects]
posted by aniola at 9:52 AM PST - 92 comments

"I've collected the suffering that men so recklessly visited on myself and other women and fashioned it into a livelihood. It is not a fortune but it is a tasteful empire of pain. I might be unlovable but I am not unsellable. I know some women who drink from mugs labeled 'Male Tears.' That's what I've labeled my checking account." Alana Massey for Medium: The Monetized Man.
posted by divined by radio at 8:44 AM PST - 58 comments

The Google DeepDream makeup tutorial that nobody asked for. If you want to look like something hallucinated by a computer, here's how. (Halloween? I suppose you could do it for that too.) Neural network nightmares previously and previouslier.
posted by moonmilk at 8:35 AM PST - 9 comments

Americans spend a lot of time worrying about not having friends and even more time having them.
posted by poffin boffin at 8:29 AM PST - 137 comments

"Why, if my neighbor sees me looking sad and asks me if I am okay, is it perfectly acceptable to tell her my aunt passed away, or I lost my job, or I had to put my dog down -- but if I tell her I experienced a miscarriage, I am somehow inappropriately oversharing?" (by Laura Benanti)
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 8:25 AM PST - 40 comments

Is the new X-Files trailer a bit too 2015 for you? Well then remember all those promo pics that made it look like Mulder and Scully were going to the prom?
posted by griphus at 8:14 AM PST - 68 comments

Richard Dreselly first hiked to the top of Mt. Washington in New Hampshire in 1941. He has since hiked the 6288 foot summit seventeen times. Now at 90, he climbed for what he says will be his last time. [more inside]
posted by blue_beetle at 7:56 AM PST - 17 comments

It’s sleazy, it’s totally illegal, and yet it could become the future of retirement. Is it time to bring back the tontine? [more inside]
posted by Cash4Lead at 7:56 AM PST - 75 comments

Atlas Obscura (previously) has crowdsourced the ultimate map of punny businesses in America.
posted by zamboni at 7:14 AM PST - 46 comments

This brand has everything: fake deaths, Nazi costumes, legal threats against 13 year-old girls, hacker attacks, class action lawsuits, FDA warnings, credit card fraud, cold sores, and questionably named eyeshadow palettes called "China Doll." Why Lime Crime Is the Most Hated Beauty Company on the Internet
posted by almostmanda at 7:00 AM PST - 23 comments

Why Five Friends Stopped Watching the NFL and Started a Book Club

Instead of watching the NFL, we’re launching Football Book Club. And you know what: No one ever got concussed reading The Goldfinch. No one ever suffered a career-ending cervical spine injury curling up with his Kindle. No one’s mind was every slowly destroyed by books — the effect is really quite the opposite — despite what some social conservatives would have you believe. And, best of all: There is no way Roger Goodell can ruin this — he’s not even invited. Every week, we’re exchanging one love for another: Instead of turning on the TV, we’ll read a new book — great works of fiction and nonfiction, poetry and graphic novels — and then we’ll share our thoughts about the current title and what our lives are like without the NFL.

[more inside]
posted by Fizz at 5:34 AM PST - 79 comments

Prominent anti-abortion campaigner Troy Newman had his visa cancelled while he was en route to Australia. This follows Sunday's denial of a visa to musician Chris Brown due to previous domestic violence offences (and a previous cancellation of Julien Blanc's visa while in the country). Visas have been denied under S. 116 of the Migration Act 1958, where the Minister may exercise his power where the presence of its holder in Australia is or may be, or would or might be, a risk to the health, safety or good order of the Australian community.
posted by wilful at 4:07 AM PST - 90 comments

For nine seasons, (1995-2004) comedienne and actress Kathy Kinney played Mimi Bobeck, the "outrageously made-up, flamboyantly vulgar, and vindictive nemesis" of Drew Carey on the sitcom The Drew Carey Show. Lately, she's been busy with a new role: professional children's storyteller. Welcome to Mrs. P's Magic Library. [more inside]
posted by zarq at 8:32 PM PST - 10 comments

For the first time in forever, Halloween will be filled with scary movies.* And while you're here... [more inside]
posted by triggerfinger at 8:11 PM PST - 89 comments

Here is the new series of video articles started by the ultra-knowledgeable folks at Hardcore Gaming 101. The first two are up, the beginning of series on Pre-Super Mario platform games and on the early history of JRPGs. Related is the video adjunct to the Game Club 199X Podcast, with over 50 videos. (Previously.)
posted by JHarris at 7:26 PM PST - 23 comments

In 2011 a Belgian photographer was allowed entry into one of Japan’s Yakuza families. Over two years, he captured the lives of those living in the underworld. In 2015 The economist created a short film about that project. [more inside]
posted by pyro979 at 7:09 PM PST - 6 comments

Isidewith.com is the website for you! (USA edition)
posted by bluesky43 at 5:50 PM PST - 122 comments

(Product video) Topmix Permeable has a claimed average permeability rate of 600 litres, per minute, per square meter. Watch the concrete in a small area of car park soak up 4,000 litres in a minute. An explanation version and a few caveats. [more inside]
posted by Wordshore at 5:00 PM PST - 66 comments

Discograph generates an interactive visualization of relationships between nearly 5 million artists, bands and labels, based on data from the Discogs.com database.
Examples: The Beatles | The Fall | Neil Young
posted by porn in the woods at 4:45 PM PST - 17 comments

Short on time? Here are the highlights: Japan’s Minister of Education has asked all national universities to close their social sciences and humanities departments. 26 universities have so far confirmed plans to close affected faculties or convert them to "areas that better meet society’s needs" [more inside]
posted by Shouraku at 2:07 PM PST - 136 comments

Detailed guide to building a medieval village. LEGO builder Luke Watkins Hutchinson / Derfel Cadarn's massive, 300-photo guide to building an intricate medieval scene out of LEGO bricks. [more inside]
posted by knuckle tattoos at 1:20 PM PST - 24 comments

The Missing Link: Architecture and Waste Management [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 11:45 AM PST - 6 comments

[R]ising star Shamir recently gave NME a playlist of his favorite recent musical discoveries, and his most lavish praise was for… Michete and his mixtape Cool Tricks, described as “a gift from the ratchet gods.” It’s a description as compelling as most any Shamir song. … If nothing else, [opening track “Rap Game Kimmy Gibbler”] will cause some outrage when Michete—who identifies as transfeminine (she/her/he/his) —concludes the song by boasting that she is “burning all these bitches like my last name Hitler.”… Cool Tricks offers up the new genre of qrap: the versed ribaldry of poor taste—a crassly mouthed “fuck you” to the gay male archetype of the connoisseur.
Andy Emitt writes about “The Worst Queer Rapper You Need To Listen To” for Pitchfork. [more inside]
posted by Going To Maine at 11:44 AM PST - 18 comments

Someday this country’s gonna be a fine, good place to be. Maybe it needs our bones in the ground before that time can come: An essay on the summer of the Atomic Bomb, by Joni Tevis. Originally published in The Diagram
posted by Rumple at 11:01 AM PST - 8 comments

The 2015 crop of MacArthur Fellows has been announced, starring Ta-Nehisi Coates, puppeteer Basil Twist, sociologist Matthew Desmond (whose work on eviction has been previously discussed on MetaFilter), and poet Ellen Bryant Voigt. [more inside]
posted by Etrigan at 10:31 AM PST - 47 comments

Why You Should Buy An Acrylic Water Pipe
posted by josher71 at 10:19 AM PST - 57 comments

As the twenty-first century gets darker, politics are likely to follow suit, and for all it’s apparent weirdness, neoreaction may be an early warning system for what a future anti-democratic right looks like. (Previously.)
posted by StopMakingSense at 9:34 AM PST - 106 comments

Trevor Noah has delivered his first episode as host of The Daily Show. Reviews are mixed but mostly positive. [more inside]
posted by jbickers at 9:34 AM PST - 49 comments

In 2011, Sultan Sooud Al-Qassemi (Arabic: سلطان سعود القاسمي‎) was lauded for his Twitter stream where he provided English translations of news and events of Arab Spring. A year earlier, the cultural commentator started the Barjeel Art Foundation, serving as a patron and promoter for artists from all over the Arab world: Syrian, Iraqi, Kuwaiti, Egyptian, Jordanian, the United Arab Emirates and Lebanon. "I don't buy artworks that I think are pretty and aesthetically appealing," he says. "But I buy art that is politically meaningful." Arab Art Redefined: How art collector Sultan Sooud Al-Qassemi is trying to change the narrative (2 minute slideshow with narration by Sultan Al-Qassemi on how he collects and shares art).
posted by filthy light thief at 9:11 AM PST - 2 comments

Ruth Graham, in a Slate piece entitled, Banned Books Week is a Crock, argued that censorship is no longer a problem in the United States. Censorship laws are nearly extinct, and if your local library doesn't have the book...well, you can always find it online. "This Banned Books Week," writes Graham, "instead of hand-wringing about a nonexistent wave of censorship, let’s celebrate the obvious: The books won." But have they? [more inside]
posted by touchstone033 at 8:45 AM PST - 92 comments

115 Ways to Scream 'Status' I thought this would just be a list of expensive things the super-rich have (and there's a lot of that), but also contains really interesting stuff on Broadway singers' throat lozenges, oboe players' preferred reeds, etc.
posted by xingcat at 8:35 AM PST - 125 comments

Interactive Map Shows What The NYC Area Looked Like Back In The 1600s [more inside]
posted by poffin boffin at 8:23 AM PST - 14 comments

A music video showcasing some of the awesome cosplay at DragonCon 2015. Part 2, Part 3.
posted by cozenedindigo at 7:46 AM PST - 16 comments

In this acoustic version of Permanent Holiday by Hawaii-based reggae musician Mike Love, a seemingly random assortment of syllables slowly grows into a song over a period of three minutes. [more inside]
posted by ellieBOA at 4:05 AM PST - 14 comments

What the American people are angry about is they understand that they did not cause this recession. Teachers did not cause this recession. Firefighters and police officers who are being attacked daily by governors all over this country did not cause this recession. Construction workers did not cause this recession. This recession was caused by a few so-called punk and hardcore bands who charged obscene door cover and priced their merch like it was goddamned Prada—Bernie Sanders (I–VT).

Bernie is hardcore. [more inside]
posted by Sonny Jim at 3:30 AM PST - 39 comments

"We now know that endometriosis is an equal-opportunity disease. Girls can have it, grannies can have it. It is necessary for doctors not to pre-judge, but to look at and listen to their patients: to exercise those old-fashioned lo-tech skills, and refrain - please - from the routine humiliations meted out to women with gynaecological disease. The injured self you take away from your consultation is the self you take home. Suffering may not be avoidable, but stigma is under social control." —Hilary Mantel on endometriosis in The Guardian [more inside]
posted by Athanassiel at 9:43 PM PST - 27 comments

Or, what to say to your cow on the steppe. Visual anthropologist Natasha Fijn presents this short video of shouts and moos as an appendix to her book, Living With Herds.
posted by gusandrews at 8:21 PM PST - 12 comments

lyre-of-ur.com is a somewhat rustic website dedicated to a playable reproduction of the world's oldest string instrument. You can hear it accompanying a set of silver pipes and a short recitation from the Epic of Gilgamesh. Don't miss the fan poetry on the informative history page. [more inside]
posted by theodolite at 6:03 PM PST - 6 comments

Catherine Coulson, Log Lady on ‘Twin Peaks,’ Dies at 71 [Variety]

Catherine Coulson, who played the Log Lady on David Lynch’s “Twin Peaks” and was set to return to the new Showtime version, has died. She was 71. She died Monday of cancer, according to KOBI-TV NBC 5 in Oregon. She reprised the Log Lady role in the feature “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me” and more recently, she appeared on an episode of “Portlandia” and in the film “Redwood Highway.”

[more inside]
posted by Fizz at 5:38 PM PST - 71 comments

Zootaxa article: A new species of death adder (Acanthophis: Serpentes: Elapidae) from north-western Australia. Guardian: These snakes are super-camouflaged - its idea is to look like a rock or a bunch of leaves. Unlike a brown snake they aren’t designed for speed at all, they are quite slow. They use their tail like a lure, they will dangle it down while it’s hidden until a lizard or something comes close and then it will strike. Telegraph: The new species adds to the impressive list of poisonous creatures in Australia, which is believed to have 20 of the world's 25 most deadly snakes, including the entire top ten. [more inside]
posted by Wordshore at 4:57 PM PST - 37 comments

You Feel Like Shit: An Interactive Self-Care Guide "This is meant to be an interactive flow chart for people who struggle with self care, executive dysfunction, and/or who have trouble reading internal signals. It's designed to take as much of the weight off of you as possible, so each decision is very easy and doesn't require much judgment."
posted by desjardins at 4:34 PM PST - 97 comments

Here's Compuserve WOW!, a new youth-oriented online service! Commercials for it. C|Net reports on it. The Chicago Tribune. Christian Science Monitor. Suck is less than enthused. (via Wayback) Advertising Age reports that its "editor" will be the guy who created Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego for PBS. Compuserve WOW! will offer its own features as well as unlimited Internet for the low price of $17.95 a month. It's coming your way Spring of 1996! And closing less than a year later....
posted by JHarris at 3:45 PM PST - 18 comments

Junior doctors protest in London this evening regarding contract changes
posted by threetwentytwo at 2:48 PM PST - 27 comments

Donald Trump Reviews Pokemon
posted by Potomac Avenue at 2:37 PM PST - 12 comments

Elysian, Anheuser-Busch, and the Fight for the Soul of Seattle’s Beer He was the sole nay vote in Elysian Brewing’s sale to Anheuser-Busch. Now the brewer’s legacy is at the center of the battle for the soul of Seattle beer. [more inside]
posted by CrystalDave at 2:23 PM PST - 27 comments

On September 20th, Ann Arbor-based freelance writer Emily Bingham, 33, wrote a post on Facebook that went on to be shared more than 40,000 times. Why? Because it touched on something that many, many women related to - namely, how often they're asked about their personal reproductive plans. [more inside]
posted by Xavier Xavier at 1:59 PM PST - 189 comments

Hörpÿ Bëlörtëd 15nd Blörthdäÿ, Everlasting Blört! [via mjjj]
posted by not_on_display at 12:47 PM PST - 28 comments

What will I hear when my ears stop working? by Ysabelle Cheung [more inside]
posted by zarq at 11:46 AM PST - 30 comments

Conservative Christian communities are split between doubling down on their advocacy, or walling themselves off from mainstream culture. - Laura Turner, Atlantic [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 11:36 AM PST - 127 comments

If we keep hiding whenever we feel less than perfect, pretty soon life will pass us by and it’ll be gone. (slMedium)
posted by Kitteh at 11:22 AM PST - 84 comments

There is plenty of space in the cultural conversation for stories about what it was like to have been depressed, but there isn’t much space or tolerance for narrating the experience in live time. That behavior, especially online, is called attention-seeking, or oversharing, or desperation. The sole exception to this rule is the cry for help, but the depressed person who isn’t sure which help to cry for is given little clearance to talk at all.

--Depressiongrams: A Photo Essay
posted by almostmanda at 10:57 AM PST - 6 comments

Having a bad day? At least a monkey isn't eating your mail. On second thought, maybe you'd better check your mailbox.
posted by Etrigan at 10:26 AM PST - 18 comments

The time expert looked through the messy time diaries I'd been keeping (one mysteriously went through the dryer) and found 27 hours of what he called leisure, and I called bits and scraps of garbagey time. Five minutes here. Ten minutes there. Listening to the radio, exhausted, trying to get out of bed. Getting some exercise. Waiting by the side of the road for a tow truck. (Yes, he said that counted as leisure.) The image that came to mind was this: time confetti.
posted by sciatrix at 8:32 AM PST - 99 comments

El-P has recruited an all-star cast of producers* to help him deliver the album in its full feline glory. But first, we needed cats... Run the Jewels don't take themselves too seriously, because Meow the Jewels (playlist, NSFW lyrics) is really happening. You can download the remix album for free, or buy it in various formats, with all proceeds of the album will go to charities that benefit victims of police violence. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 8:22 AM PST - 23 comments

The New York Times is reporting that NASA is about to announce the discovery of "definitive signs of liquid water on the surface of present-day Mars."
posted by schmod at 8:21 AM PST - 109 comments

Man attempts to kill spider with fire, nearly burns down gas station [more inside]
posted by poffin boffin at 8:10 AM PST - 119 comments

Lush announce their return on May 6th in London. Following some speculation over the last few weeks, the band finally confirmed (via Facebook) their return, following in the footsteps of contemporary shoegaze bands My Bloody Valentine, Slowdive and Ride. [more inside]
posted by lmfsilva at 7:04 AM PST - 30 comments

One of the strangest months in British politics is capped by a anti-gentrification anarchist march through the streets of Shoreditch culminating in an attack on the Cereal Killer Cafe. Take it away, Nigel.
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 6:30 AM PST - 77 comments

This is where Chicagoans say the borders of their neighborhoods are. Crowdsourced cartography from residents asked to draw their neighborhood. [more inside]
posted by nebulawindphone at 6:15 AM PST - 24 comments

A cooking channel with a twist... [more inside]
posted by ellieBOA at 3:57 AM PST - 30 comments

Peter Dean Rickards, the self-taught photographer, writer, and filmmaker whose work helped to both define and complicate the aesthetic of modern dancehall and challenged easy assumptions about Jamaican culture and art, passed away at the end of 2014. (All links may be NSFW.) [more inside]
posted by Dip Flash at 9:07 PM PST - 2 comments

How the Call of Cthulhu RPG came to be.
posted by Artw at 8:23 PM PST - 48 comments

Netflix releases schematics and code for The Switch, an open-source microcontroller-based hardware switch that can turn on the TV, dim your lights, order food, and silence your phone. A video of The Switch in action.
posted by Itaxpica at 8:09 PM PST - 36 comments

Sofia Samatar's "Skin Feeling" evokes "What it is to be encountered as a surface, to be constantly exposed as something you are not." Samatar is an English professor, an SFF writer, and a person of color engaged in diversity work on her campus, and among other things, her essay reflects on multiple incidents of indecent exposure, Charlie Parker's "Relaxin' at Camarillo" and the university housed in what was once the largest mental hospital in the world, the book On Being Included, and being made a symbol of diversity (a topic that fellow SFF writer Kate Elliott recently addressed as well). [Samatar link via Savage Minds and Elliott link via N. K. Jemisin.]
posted by Monsieur Caution at 7:27 PM PST - 4 comments

The Understated Elegance of the Airline Scarf by Troy Patterson [New York Times]

“Though the scarf coordinates with contemporary gender politics, it also conjures an old romance of the skies, stirring visions of aviators in open cockpits with white silk rippling at their throats and of fighter pilots wearing flight scarves printed with roaring beasts. It is also polymorphously practical. Heather Poole, a flight attendant and writer, has described scarves deployed as ad hoc bikini tops, improvised curtain ties and all-purpose utility tools: “I’ve seen a scarf used as a lanyard, a belt, a sweatband, a ponytail holder, a napkin and a compression bandage.”

posted by Fizz at 4:58 PM PST - 20 comments

Does your lifestyle prevent you from qualifying for insurance discounts? Do you lack sufficient time for exercise or have limited access to sports facilities? Maybe you just want to keep your personal data private without having to pay higher insurance premiums for the privilege? Unfit Bits provides solutions. Check out their website for more
posted by rebent at 4:07 PM PST - 40 comments

1976. Sunrise in Paris. French film director Claude Lelouch mounted a camera on his Mercedes and went for a spin. [more inside]
posted by raider at 2:45 PM PST - 48 comments

Here's a full Spike Jones special from 1952. Here's another one. Here is a short series of clips with his costars talking about Spike Jones and Live TV. Also from the Spike Jones Show: Tchaikovsky - Poet and Peasant Overture - I'm Going To Sit Right Down And Write Myself A Letter - 12th Street Rag (featuring the bottom half of Elvis) - Flight of the Bumblebee - That Old Black Magic - The Black And Blue Danube - The Shiek of Araby (warning: a bit culturally insensitive) - Clink! Clink! Another Drink - the "All Girl Band" Medley - Hits Medley (with Jim Backus at the start!) - and their famous version of Cocktails For Two. There's plenty more among the uploads from YouTube user SpikeJonesEstate. A documentary, The Spike Jones Story - Part 2. The best of Spike Jones. [more inside]
posted by JHarris at 2:25 PM PST - 24 comments

Photographer Honey Lee Cottrell died on September 21st of this year. She was a cofounder and the first staff photographer for the lesbian erotica magazine, "On Our Backs". Some of her photography may be found in the Digital Culture of Metropolitan New York. Her papers will be cared for by the Cornell University Library Human Sexuality Collection. [more inside]
posted by rmd1023 at 1:38 PM PST - 18 comments

An untitled poem from NLU Delhi's student newspaper. Trigger warnings for rape, sexual abuse, and pedophilia.
posted by jbickers at 1:20 PM PST - 13 comments

The Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards* showcases wild animals caught in amusing, unflattering, or otherwise hilarious poses. The shortlist: part 1, part 2 (*Google thinks this site has been hacked. Proceed cautiously.)
posted by That's Numberwang! at 12:32 PM PST - 13 comments

"It's fake and its real, and sometimes, when the stars align, something happens that is both real and fake simultaneously." Mat Ricardo, a professional entertainer, describes a moment from the professional wrestling scene.
posted by emilyw at 11:12 AM PST - 17 comments

"An amulet, a treasure hunt, and a legion of readers mobilized by the false patterns our brains create to make sense of the world around us. " Jess ZImmerman discusses 1979's treasure-hunt sensation, Masquerade.
posted by jenkinsEar at 10:50 AM PST - 20 comments

Adam Davidson,The V.C.s of B.C.

Through a series of incredibly unlikely events, archaeologists have uncovered the comprehensive written archive of a few hundred traders who left their hometown Assur, in what is now Iraq, to set up importing businesses in Kanesh, which sat roughly at the center of present-day Turkey and functioned as the hub of a massive global trading system that stretched from Central Asia to Europe. Kanesh’s traders sent letters back and forth with their business partners, carefully written on clay tablets and stored at home in special vaults. Tens of thousands of these records remain. One economist recently told me that he would love to have as much candid information about businesses today as we have about the dealings — and in particular, about the trading practices — of this 4,000-year-old community.

[more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 10:38 AM PST - 7 comments

Oh, sure, Batman Day is getting too commercial, but more importantly, it's on the wrong day. Kotaku's Evan Narcise uses the basic question of "When did Batman become Batman?" to take a look back at one of the Dark Knight's lesser-known villains and plotlines: The Wrath, a reverse-Batman whose parents were criminals killed by a police officer.
posted by Etrigan at 10:24 AM PST - 15 comments

Secret Agent Cinder - a short Twine game of espionage and ball gowns in Versailles [more inside]
posted by invokeuse at 10:11 AM PST - 6 comments

In 1972 & 1973 26 year old photographer Bill Yates shot scenes at the Sweetheart Roller Skating Rink in rural Florida. Then he moved away to attend the Rhode Island School of Design, eventually becoming well known for his aerial photography. Forty years later he dug out the negatives from the fall and spring he'd spent hanging out at the rink, and began scanning them. Video of the artist discussing the work on his website for the project.
posted by Cuke at 7:10 AM PST - 29 comments

Two million children are fleeing Syria, this is where they sleep.
posted by Iteki at 1:08 AM PST - 30 comments

"But the other thing you learn is that your fear and nervousness and insecurity is your own business, nobody else’s.”
Helen Mirren is interviewed by The Guardian.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 10:48 PM PST - 16 comments

Dune: The Animated Series - Dragon Age: Inquisition concept artist Matt Rhodes reimagines the classic SF story as a Legends of Korra style animated show inspired by the art of Tarsem Singh.
posted by Artw at 7:58 PM PST - 35 comments

"I'm not a model. I went to a military college on Long Island called the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy. At the end of the four-year program I got a marine engineering degree and a commission as an officer in the naval reserve. I recently spent time on a ship in the Gulf of Mexico. Luckily, I had Wednesday off, because Kanye's show was the very next day." what it was like to walk in yeezy 2 (and make kanye cry) (i-D) [more inside]
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 6:18 PM PST - 17 comments

How difficult would it be to take apart this airplane and use it to manufacture this airplane?

Very difficult.
posted by dfm500 at 4:28 PM PST - 39 comments

What's going on, and how to work around it. If you play some older PC games, you may have noticed that they don't work after a recent Windows update. They don't work because the update broke SafeDisc DRM. Another reason to hate SafeDisc DRM, as if we needed one.
posted by Anne Neville at 3:40 PM PST - 19 comments

The Tangled History of Barbed Wire by Robert Zaretsky [Boston Globe]

“Like inventors from Joseph Guillotin to Alfred Nobel, whose creations escaped their original purpose and were yoked to evil ends, Joseph Glidden would have been shocked at what became of his. In 1874, the Illinois farmer and New Hampshire native, fastening sharpened metal knots along thick threads of steel, created barbed wire. Thanks to its high resilience and low cost, the rapid installation of the coils and lasting dissuasion of the barbs, the wire transformed the American West. Ranchers could protect their cattle against predators, both wild and human, as they pushed the frontier ever further west. The wire itself came to be called 'devil’s rope.'”

Previously. Previously. Previously.
posted by Fizz at 2:25 PM PST - 13 comments

Here's an old Burger King ad campaign, created by New York firm J Walter Thompson, that was a legendary flop. 30 years ago Burger King failed to get the whole country asking: Where's Herb? He was supposedly the only person in the country not to have had a burger from their chain. They offered food discounts, but only to people who weren't Herb (weird cameo at the end of that one). They even talked to Herb's parents. Eventually Herb did have a burger and visited a BK in every state as part of a contest. The sites Go Retro and Burgatory have articles about the non-phenomenon (with an interview with Jon Menick, who played Herb). It was all an attempt to duplicate Wendy's success the year before with Where's The Beef? [more inside]
posted by JHarris at 2:20 PM PST - 42 comments

Shhhh, she's sleeping. [more inside]
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 1:25 PM PST - 66 comments

Have you ever seen cats? No, have you ever really seen cats?
posted by Wordshore at 1:13 PM PST - 13 comments

Laura Hudson at Boing Boing has a thoughtful, in-depth review of Undertale, the new RPG by Toby “Radiation” Fox, the creator of the new RPG Undertale. (Kickstarter) The game was inspired by the Shin Megami Tensai franchise and Earthbound. All combat can be resolved through pacifist means, and the consequences of subsequent playthroughs stack and change the environment. In her review, Hudson compares playing the game to the classic spider-man piñata video –at least, if you want it to be. [more inside]
posted by Going To Maine at 12:42 PM PST - 34 comments

We demand that women live in fear and behave impeccably to avoid 'asking for it.' "In an extract from her book, Asking for It: The Alarming Rise of Rape Culture — and What We Can Do About It, author Kate Harding explains how women order their lives around the fear of rape – and of being blamed for not preventing it." [more inside]
posted by homunculus at 11:31 AM PST - 61 comments

Let's Play: War [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 10:15 AM PST - 13 comments

On this date in 1983, Lt. Col. Stanislav Petrov saved the life of every man, woman & child on the face of the Earth. [more inside]
posted by MrJM at 8:10 AM PST - 83 comments

Fresh from The Intercept (that fearless vanguard of journalism helmed by Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras): disturbing documents exposing the unfathomable reach of the United Kingdom's GCHQ in its quest for total awareness of global internet traffic. A hundred billion user actions logged per day. A "Black Hole" database of 1.1 trillion logs. Frightening programs like KARMA POLICE, MEMORY HOLE, and MUTANT BROTH that correlate the kilo-crore corpus -- IP addresses, cookies, forum posts, search histories, emails, and passwords all compiled and cross-referenced into a real-time "diary" that gives penetrating insight into the relationships, beliefs, and desires of every web user on the planet. Internal documents suggest only widespread encryption can threaten the regime -- a movement the UK is determined to subdue (previously). [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi at 5:24 AM PST - 105 comments

Could you roller skate across this bridge? It's 300 meters long and 180 meters above the ground, and the entire bridge floor is made of glass.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 1:19 AM PST - 41 comments

A brief history.
posted by Tentacle of Trust at 7:20 PM PST - 15 comments

These people, one of them about to have a kid are having more fun than us Walk off the Earth are from Canada, you know... america's attic. They are playing a Harpejji. It's played by tapping the strings.
posted by bobdow at 6:42 PM PST - 17 comments

In a new podcast from APR, host Lia Haddock investigates the disappearance of over 300 men, women and children from the research community of Limetown, TN. What makes the Limetown tragedy unique, what makes it worth a continuing discussion, in spite of the collective moving on, is the complete lack of context. In the ten years since, no one group or individual has taken responsibility. No explanations have been uncovered or given with any credibility and, most tragically, no survivors have been found. [more inside]
posted by thsmchnekllsfascists at 6:20 PM PST - 55 comments

The Simpsons title credits sequence is one of the most delightfully surreal animations in recent history. But when Yoann Hervo recorded it to VHS back in the 90's he must have turned the surreality setting up to 11.
posted by carsonb at 6:00 PM PST - 21 comments

"Fact: wearing white and holding your belly is the best way to ensure a healthy baby." Twitter bots 4 momz! is a Twitter list of three humorous Twitter bots from Mefi's own Metroid Baby, spoofing parenting advice from popular media: @FakeMomAdvice, @FakePregAdvice, and @TrendyNames. [via mefi projects]
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 5:43 PM PST - 14 comments

HUMAN is a film by French photographer Yann Arthus-Bertrand (who is primarily known for his aerial photography, especially as collected in the book Earth From Above). The film combines interviews of people from all over the world (over 2,000 were collected as the film was made) with aerial views of humanity in many contexts. The interviews are loosely organized by subject, and the film (in three 90 minute parts) may be viewed for free on YouTube: Part One, Part Two, Part Three.
posted by ocherdraco at 4:29 PM PST - 4 comments

Bad Horse, a domain owned by James Renkin, takes a fun ride across the nation using traceroute.
posted by jeather at 2:46 PM PST - 38 comments

The Battle Over The Worst Movie Ever - Just who has the rights to Manos: The Hands of Fate? (SLPlayboy - article SFW)
posted by Chrysostom at 2:40 PM PST - 66 comments

Here is Android x86, an open source project which allows you to put Google's Android OS on PC hardware. While there is some software that won't work, it's surprisingly capable! While obviously best for netbooks it's capable of running on many laptops, or you could consider running it in a virtual machine if you just want to run Android software on your PC for a bit. Here's the download page (the proper boot media can be found under "Android-x86-4.4") and installation instructions.
posted by JHarris at 1:57 PM PST - 50 comments

Really, though, shouldn’t authors be more likely to write about unions now that labor is so gravely imperiled? Don’t we need more novels about what unions are capable of, now that pencil-necked geeks like Scott Walker are eviscerating them in public? - The Seattle Review of Books reviews Windswept, a new science fiction book by MeFi's own Adam Rakunas. Interview. He also posts fiction on Twitter at Adam's Bedtime Story.
posted by Artw at 1:56 PM PST - 16 comments

Researchers from the University of Washington Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences recently used a direct brain-to-brain connection to enable pairs of participants to play a question-and-answer game by transmitting signals from one brain to the other over the Internet. The experiment, detailed in PLOS ONE (open access), is thought to be the first to show that two brains can be directly linked to allow one person to guess what’s on another person’s mind. [more inside]
posted by Existential Dread at 12:35 PM PST - 18 comments

"For men, it is a tragedy that the two things they prize the most—women and humor—should be so antithetical," wrote Christopher Hitchens in a 2007 Vanity Fair article. But the evidence against this view mounts. This year, for example, the three finalists for the Thurber Prize for American Humor are all women, guaranteeing that a woman wins the award for the first time. [more inside]
posted by touchstone033 at 12:32 PM PST - 62 comments

BBC: Swiss prosecutors have opened a criminal investigation against Sepp Blatter, the head of football's world governing body Fifa. Telegraph: Criminal proceedings have been opened against him by the Swiss attorney general on two issues: a TV rights deal that FIFA signed with Jack Warner's Caribbean Football Union and an alleged "disloyal payment" of two million Swiss francs made in 2011 to UEFA president Michel Platini. Guardian: Office of the Fifa president has been searched and data seized. LA Times: The new investigation targeting Blatter involves “suspicion of criminal mismanagement as well as -- alternatively -- on suspicion of misappropriation,” according to Swiss Atty. Gen. Michael Lauber.
posted by Wordshore at 12:16 PM PST - 15 comments

"Clad in green robes, Mike Jittlov races at 500 m.p.h. through the Northern California hills, across an inlet of the Pacific Ocean, and horizontally along the wall of a downtown Hollywood building. He moves so fast that when he slips on a banana peel, he flies into orbit." [more inside]
posted by turtlebackriding at 12:14 PM PST - 44 comments

Notes Towards a Theory of Hair: Novelist Siri Hustvedt Reflects on the Cultural Meaning of Coiffure [New Republic]

“Even this simple act of plaiting my child’s hair gives rise to questions about meaning. Why do more girl children wear their hair long in our culture than boy children? Why is hairstyle a sign of sexual difference? I have to admit that unless a boy child of mine had begged me for braids, I probably would have followed convention and kept his hair short, even though I think such rules are arbitrary and constricting. And finally, why would I have been mortified to send Sophie off to school with her tresses in high-flying, ratted knots?”

posted by Fizz at 12:11 PM PST - 10 comments

It is curious that while there are erotic works that appeal to otaku, in Azuma’s account the erotic is subordinated to the emotional. For example, “games produced by Key are designed not to give erotic satisfaction to consumers but to provide an ideal vehicle for otaku to efficiently cry and feel moé, by a thorough combination of the moé-elements popular among otaku.”

McKenzie Wark on the work of Hiroki Azuma: Otaku philosophy
posted by MartinWisse at 12:10 PM PST - 8 comments

Some Friday afternoon inspiration and reminder that everything will be okay: Time to Level Up. Here are the lyrics. Here's more info on Tommy Guns, one of the dancers in the video. [more inside]
posted by jbickers at 10:53 AM PST - 12 comments

The man behind the mascots is a character, too. Jean-Claude Tremblay is a 68-year-old Quebecois whose company, Creations JCT, makes 100-200 mascots per year. The article includes a slide show of the mascot-making process, as well.
posted by kevinbelt at 10:39 AM PST - 14 comments

Syrian Refugees: Who is leaving for Europe and Why.
posted by storybored at 9:58 AM PST - 31 comments

"Saada: In some ways, “inconspicuous chic” is about a perceived entitlement to money, not money itself. People who flaunt their wealth by wearing tons of brands and being flashy are not considered wealthy; more often they’re seen as nouveau riche vis-a-vis old-monied. ...Maybe if they were bulldozing low income housing to build a huge Barney's I would be concerned, but to be upset about how rich ladies shop is almost pointless." ---- Clothes & Class - An Adult Magazine roundtable discussion of the minutiae of high fashion, low budgets, the history of class signaling and inconspicuous chic. With Saada Ahmed, Katherine Bernard, Durga Chew-Bose, Fiona Duncan, Hari Nef, Steve Oklyn and Arabelle Scicardi. (NSFW main photos and related ads. Extreme fashion nerdery)
posted by The Whelk at 9:46 AM PST - 83 comments

Pope Francis drops a prog-inspired single from his upcoming album. No, seriously. Second source.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 9:33 AM PST - 51 comments

Reactor Incremental is a clicker game, but there's little spamming of clicks. Instead, you purchase and place fuel cells and heat mitigation hardware carefully to generate and sell power, building from a single uranium core to a mighty nuclear engine- or else accidentally burn the whole thing down and start again!
posted by Pope Guilty at 9:31 AM PST - 50 comments

The Outbursts Of Everett True, a comic strip by A.D. Condo (more) about a man frustrated with nonsense, up with which he will not put! [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 9:30 AM PST - 18 comments

"Julia is a do-gooder – which is to say, a human character who arouses conflicting emotions. By 'do-gooder' here I do not mean a part-time, normal do-gooder – someone who has a worthy job, or volunteers at a charity, and returns to an ordinary family life in the evenings. I mean a person who sets out to live as ethical a life as possible. I mean a person who is drawn to moral goodness for its own sake. I mean someone who commits himself wholly, beyond what seems reasonable. I mean the kind of do-gooder who makes people uneasy."
posted by divined by radio at 8:29 AM PST - 123 comments

House Speaker John Boehner will give up his House seat and resign from Congress at the end of October. Boehner has been Speaker since January 2011, and has been a member of the House since January 1991. Boehner made the announcement this morning in an emotional meeting with fellow Republicans, according to the New York Times, which says that his resignation throws Congress and the federal government "into chaos" as Congress faces an imminent government shutdown, the first since 2013.
posted by blucevalo at 6:54 AM PST - 505 comments

A drug mule for a Mexican cartel flies into Dayton, OH, gives up a kilo of heroin to federal agents, and provides a narrow glimpse of the current drug trade. (SLWaPo). [more inside]
posted by pjenks at 6:23 AM PST - 13 comments

Larson had made a fool of CBS: He'd spun the show's board 47 times. He’d won more than any other daytime game show contestant in history. And he’d done so by finding an inherent flaw in television’s most “technologically impressive” game board.
posted by veedubya at 6:17 AM PST - 19 comments

For the first time in 28 years, the Winton Book Prize has been won by a solo female author - Gaia Vince. Vince has published an article today asking why women don't win science book prizes more often. It's an effective round up of everything from early years conditioning to institutional sexism (in publishing as well as science). The first chapter of her winning book Adventures in the Anthropocene is available as a .pdf download. [more inside]
posted by AFII at 4:31 AM PST - 2 comments

Beardyman's One Album Per Hour session at the 2015 Edinburgh Fringe Festival (SLYT)
posted by slater at 10:01 PM PST - 8 comments

Life After A Total Hack. "A short story about the biggest fear you don’t even know you have," by Jon Methven. LinkedIn, eHarmony and Last.fm were all "hacked wide open this week [June 6, 2012] .. But what would happen to us if everything got compromised?" [more inside]
posted by Devika at 9:32 PM PST - 33 comments

The iBookGuy explains how graphics worked within the memory constraints of the Commodore 64 and NES, and the Apple II and Atari 2600
posted by a lungful of dragon at 9:28 PM PST - 9 comments

Renters Will Continue to Struggle for the Next Decade
posted by bswinburn at 8:17 PM PST - 90 comments

More Than Just Parks is "a project started in an effort to effect a greater awareness of the treasures that reside within America's National Parks." So far, there are four short videos: Olympic ^4K (info) // Smoky Mountains (info) // Joshua Tree (info) // Redwood (info) // the tumblr blog
posted by filthy light thief at 8:14 PM PST - 6 comments

Geosesarma is a genus of small, colorful, land based freshwater crabs, roughly the size of an American quarter. Scientists struggle to properly catalog and describe the varieties of crabs they find in pet stores. [more inside]
posted by RogueTech at 7:24 PM PST - 5 comments

Space Patrol was a 1962 TV series featuring puppets a la Gerry Anderson's Supermarionation. In fact, the creator, Roberta Leigh, had worked with Anderson previously. Its fans include some guy named J. Michael Straczynski. It features the first music completely realized through electronic means. [more inside]
posted by wittgenstein at 7:05 PM PST - 15 comments

Dreadpunk feels like a perfectly natural term for the recent trend in Gothic-inspired horror and fantasy. Typified by the popular series Penny Dreadful, the word implies a subversive take on fog-drenched Victoriana, tales of the supernatural mixed with late 19th-century aesthetics, and the recent wave of Gothic horror like The Woman In Black and Crimson Peak.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 6:18 PM PST - 37 comments

"'I was reading an article in the Radio Times the other day,' says Andrew Davies. 'The journalist was asking, "Why have all these classic serials got to be about the male lead getting his kit off?" And I thought, 'Hey! I started that!'" - Pride and Prejudice at 20: The scene that changed everything, by Nicholas Barber for BBC Culture. [more inside]
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 5:24 PM PST - 35 comments

Baobab Trees I was not aware that baobab trees grew anyplace but Africa, so it blew my mind to find out that they also live in India and Australia. They were likly introduced by Africans in both cases.
posted by Katjusa Roquette at 4:34 PM PST - 18 comments

Crisp leaves underfoot, warm sweaters, the smell of cooler air: a Grauniad collection of photos and observations about the fall equinox. (slGrauniad)
posted by Kitteh at 3:14 PM PST - 31 comments

The Glowforge 3d laser printer "The Glowforge simplifies laser cutting by moving software to the cloud and making use of smartphone sensors. " [via]
posted by dhruva at 2:39 PM PST - 43 comments

At first glance there's nothing unusual about the job posting. [more inside]
posted by kanewai at 2:35 PM PST - 67 comments

Utility for testing (and cracking) "Is your password secure? We’ve all heard a lot of advice about what sorts of passwords you should never pick – and there are various tools that claim to assess the security of your password online. However, these can only be dubiously accurate. The only way to really test the security of your passwords is to try to break them. FUD and previously [more inside]
posted by key_of_z at 2:15 PM PST - 23 comments

Here's a retro computing oddity, info on the first portable color computer, the Commodore SX64, with a 5 1/4-inch floppy drive and a seriously tiny CRT monitor. Here's a demonstration and teardown. Here's a somewhat ridiculous commercial for it. Commodore had a lot of unreleased prototypes, but the SX actually made it to market. Not a prototype but still interesting is Steve Gray's hack on an old monochrome Commodore PET to display color. And he also has an archive of old Commodore brochures.
posted by JHarris at 1:46 PM PST - 46 comments

If you want to read the latest work of Shakespeare, written and performed 200 years after his death, look no further! Vortigern, an historical play(sic) is it! Performed for the first time on April 2, 1796 it was not performed again until 2008, when the Pembrooke Players put on a revival. Why not? [more inside]
posted by Torosaurus at 1:19 PM PST - 9 comments

"In some ways I see it as my personal protest of Father Serra and his anticipated canonization." In light of the recent canonization of Father Fray Junípero Serra by Pope Francis yesterday, (the first canonization ceremony to be held in the United States and Serra being the first native saint of the Balearic Islands), it seems a good time to recommend Last Mass a new book by former Californian, current Georgia, (USA), resident, Jamie Iredell. [more inside]
posted by Francis7 at 12:58 PM PST - 18 comments

From the Neurologica blog: "Creationists are engaged in science denial—denying evolutionary science. The purpose of denial is doubt and confusion, so they don’t have to create and defend a coherent explanation of the origins of life on Earth. They don’t have to provide an explanation for all the available evidence. All they have to do is muddy the waters as much as possible." [more inside]
posted by Flexagon at 12:27 PM PST - 41 comments

Eugene Bostick built a train for his dog friends. More video here.
posted by Orange Dinosaur Slide at 11:01 AM PST - 39 comments

80 High-Resolution, Textless Movie Posters (SL Imgur)
posted by griphus at 10:57 AM PST - 23 comments

SOMA, the new sci-fi horror game by the creators of Amnesia, the Dark Descent, came out this week. It was influenced by the works of Greg Egan, China Mieville, Philip K Dick, and (MeFi's own) Peter Watts. [more inside]
posted by One Second Before Awakening at 10:37 AM PST - 19 comments

'You worry they could take your kids' Teachers [in the UK] now have a statutory duty to spot signs of 'non-violent extremism', with children as young as three being referred for anti-radicalisation. Does the policy safeguard vulnerable pupils – or discriminate against Muslims?
posted by jack_mo at 10:23 AM PST - 35 comments

A comic about the interior struggle of onions. This is not a gag-a-week webcomic, it is a long form comedy about opposing philosophies of growing up, love, work and friendship. It is also about an onion who lives with a sphinx cat.
posted by DinoswtfEd at 10:20 AM PST - 9 comments

I Sing for You an Apple is an account by writer and translator Eric Wilson of "escorting a Faroese poet-hero around the USA" in 1978. The poet-hero from the Faroe Islands was Steinbjørn Berghamar Jacobsen, who wrote fiction, poetry, plays and children's books in the language of his North-Atlantic archipelago. His works have not been translated into English, but they have been set to music. On Tinna og Tám he reads his own poems, accompanied by Kristian Blak and Heðin Ziska Davidsen (YouTube: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18 ). And after his passing in 2012, two of his children, Kári and Eyð Jacobsen, made an album, Tungl, where they turned his poems into indie songs (YouTube: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10).
posted by Kattullus at 9:57 AM PST - 3 comments

The life and times of a family with a surprisingly large amount of well-known friends ...
posted by criticalbill at 9:15 AM PST - 12 comments

Danish researchers Trine Tornøe Platz and Lars Peter Østerdal have modeled a counterintuitive queueing system -- the last person to arrive is served first -- and found that it makes the entire process more efficient. The key is telling people that getting there earlier won't mean you're served earlier. [more inside]
posted by Etrigan at 8:58 AM PST - 135 comments

Watch This Pro BMX Rider Terrify All Of NYC (vertigo/nauseating camera angles warning) [more inside]
posted by poffin boffin at 8:34 AM PST - 42 comments

Death is the Mother of Beauty The doom metal band named, uh, DoOoM, has churned out seven instrumental tracks of…doom, written by MeFi's Own gwint! (I'm only on track five, but I'm that excited.) In the vein of Sleep or Trouble, they are heavy and chill. Over giant-heartbeat-like kick drums, elegant and grounded riffs flow. They are wrapped generously in hearty, fibrous fuzz. Let your brain sink through the layers of the earth guided by a wise capybara as your body pretends to work this afternoon! [via mefi projects] [more inside]
posted by ignignokt at 8:12 AM PST - 29 comments

(Pictures of pieces of skin) We preserve books, games, images, videos, memories, so why not tattoos? NAPSA, the National Association for the Preservation of Skin Art, are offering such a service. (website currently down) [more inside]
posted by Wordshore at 7:56 AM PST - 36 comments

"First of all, in terms of history I’d like to say the vast majority of the medieval world as we think of it was all kinds of people with various shades of brown skin moving back and forth across borders. Yes, there were people in remote little areas who might have never encountered anyone who looked any different than themselves, but overall there was a lot of movement and a lot of contact and a lot of exchange of ideas, crossing transcultural, trans-religious, trans-ethnic zones." -- Arthur Chu and David Perry talk about The Inaccuracy Of “Historical Accuracy” In Gaming And Media.
posted by MartinWisse at 5:05 AM PST - 78 comments

Morrissey’s debut novel List of the Lost is published today. The author has explained that “The theme is demonology … the left-handed path of black magic. It is about a sports relay team in 1970s America who accidentally kill a wretch who, in esoteric language, might be known as a Fetch … a discarnate entity in physical form.” The initial reviews have not been kind: “an unpolished turd of a book” reckons Michael Hann at The Guardian; “a bizarre misogynistic ramble” opines Nico Hines of The Daily Beast. [more inside]
posted by misteraitch at 2:22 AM PST - 96 comments

SLYTP: two hundred and twenty three pre-1925 'music hall records' YT user Robert Godridge has made a long playlist of digital captures taken from 'some of the british music hall records in my collection, 78rpm gramophone records and cylinders.' This is one of a number of playlists centered on very old popular music recordings by various users. Most of the recordings are quite innocuous by today's standards, but it is far from uncommon to encounter double entendres, racism and stereotypes, and well, I'm not sure what to call this genre.
posted by mwhybark at 10:08 PM PST - 11 comments

Signily is an ASL keyboard app. [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 8:49 PM PST - 14 comments

When the father of a second grader got annoyed by common core math tools (namely, ten frame cards), his annoyance went viral when he wrote a check to his student's school using common core numbers. Then the Friendly Athiest on Patheos used that check to teach how common core math works at the second grade level.
posted by filthy light thief at 7:24 PM PST - 206 comments

Mohamed Fahmy and Baher Mohamed have been released from prison following Eid al-Adha pardon. [New York Times] [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 5:59 PM PST - 8 comments

"I found this collection of outtakes in my archive. I shot these interviews on the streets of New York in the late 70s when I was doing a documentary on the coming of the information age." - Man on the street interviews with New Yorkers in 1979 about science, technology, corporate influence, computers, and paperwork. (SLYT 5:45)
posted by The Whelk at 5:33 PM PST - 17 comments

BBC Radio's From Our Own Correspondent (previously on Metafilter) turns 60 this month. To celebrate, they've released several special editions: the first ever UK edition; a discussion panel on foreign reporting's past, present and future (includes a thoughtful discussion of how much a reporter's personal point of view should inform their reporting); and a compilation of notable stories from the past 60 years.
posted by une_heure_pleine at 3:41 PM PST - 6 comments

We Are Jam [more inside]
posted by Potomac Avenue at 1:55 PM PST - 32 comments

Here are some promos from and other information on the long-forgotten HA!: The New TV Comedy Network.
Promos - Logos - More promos - Even more promos (with a bit of Mel Torme!) - And a few more spots. HA would merge with The Comedy Channel in 1991 to produce the nascent Comedy Central (NYT). Fred Seibert writes about positioning HA. [more inside]
posted by JHarris at 1:17 PM PST - 26 comments

BEAT COP
It’s over here, detectives. The body was found about an hour ago.

STRUNK
Use the active voice, rookie.

Strunk & White: Grammar Police (The Millions)
posted by salix at 1:01 PM PST - 44 comments

SLFullyJustifiedPlainTextWorkOfArt
posted by alby at 12:36 PM PST - 31 comments

What’s Rangoon To You Is Grafton To Me is a forty-five minute long radio play about a long, strange road trip from Brisbane to Sydney. (transcript) First broadcast in 1978 on Double Jay (now Triple J), it was written by Russell Guy (link) and starred news reader James Dibble (MBE) as its “whacked-out road warrior protagonist”. The piece has gone on to become something of a cult classic, and inspired a recent homage by broadcaster Mike Williams: A Kangaroo Has Three Ears
posted by Going To Maine at 12:08 PM PST - 8 comments

Barbie Wants to Get to Know Your Child.

For psychologists who study the imaginative play of children, the primary concern with A.I. toys is not that they encourage kids to fantasize too wildly. Instead, researchers worry that a conversational doll might prevent children, who have long personified toys without technology, from imagining wildly enough.

posted by gottabefunky at 10:27 AM PST - 64 comments

The “867-5309/Jenny” Awareness Center. Since 2003, raising awareness that Jenny's number is, and will always be, 867-5309.
posted by maryr at 10:07 AM PST - 57 comments

Boston area guy on a boat spots a sea monstah. [NSFW - audio is full of cursing.] [more inside]
posted by ants at 9:53 AM PST - 72 comments

Part of the White House Friday afternoon announcement dump last week was a routine announcement of a relatively high-level appointment: Acting Undersecretary and Chief Management Officer of the Army Eric Fanning will be appointed as Secretary of the Army when John McHugh steps down. The fact that Fanning is openly gay hardly raised any eyebrows, except Mike Huckabee's. [more inside]
posted by Etrigan at 8:07 AM PST - 86 comments

The Black Mambas are an all-female anti-poaching squad in South Africa. They patrol the borders of the Greater Kruger National Park, where wild rhinos live. The women in the squad come from the surrounding townships and patrol un-armed.
posted by colfax at 7:22 AM PST - 14 comments

In London, the coffeehouse offered the threat not of male homosexuality but rather of a different kind of dangerous male-on-male behavior, namely "wasting time." Coffee itself was often thought to be disgusting — a few of the names used by detractors were "syrup of soot," "a foreign fart," "a sister of the common sewer," "resembling the river Styx," "Pluto's diet-drink," "horsepond liquor" — but even for those who thought coffee led to medical problems, especially impotence, it was not as threatening as the spaces where it was drunk. Some perceived the coffeehouse as pure waste, a corrupting influence on London society, while others celebrated it with a strange enthusiasm.

– Writing in Cafés: A Personal History by food historian Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft.
posted by Kattullus at 6:20 AM PST - 65 comments

"In the past 12 months, workers in the entertainment industry considered taking their own lives almost seven times more than the general population. Almost one in every 14 performers surveyed admitted to making an attempt on their life. For roadies and technicians, the figures were even more troubling, at almost one in 12. That compares with roughly one on 30 for the wider Australian population."

Unsurprising to anyone in the industry, startling to those outside, a recent study (pdf) sheds light on the sickness within the Australian entertainment industry [more inside]
posted by deadwax at 3:28 AM PST - 21 comments

Yogi Berra, master Yankee catcher with goofy wit, dies at 90. I guess it's over now.
posted by tallmiddleagedgeek at 1:55 AM PST - 100 comments

Once, work was a major source of friendships. We took our families to company picnics and invited our colleagues over for dinner. Now, work is a more transactional place. We go to the office to be efficient, not to form bonds. We have plenty of productive conversations but fewer meaningful relationships.
posted by ellieBOA at 12:07 AM PST - 121 comments

What can we do about the privacy threat posed by online ad networks? And how much trust should we place in Silicon Valley to design the future of our society? What Happens Next Will Amaze You: Slides from a recent talk by (Mefi's own) Maciej Cegłowski.

It's no accident how much the ad racket resembles high-frequency trading. A small number of sophisticated players are making a killing at the expense of everybody else. [...] I don't believe there's a technology bubble, but there is absolutely an advertising bubble. When it bursts, companies are going to be more desperate and will unload all the personal data they have on us to absolutely any willing buyer. And then we'll see if all these dire warnings about the dangers of surveillance were right.

[more inside]
posted by teraflop at 11:35 PM PST - 101 comments

Feel free to sing "Happy Birthday"
posted by atomicmedia at 9:41 PM PST - 59 comments

Gillian Wearing herself. Gillian wearing Warhol. Gillian wearing many faces, one of the ten most important artists today. [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 8:46 PM PST - 7 comments

"By all accounts, work on NOLA began at some point in 1991. The demo work hammered out during those sessions was captured on tape, and as the story goes, was then distributed to unsuspecting headbangers far and wide accompanied with only a word-of-mouth seal of approval."

In which Invisible Oranges discusses Down's superb debut album, a slab of southern doom titled NOLA. [more inside]
posted by Existential Dread at 8:19 PM PST - 11 comments

A New Caption That Works for Every New Yorker Cartoon (SLTheAtlantic). (via Frank Chimero). [more inside]
posted by DirtyOldTown at 7:54 PM PST - 49 comments

"George Miller has said that the best version of his film is in black and white, with no dialogue. BLACK & CHROME is an attempt to realize Miller’s alternate vision. The cinematography, the editing, the sound design, and the score, are now represented in a completely new experience." [more inside]
posted by saturday_morning at 7:23 PM PST - 57 comments

A survey of 150,000 college students across 27 high-profile universities supports previous studies that sexual assault and misconduct is widely prevalent on college campuses. Discussion of sexual assault within. [more inside]
posted by telepanda at 7:00 PM PST - 53 comments

Can’t Swallow a Pill? There’s Help for That [New York Times]

Most children start swallowing pills around age 10, said Dr. Tanya Altmann, a pediatrician in Calabasas, Calif., and a spokeswoman for the American Academy of Pediatrics. And 20 percent to 40 percent are unable to swallow a standard-size pill or capsule, according to a recent study in the journal Pediatrics. [...] Many never outgrow the problem.

[more inside]
posted by Fizz at 4:21 PM PST - 73 comments

It's the 2nd Annual Bisexual Awareness Week. An expansion of International Celebrate Bisexuality Day (Sept. 23) of events, articles, and posts for the week. An infografic of issues (huffpo). The twitter hashtag #biweek. The #StillBisexual video campaign. A pastor talks about coming out (Advocate).
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 3:48 PM PST - 117 comments

Martin Shkreli was a hedge fund manager who started out short-selling biotech stocks before founding Retrophin, a company with a new goal: "acquiring the rights to obsolete remedies Shkreli says can be put to new and lucrative purposes". In 2014, Retrophin hiked the price of Thiola, a drug to treat rare kidney disease, from $1.50 a pill to $15. Shkreli was ousted from Retrophin and later sued for $65 million, but returned to form Turing Pharmaceuticals, whose aim is to "buy forgotten and orphaned assets from Big Pharma—any drug that’s had weak supply or weak support." They bought the rights to market Daraprim, an obscure drug used to treat parasitic infections, and raised the price from $13.50 to $750 per pill. In response to the price rises for Daraprim, and for other vital drugs, Hillary Clinton has unveiled plans to tackle prescription drug pricing, while Bernie Sanders introduced a bill in September that would also allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices. Pharma industry blogger Derek Lowe (previously) also has some ideas about what to do about Turing. Meanwhile, Shkreli has defended his price hike and says that anyone who cannot afford the drug will not be forced to pay. [more inside]
posted by penguinliz at 2:22 PM PST - 187 comments

The opening credits of series three of The Wire, reworked using scenes from only series three of The Simpsons. (original Wire intro)
posted by Wordshore at 1:48 PM PST - 20 comments

Jews in America struggled for decades to become white. Now we must give up whiteness to fight racism.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 1:34 PM PST - 63 comments

"There Aren't Enough Bricks in the World to Throw at Roland Emmerich’s Appalling Stonewall" - The first reviews of Roland Emmerich film about the Stonewall riots are in. They are not favorable.
posted by Artw at 1:12 PM PST - 74 comments

Hana Feels is a short, dialogue-driven interactive story from teacher, performer, and Zombies, Run! writer Gavin Inglis. When four different characters get the chance to help Hana through a personal problem, subtle choices make the difference between painful and painfully funny.
posted by AteYourLembas at 1:00 PM PST - 17 comments

It started with the Humble Indie Bundle. (Previously, and multiple times.) But there's now plenty of other places to get indie games bundled cheaply: IndieGala, Bundle Stars, Groupees, and, because you can't get cheaper than free, Freebie Bundle and Free Bundle. There's also Indie Game Stand, Buy-Some-Indie-Games, Fire Flower Games, Shiny Loot and GreenManGaming's Indie section.
posted by JHarris at 12:50 PM PST - 30 comments

Violence does not stem from a psychopathic lack of morality. Quite the reverse: it comes from the exercise of perceived moral rights and obligations. So says Tage Rai, whose research with anthropologist Alan Fiske analysed violent practices across cultures and history. [more inside]
posted by showbiz_liz at 12:37 PM PST - 56 comments

Daniel Thompson, Whose Bagel Machine Altered the American Diet, Dies at 94. The obituary doubles as an abbreviated history of the bagel's fortunes, and the fortunes of bagel-makers:

As vaunted as it was in American cities, the traditional bagel for years remained so obscure — so ethnic — that as late as 1960 The New York Times Magazine felt obliged to define it for a national readership as “an unsweetened doughnut with rigor mortis.” … “Every bagel that was made in New York City up until the 1960s was a union bagel — every one,” Mr. Goodman said. … “Bagel Famine Threatens in City,” an alarmed headline in The Times read in 1951, as a strike loomed. (It was followed the next day by the immensely reassuring “Lox Strike Expert Acts to End the Bagel Famine.”)

posted by kenko at 12:35 PM PST - 21 comments

His passions intersected in May, during the magazine’s New York Ideas seminar, when he interviewed Sana Amanat, a Marvel editor, about diversity and inclusion in comic books. Ms. Amanat led the creation of the new Ms. Marvel, a teenage Muslim girl living in Jersey City, based on some of her own childhood experiences. “It was a fruitful discussion,” he recalled.
posted by ursus_comiter at 12:24 PM PST - 68 comments

Just add water and salt; perhaps something else, too: add some Italian and it becomes polenta. Grits are principally coarse ground corn kernels. But there’s so much more to it. [more inside]
posted by mightshould at 12:22 PM PST - 17 comments

Kate McCue becomes the first American Female to be Captain of a Cruise Ship. [more inside]
posted by danapiper at 12:20 PM PST - 16 comments

Transgender woman live-tweets her expulsion from Orlando airport

Shadi Petosky, a transgender woman, was detained unexpectedly at the Orlando airport on Monday after the TSA allegedly decided that her genitalia didn't match up to their (mis)perceptions about gender. The TSA had yet to release a statement by the time that comedian Tig Notaro tweeted to her 39,000 followers to watch Petosky's tweets.

[more inside]
posted by WCWedin at 11:54 AM PST - 64 comments

2channel (NYT, 2004) is an anonymous, Japanese-language bulletin board which regularly ranks as one of the 50 most visited websites in Japan, and one of the top 500 worldwide. In 2004, the Times described it as a site of casual freedom in an otherwise staid public arena, "the place where gays come out in a society in which they mostly remain in the closet, where users freely broach taboo subjects, or where people go to the heart of the matter and ask, 'What's for dinner?'" and Wired in 2007 called it "an anonymous anarchy" and a "refreshing liberation." From the perspective of 2015, 2ch's history as an anonymous board might seem less novel: a kinetic creative culture, persistent hate speech (and subsequent DDoSes), mainstream media inspiration, threats and hoaxes, animal cruelty and shock content, severe data leaks, and, of course, increasingly urgent legal and moral questions about exactly who is responsible for the anonymous voices on 2ch.net. Today the site is still going strong, but in 2014 the founder and original owner of 2ch (apparently) stepped down. Sound familiar? Well, yesterday 2channel's founder acquired a new, English-language anonymous image board. moot no longer owns 4chan. [more inside]
posted by postcommunism at 10:57 AM PST - 54 comments

Three weeks ago, The AV Club quietly launched Film Club, a conversational weekly review show hosted by film editor A.A. Dowd and critic / former At the Movies host Ignatiy Vishnevetsky (previously, previously). New releases covered so far include The Visit, Transporter: Refueled, and Black Mass and Sicario. [more inside]
posted by alexoscar at 10:56 AM PST - 2 comments

You wake in a strange room. Your clothes are foreign and the walls are covered in objects from a different world. Jumping up, you race out of the room and into the streets. You have just entered.... the Ice Age. Or a North America ruled by Aztecs. Or the first days of the Carthaginians' colony on Mars.

The Twilight Histories is an alternate history audio drama podcast, described by the creator, Jordan Harbour, as a blending of Dan Carlin's Hardcore History with the Twilight Zone. Stories are told in second person, with artful music and sound effects that make you feel like you've stepped sideways into another universe where Hitler won WWII or robots took over the world.
posted by possibilityleft at 10:41 AM PST - 7 comments

How the Atlanta graffiti artist went legit and became a global art star. (slAJC)
posted by Kitteh at 10:35 AM PST - 6 comments

"The Disgustings" (12:12 ) is a short film starring Drew Droege and written, directed and starring Jordan Firstman. It's about two gay men living in Los Angeles who just happen to be completely, utterly awful. The Disgustings return in "Save The Date." (5:45)
posted by The Whelk at 10:19 AM PST - 14 comments

"In the Marx Brothers films, [Margaret] Dumont often played a society matron, usually a wealthy widow. During the Depression, this was a type of character that the audience loved to see humiliated, and it happened. At the same time, Dumont played the type sympathetically, because no matter how Groucho treated her, her characters obviously found him attractive, funny, and even sexy. Whereas the perfectly stereotyped society matron character would be constantly offended at the Marx Brothers antics, Dumont’s characters wavered between perfectly-timed embarrassment and full-on collaboration. Groucho simultaneously courted Dumont’s characters out of greed and opportunity and genuine attraction." The Fifth Marx Brother (Miss Cellania) [more inside]
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 9:52 AM PST - 42 comments

"Whether it is the covering of breasts in Southern India or the wearing of burqas in Afghanistan, women's comportment and clothing have offered an emotionally powerful shorthand for all that is wrong with native culture and all that must be corrected by the empire." Rafia Zakaria for Aeon: Clothes and daggers. [more inside]
posted by divined by radio at 9:23 AM PST - 23 comments

It seems that with little fanfare, gog.com released System Shock: Enhanced Edition. This is not System Shock 2 (see previously) that was released to the happy tears of many in 2013, but the game that started it all in 1994. And it's ENHANCED. Although we already know that gog.com rocks the house, the takeaway here is that this is an official, supported re-release that has been years in the wanting, with a lot of creative workarounds before now. [more inside]
posted by SpacemanStix at 9:02 AM PST - 30 comments

"I Am Fundi" is a short documentary depicting the education system in Uganda and the measures that the organization, Fundibots, is taking to create change. Victor, a Fundi teacher with a challenging past, is changing the future of Uganda by preparing and instilling excitement for science in young children so that when they grow, they will be confident, supported, and prepared for contemporary practices and technological advances.

via
posted by infini at 8:59 AM PST - 1 comment

Let’s just be honest with ourselves: of course people gossip about us [...] This month’s One Big Question is what do you want people to say about you after you’ve left the room, because it’s a way for our deepest insecurities to mingle with our private aspirations and come up with something honest and hopeful, and quite possibly, true.

posted by griphus at 8:00 AM PST - 125 comments

The Enterprise-D Construction Project is an ambitious one-man project to recreate the Enterprise-D in its entirety using the Unreal engine, drawing from a variety of sources including both the official blueprints by Rick Sternbach and the earlier Ed Whitefire blueprints. It's not yet publicly available, but you can take a virtual tour showing off decks 1–4, including the bridge and main shuttle bay.
posted by Mr. Pokeylope at 7:58 AM PST - 66 comments

Goodfellas turned Wiseguy’s simple prose into cinematic gold [more inside]
posted by poffin boffin at 7:55 AM PST - 24 comments

The human microbiome is the subject of intense scrutiny for a variety of reasons -- probiotic yogurt, as a replacement for bathing, even down to the viral level -- but what we really want to know is How incredibly gross am I being by merely existing in the world? It turns out that the answer is Way gross -- like Pigpen, each of us sheds a unique cloud of bacteria that could conceivably be used to track criminals and to more precisely survey disease outbreaks.
posted by Etrigan at 7:18 AM PST - 48 comments

Our hero, one of the few surviving, is someone like me. An individual who you’d think would be the first gone — not last surviving — due to physical disability. Here was a game presenting Max and saying "He survives." The subtle message, vital message that goes unsaid is the next part: "And so can you".

Tauriq Moosa at Polygon writes about representation of physical disability in the new Mad Max video game.
posted by Stacey at 5:51 AM PST - 8 comments

via Bigthink's writeup - "European researchers created a virtual reality simulation where participants could give advice to themselves — as Sigmund Freud. In the experiment, "volunteers wore very sophisticated VR (virtual reality) devices (headset and sensors) and were immersed in a virtual room where there was a duplicate representation of themselves and Sigmund Freud. The subject could alternately be in the avatar body representing themselves or in Freud's body. The movements of the avatars ... were perfectly synchronized with the subject's real movements, and this produced a powerful illusion of embodiment." The result was not only that people felt better, but also their advice was much more effective." But did the researchers pick the "best" psychoanalyst for this job? [more inside]
posted by Perko at 3:42 AM PST - 6 comments

Scientific evidence for popular health supplements from information is beautiful [Snake Oil not included]
posted by chavenet at 2:44 AM PST - 42 comments

The BBC Symphony Orchestra performs John Cage's 4'33" [SLYT]
posted by Spinda at 2:12 AM PST - 23 comments

"I Reviewed Jail on Yelp Because I Couldn't Afford a Therapist." Why people are using sites like Yelp to vent and offer tips about prison and jail.
posted by Harald74 at 1:46 AM PST - 18 comments

"Before we enter into the question of cat videos, we must talk about cats themselves. Cat videos are the crystallisation of all that human beings love about cats, the crux of which is centred in the fact that cats are both beautiful and absurd. Their natural beauty and majesty are eternally just one tiny slip away from total humiliation, and this precarious condition fills us with a sympathetic panic and delight, for it exactly mirrors our own." Maria Bustillos on how cats won the internet.
posted by Athanassiel at 11:20 PM PST - 42 comments

A Modest Proposal - David Sedaris talks about the pros and cons of getting hitched
posted by a lungful of dragon at 11:07 PM PST - 29 comments

Japanese woodblock prints re-imagined as animated GIFs. (via Giant Cypress)
posted by jedicus at 8:57 PM PST - 13 comments

The Hashtag #ShoutYourAbortion Is Challenging The Stigma Of Abortion [more inside]
posted by triggerfinger at 8:57 PM PST - 41 comments

You ever see a motocross race?
You ever see a motocross race WITH SIDECARS?! [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 8:33 PM PST - 21 comments

This photographic documentary is not intended to tell the story of the events surrounding the disaster yet again. [...] It is not earthquakes or tsunami that are to blame for the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station, but humans. [...] As in the Chernobyl case, it was a human, not technology, that was mainly responsible for the disaster.
posted by slater at 8:30 PM PST - 5 comments

1989 as covered by Ryan Adams (except "Clean", for some reason). Blank Space is my favorite. It's available on iTunes (including "Clean"). You can read an interview with him or read about the backstory in USA Today.
posted by Kattullus at 5:09 PM PST - 84 comments

Cassini Finds Global Ocean in Saturn's Moon Enceladus. "A global ocean lies beneath the icy crust of Saturn's geologically active moon Enceladus, according to new research using data from NASA's Cassini mission." The discovery of a global ocean beneath its icy rind makes Enceladus an even better potential extraterrestrial incubator than previously thought. [more inside]
posted by homunculus at 4:26 PM PST - 30 comments

Meet the GynePunks , activists who are making reproductive healthcare more accessible by using open source tools to make centrifuges, microscopes, and speculums.
posted by faethverity at 4:12 PM PST - 33 comments

In Defense of Hufflepuff [The Atlantic] The much-maligned house of the Harry Potter series doesn’t get nearly enough attention or praise for its egalitarian ethos. [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 3:12 PM PST - 142 comments

In 2014, flagging tape was discovered in the old-growth forest of the central Walbran Valley that concerned citizens feared were marking out proposed cutblocks - but the logging company, Teal Jones, denied having any logging plans in the area. Then in 2015, Wilderness Committee Vancouver Island Campaigner Torrance Coste obtained maps from the company showing that they were indeed planning to log eight cutblocks of ancient forest surrounding the iconic Castle Grove. Now the fight is on to save the Walbran Valley's remaining ancient forests. Meanwhile on the nearby Sunshine Coast, protesters have blocked roads into old-growth cutblocks, prompting speculation of a War in the Woods part 2.
posted by mannequito at 2:48 PM PST - 20 comments

On September 7, Candida Royalle died of ovarian cancer at the age of 64. [more inside]
posted by janey47 at 1:54 PM PST - 19 comments

Guardian: Scott Walker 2016 presidential campaign in crisis after plunge in polls. BBC: Scott Walker drops out of US 2016 presidential race. New York Times: Scott Walker Said to Be Quitting Presidential Race. Milwaukee-Wisconsin Journal Sentinel: Campaign woes prompt Scott Walker to drop out of race. The Onion: Aides Rush On Stage To Rotate Scott Walker Back To Direction Of Audience.
posted by Wordshore at 1:46 PM PST - 239 comments

New York rat drags a slice of pizza down subway steps. Insert joke about inferiority of your preferred regional pizza here.
posted by phunniemee at 12:36 PM PST - 108 comments

In fact, women have never once asked me why my account is locked—and unlike some of my male editors, they’ve never recommended opening it up. They understand that the online world has become a horror show, and that men largely drive that horror.

Stacey May Fowles: I am afraid of men on the Internet.
posted by MartinWisse at 12:32 PM PST - 98 comments

A video has emerged of a man serenading his wife of 73 years on her deathbed with a song she sang to him as he went to fight in the Second World War.
posted by gman at 12:32 PM PST - 25 comments

Here's David Manning's YouTube videos illustrating how to make use of ghost AI quirks on the fly while playing in Ms. Pac-Man: Ghost Behavior and On Grouping. It's excellent for building an intuitive sense of how to play the game which, because of random aspects, cannot be reliably beaten with patterns as with Pac-Man. [more inside]
posted by JHarris at 12:12 PM PST - 7 comments

Lawyers for Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson recently sent a cease and desist letter (pdf) to CafePress. The reason? To halt sales of all unauthorized Ben Carson For President products, based on the "Digital Millennium Copyright Act, The Lanham Act, Federal Trademark Infringement, Federal Copyright Infringement, state misappropriation and privacy laws." [more inside]
posted by 1367 at 11:14 AM PST - 56 comments

Parking sign company goes meta: Free Parking Infographic
posted by aniola at 11:01 AM PST - 33 comments

STEM education meets Guinness Book of World Records with world's largest bridge built from toy construction set 'A lot of engineers have probably grown to like engineering through playing with toys like Meccano.'
posted by Michele in California at 10:33 AM PST - 15 comments

We've heard before about the Wood Database, which lists detailed information ranging from crushing strength to odor to sustainability for close to 200 different types of wood. But now, the project has a beautifully simple Pinterest page as well. You can browse images of burled wood, striped wood, golden wood, and even pink and purple wood - and every image links back to the database, if you want to find out more. [more inside]
posted by showbiz_liz at 10:22 AM PST - 16 comments

In the wake of the national furor over the arrest of a high schooler over a digital clock, one prominent atheist ponders if this wasn't part of some elaborate plan this whole time. [more inside]
posted by runt at 10:09 AM PST - 313 comments

"There's a popular narrative about poor families and fast food: They eat more of it than anybody else. It’s dangled as evidence for the high rate of obesity among poorer Americans -- and talked about even by some of the country’s foremost voices on food. "[J]unk food is cheaper when measured by the calorie, and that this makes fast food essential for the poor because they need cheap calories," wrote Mark Bittman for The New York Times in 2011 But there’s a problem with saying that poor people like fast food better than others. It’s not true."
posted by almostmanda at 9:35 AM PST - 35 comments

"This is musical theater made by someone who knows rap to be all our cultural lingua franca, whose sense of humor is legible to people like us. It is songwriting done within rap's regulations and limitations. It's a work of historical fiction that honors the sentiments of rap, a play off collective memory that feels overwhelming personal." NPR is now streaming the Cast Recording of the hit broadway play Hamilton (previously).
posted by DynamiteToast at 9:22 AM PST - 181 comments

In Unit Stalked by Suicide, Veterans Try to Save One Another. The Second Battalion, Seventh Marine Regiment (2/7) was deployed to Helmand Province, Afghanistan in 2008. During eight months of combat, the unit killed hundreds of enemy fighters and suffered more casualties than any other Marine battalion that year. When its members returned, most left the military. Seven years later, at least 13 of the 1200 members of that battalion have killed themselves in the interim: two while on active duty, the rest after they left the military. That is nearly four times the rate for young male veterans as a whole and 14 times that for all Americans. (This story discusses self-harm, suicide and suicidal ideation. Some readers may find the content disturbing.) [more inside]
posted by zarq at 8:40 AM PST - 9 comments

In praise of dirty, sexy cities: the urban world according to Walter Benjamin (slGrauniad)
posted by Kitteh at 8:18 AM PST - 16 comments

I heard the debut record from this band when it came out a little while ago and thought it was cool, but it didn't make a lasting impression. However, this video featuring the band performing a house concert in France really blew me away! Skip ahead in the video to about 1:10 in to get to the actual concert: St. Paul & The Broken Bones live at some house in France!
posted by nangsta at 8:11 AM PST - 14 comments

SOUNDS LIKE YOUR NEXT STORY!: a short play with infinite scenes by Rebecca Makkai.
posted by divined by radio at 8:05 AM PST - 5 comments

Rescuing Ghosts is a short, emotional animation to the music of Fox Amoore.
posted by Wolfdog at 7:38 AM PST - 3 comments

Check out Kim Jung Gi doing a quick sketch - most impressive.
posted by zeoslap at 6:40 AM PST - 16 comments

The Emotions Of Pixar (SLVimeo)
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 6:25 AM PST - 8 comments

With the Canadian election coming in under a month, it's time for some Super Gay Campaign Advice. (round 2)
posted by Theta States at 6:11 AM PST - 12 comments

When shopping for a microwave oven, bring a box of appalams and cook four of them for 30 seconds. (via What if? xkcd via this amusing ELI5 about a microwave-resistant gnat)
posted by elgilito at 4:59 AM PST - 38 comments

We don’t glamorize all violent crime; no one holds the Son of Sam or Charles Manson in high regard. (It’s hard to imagine their descendants gathering for a celebratory dinner at a steakhouse.) So why are Al Capone, Lansky, Arnold Rothstein, Luciano, and their ilk held up as mythic figures, even heroes of a sort, not just by their families but by the general public? Why are members of the Italian mafia treated more like celebrities than unsavory criminals?
posted by ellieBOA at 3:59 AM PST - 94 comments

She's 10. She Has HIV. And She's About to Learn the Truth. [SL WaPo]
posted by ActionPopulated at 8:28 PM PST - 21 comments

Gary Warnett: A social and cultural history of the hoodie [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 8:25 PM PST - 10 comments

Recently, It Gets Better teamed up with Doritos to support the LGBT community with rainbow colored chips, which could be purchased from It Gets Better's website, until they ran out. There was the usual outcry and backlash, but this time it looked like Doritos took time to respond to individual criticisms on Facebook. Except it was the return of the beneficial troll, Mike Melgaard, who previously posed as a Target representative in support of its move towards more gender-neutral of children's products in its stores. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 8:20 PM PST - 51 comments

Mamie Lang was 7 years old when her father gathered her mother and her four siblings in the middle of the night to catch a train. The Langs left Ellisville, Mississippi, just ahead of a lynch mob. Mamie Lang Kirkland returned to the town of her birth this year, a century later. SLNYT
posted by Etrigan at 7:20 PM PST - 9 comments

Sources can be tricky things. The Daily Mail doesn't have the greatest reputation. Lord Ashcroft is a Tory billionaire with a grudge against David Cameron. And so far they are the only sources for this one. That said, judge for yourself:

Prime Minister David Cameron ‘put a private part of his anatomy’ into a dead pig’s mouth .

(Over on Twitter, as you might have guessed, it's Christmas.)
posted by bonaldi at 5:49 PM PST - 376 comments

Gayle Brandeis writes on the cultural construction of her thighs.
posted by Rumple at 5:28 PM PST - 31 comments

Cork.
posted by loquacious at 5:22 PM PST - 15 comments

PatentsView is a new patent data visualization platform from the US Patent and Trademark Office. The PatentsView beta search tool allows members of the public to interact with nearly 40 years of data on patenting activity in the United States. Users can explore technological, regional, and individual-level patent trends via search filters with multiple viewing options. The database links inventors, their organizations, locations, and overall patenting activity using enhanced 1976-2014 data from public USPTO bulk data files.
posted by jedicus at 5:12 PM PST - 5 comments

Cormac McCarthy just did a short video on behalf of the Santa Fe Institute explaining why you should join their enterprise.
posted by jason's_planet at 4:48 PM PST - 6 comments

The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps is filling in gaps by starting a new podcast feed [iTunes link] dedicated to the history of philosophic traditions other than the one that started with the Ancient Greeks. The first tradition covered will be Indian philosophy, but the series will move on to Africa and China, and perhaps elsewhere as well. The primary author of the India episodes is Prof. Jonardon Ganeri but Prof. Peter Adamson will co-write, present each episode, and probably come up with illustrative examples involving giraffes, Buster Keaton, and his non-existent trapeze-artist sister. [Adamson's main History of Philosophy podcast previously and subsequently]
posted by Kattullus at 4:33 PM PST - 15 comments

How to draw buildings, trees and people.
posted by andrewcooke at 4:15 PM PST - 7 comments

The extraordinary case of the Guevedoces. "Johnny lives in a small town in the Dominican Republic where he, and others like him, are known as 'Guevedoces', which effectively translates as 'penis at twelve' ... Like the other Guevedoces, Johnny was brought up as a girl because he had no visible testes or penis and what appeared to be a vagina. It is only when he approached puberty that his penis grew and testicles descended." [more inside]
posted by homunculus at 4:00 PM PST - 15 comments

Lady Gaga has just released a new video (Major trigger warnings for graphic depictions of assaults) called The Hunting Ground as a PSA for It's On Us (they also have a tumblr), an organization dedicated to ending campus rape. Take the pledge. [more inside]
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 2:47 PM PST - 12 comments

Pre-Code.com is an incredibly detailed exploration of the Hollywood cinema that fell between the advent of sound motion pictures in 1927 and the Motion Picture Production Code of 1930 (Which wasn't enforced until 1934. Huh? Here's a timeline). This includes a number of familiar titles such as All Quiet on the Western Front, Dracula, Duck Soup, It Happened One Night and The Public Enemy. But we also get a peek at the more obscure and daring titles such as Baby Face, I’m no Angel, Smarty, Safe in Hell and Night Nurse.
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 2:09 PM PST - 8 comments

The New Games Criticism - a response to Kieron Gillen's The New Games Journalism 10 years after the fact.
posted by Artw at 1:56 PM PST - 24 comments

Unsolved problems with the common core. Computational biologist (and occasional curmudgeon) Lior Pachter pairs unsolved problems in mathematics to common core math standards.
posted by quaking fajita at 1:39 PM PST - 18 comments

Here's The Daily Meal's list of 10 favorite regional soft drinks (SLIDESHOW). And here's Mental Floss's stories behind 11 regional soft drinks. More info follows.... [more inside]
posted by JHarris at 11:55 AM PST - 125 comments

Jackie Collins, Novelist Who Wrote of Hollywood’s Glamorous Side, Dies at 77 [New York Times]

Jackie Collins, the best-selling British-born author known for her vibrant novels about the extravagance and glamour of life in Hollywood, died on Saturday in Los Angeles. She was 77. The cause was breast cancer, her family said in a statement.

posted by Fizz at 11:17 AM PST - 27 comments

In search of trifinia Even for geographical completists, visiting all of the United States' trifinia, or places where three states meet, is an often overlooked pleasure. [more inside]
posted by chainsofreedom at 6:30 AM PST - 24 comments

In 2002, Steve Martin sat down for a Q&A about his writing and his interest in mathematics. His friend Robin Williams was on hand to help out. Please pardon the video quality. Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5
posted by Optamystic at 4:04 AM PST - 14 comments

79 year old Grandma Shirley plays some Skyrim.
posted by Sebmojo at 2:03 AM PST - 47 comments

Who's Funding Kevin Johnson's Secret Government? — Deadspin's detailed report on a developing scandal involving Sacramento, California mayor and former NBA star Kevin Johnson's alleged misuse of the power of his office to benefit for-profit charter schools. [more inside]
posted by tonycpsu at 11:31 PM PST - 48 comments

In a universe at a slightly different frequency than ours there was an alternate Hugo Ballot. Below the fold are links to the authors and works: [more inside]
posted by ladyriffraff at 10:06 PM PST - 28 comments

Hector Mancha with the act that won him the Grand Prix of FISM 2015 in Rimini.
posted by Confess, Fletch at 8:59 PM PST - 8 comments

An American living in Japan, Ellen Freeman confronts her own body issues upon learning that her 'small face' fits an ideal of beauty she wasn't even aware of.
posted by buriednexttoyou at 7:41 PM PST - 40 comments

Evan Puschak, aka The Nerdwriter, watches Children of Men and asks us to not ignore the background [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 6:29 PM PST - 48 comments

My affection is real: Jon Bon Jovi covers a Teresa Teng classic- The Moon Represents My Heart [more inside]
posted by otherchaz at 5:46 PM PST - 11 comments

Jimmy Carter watched a lot of movies when he was President -- more than 400, in fact, ranging from Midnight Cowboy (the first known X-rated movie screened at the White House) to The Bad News Bears. [more inside]
posted by Etrigan at 5:16 PM PST - 28 comments

Born Red is a long profile of Xi Jinping, President of China, by Evan Osnos of The New Yorker. Osnos explains the character and policies of China's current leader through his biography. He was privileged son of a revolutionary leader. After the father fell from grace, the son endured a troubled decade. His father was invited back into the fold, and Xi rose through the ranks all the way to the top. Xi is considered the leader of the informal princeling faction of the Chinese Communist Party. He has put a focus on combating corruption, which had gone out of control in the last couple of decades, and stifling dissent. Recent months have seen tumultuous stock markets and a large army parade. Since coming to power, a personality cult has been promoted by the state. Jeffrey Wasserstrom makes a comparison between the Chinese President and the Pope.
posted by Kattullus at 3:56 PM PST - 10 comments

The Very Polish Cut Outs is a label/ collective/ collection of that has been busy bringing Poland’s lost grooves to a new world audience, everything from disco, funk, soul, electronic and psychedelic for the past few years. They're active on Facebook, where you can get previews of new releases and hear more funky fun music, or you can go straight to the source with their Soundcloud and Mixcloud accounts. Of course, there's even more, if you're down to dig. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 3:21 PM PST - 9 comments

Here are two Let's Plays (text) devoted to SSI's classic DOS D&D "Gold Box" construction set program Unlimited Adventures, one of the most revered user-level RPG creator programs and now available on GoG.

• Let's Play UA, an ENWorld forum post.
• Another text Let's Play, on RPG Codex. UA modules are not easy to get running, but for those interested....

[more inside]
posted by JHarris at 11:49 AM PST - 8 comments

Everyone has probably seen wheelchair accessible cars and vans, but this custom Hitachi ZX210LC-5 (servicable translation) is probably the only wheelchair accessible excavator around. It came about as a joint project between the Norwegian welfare and labour administration (NAV) and the construction firm Jakhelln Entreprenør in Lillestrøm, Norway, when operator Tim Knutsen, who lost use of his legs after a traffic accident in 2006, needed work. Video in this article (translation of article text).
posted by Harald74 at 10:52 AM PST - 6 comments

How the i got into iMac.
posted by pjern at 10:10 AM PST - 69 comments

Meet the Hottest Restaurant of 2081. (via Gawker)
posted by Countess Elena at 9:31 AM PST - 35 comments

Vanishing Canada: Why we’re all losers in Ottawa’s war on data. [Maclean's Magazine]

Stories about government data and historical records being deleted, burned—even tossed into Dumpsters—have become so common in recent years that many Canadians may feel inured to them. But such accounts are only the tip of a rapidly melting iceberg. A months-long Maclean’s investigation, which includes interviews with dozens of academics, scientists, statisticians, economists and librarians, has found that the federal government’s “austerity” program, which resulted in staff cuts and library closures (16 libraries since 2012)—as well as arbitrary changes to policy, when it comes to data—has led to a systematic erosion of government records far deeper than most realize, with the data and data-gathering capability we do have severely compromised as a result.

posted by Fizz at 9:19 AM PST - 85 comments

Death on Sevenmile Road
The rush to militarize the U.S.-Mexico border has tragic consequences in Texas.
posted by andoatnp at 9:16 AM PST - 28 comments

An 8:44 long timelapse in 4K resolution on Vimeo and YouTube. Includes Yosemite, Yellowstone, Olympic, Banff, Kings Canyon, Sequoia, Acadia, Rocky Mountains, Mesa Verde, Arches, Mount Rainier, Mount Revelstoke and Zion. Also Seattle, Los Angeles, Vancouver, St. Louis, San Francisco and Las Vegas. Plus Mount Rushmore, New Orleans, Toronto, Boston, Calgary, Springdale, Three Rivers, Pagosa Springs, Swift Current, New York, Niagara Falls, Lake Palourde, Keene Lake, Horseshoe Bend, White Mountains, Hobson and the Mississippi River. [more inside]
posted by Wordshore at 8:21 AM PST - 16 comments

Supermoon Lunar Eclipse! Coming to most of the world September 27th or 28th, 2015. There are many other cool visualizations, like this telescopic view or a view from the moon. Provided by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter mission of NASA.
posted by Roger Dodger at 7:30 AM PST - 15 comments

The Leap Manifesto was recently launched by a range of Canadian intellectuals, celebrities, and organizations as an attempt to combat catastrophic climate change by convincing Canadians that business as usual is not the only way. [more inside]
posted by Alex404 at 7:21 AM PST - 16 comments

AutoCAD drinks DWG file. Also, Engineers Guide to Drinks in DWG. via archdaily.
posted by signal at 6:49 AM PST - 9 comments

"The biggest pop star in America today is a man named Karl Martin Sandberg. The lead singer of an obscure ’80s glam-metal band, Sandberg grew up in a remote suburb of Stockholm and is now 44. Sandberg is the George Lucas, the LeBron James, the Serena Williams of American pop. He is responsible for more hits than Phil Spector, Michael Jackson, or the Beatles." [more inside]
posted by p3on at 10:09 PM PST - 151 comments

Gilbert, when he published his article, noted that being able to identify hierarchy from the text of emails could have practical applications. A company could apply his methods to its own internal communications and discover informal structures of power within its ranks. Maybe a mid-level manager is laying the groundwork for a coup, gaining authority over subordinates on other teams....Or, less cynically, you could identify promising young hires for promotion: “Imagine a study investigating who in an organization disproportionately attracts upward language. Do they move up the ladder faster? [more inside]
posted by storybored at 6:58 PM PST - 45 comments

Jack hair cut - A fantastic home scene you don't see everyday. (By the guy who took this drone video)
posted by growabrain at 6:34 PM PST - 5 comments

Cat & Snail [more inside]
posted by Going To Maine at 6:16 PM PST - 23 comments

"Hey Jerry, what's it like working in a video game studio?" (sl tumblr)
posted by buriednexttoyou at 4:22 PM PST - 10 comments

It's well understood that many species of parasitic wasp, when they lay their eggs on host caterpillars, also inject viruses that prevent the host's immune system from attacking the eggs. But it was recently discovered that some of those virus genes, as well as genes from parasitic wasps themselves, have become a part of the genome of some lepidopteran species (even protecting these species from a different type of virus), thus demonstrating horizontal gene transfer between insect species (link to paper).
posted by J.K. Seazer at 3:03 PM PST - 23 comments

The Case for More Traffic Roundabouts — "Here’s why: Using simple principles of physics, roundabouts dramatically reduce crash rates, as well as injuries and deaths. They diminish vehicle emissions. They are a more effective use of road space, and cost less to maintain than traditional four-way intersections. And it’s time that America learns to love them."
posted by tonycpsu at 2:14 PM PST - 140 comments

Atop the twin spires of the Andromeda and Milky Way Galaxies the eerie call-and-response of bagpipe players echoed across the valley. I watched four siblings race one another up to the top of the Multiverse's spire as their mother, standing at the base, tried to maneuver a cell phone around the fifth child strapped to her chest.

-The Duke, the Landscape Architect and the World's Most Ambitious Attempt to Bring the Cosmos to Earth by Alina Simone is an article about the Crawick Multiverse in Dumfriesshire, Scotland, and its designer, landscape architect Charles Jencks. The garden is designed to represent modern cosmological theories.
posted by Kattullus at 2:11 PM PST - 8 comments

PBS's Frontline reports that a new study of the brains of deceased NFL players shows that 87 of 91 brains, 96%, had signs of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy. The condition, caused by repeated head trauma, has been discovered in 79% of the 165 NFL athletes studied to date. These new findings are released just as the NFL gets its 2015-16 season underway and weeks before the release of the new Will Smith film Concussion, about the neurologist who first discovered the degenerative brain disease in a deceased NFL player's brain ten years ago. [more inside]
posted by briank at 12:55 PM PST - 107 comments

[Warning - flashing lights in some links] Bradley Eros & Tim Geraghty have collaborated on some interesting de/re/constructive film making, with the blockbuster buster TransTrans (TransformersTransformed) (11:58) - "a radical remix of the recent Transformers film, via synthetic collapse and critical revenge on its old & new fascist tropes," blending film imagery with text from the Futurist Cinema/Manifesto and soundtrack by Einstürzende Neubauten | Eros C'est Lamour, a wedding gift (7:57) - "The missing link between Rose Hobart and Maria Montez via Rrose Selavy's bride stripped bare by the song of the sarong" | FOOLS! (30:11) - "Remember, fortuna favet fatuis [fortune favors fools], but fortuna caeca est [fortune is blind]."
posted by filthy light thief at 12:22 PM PST - 11 comments

The Subtext Buried In Seven Great Movie Chess Scenes: "So let’s go one level deeper into some iconic movie scenes that involve a chess match. This exercise involved a lot of pausing and rewinding and probably wouldn’t have been possible without 1080p. To pick apart these cinematic chess clashes, we also spoke to chess grandmaster Robert Hess, a former U.S. national championship runner-up, and turned to the raw silicon-powered strength of the chess engine Stockfish. (We showed Hess the positions over email, without telling him anything about the movies the games were from.)" [SL538]
posted by capricorn at 11:59 AM PST - 57 comments

Here's Dinosaur Dracula, a pop culture retro nostalgia site from the guys who formerly brought us X-Entertainment (currently "down for repairs"), the subject of many many MeFi posts. Some pages of interest:

• TV Guide listings for Halloween 1990
• Excerpts from the 1989, 1992, 1998 and 1999 Sears Wish Books.
• Comic Book Ads.
• The Masters of the Universe Slime Pit, which had great instructions, and the sliming of Jimmy "Mouth of the South" Hart. There's more....

[more inside]
posted by JHarris at 11:42 AM PST - 11 comments

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein talks about her inspiration, teaching herself what she needed to know, how she keeps balance in her life, and being one of 89 black women with a physics Ph.D., and the only theoretical physicist. [more inside]
posted by Deoridhe at 11:39 AM PST - 20 comments

The rise, decline, and possible comeback of Tiger Beat (with free poster of Justin!).
posted by Chrysostom at 11:32 AM PST - 16 comments

Universal Soldier may be the only series whose DTV sequels are its best work [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 11:28 AM PST - 18 comments

The EPA and the State of California Notify Volkswagen of Clean Air Act Violations via an intentional defeat device [more inside]
posted by Annika Cicada at 11:13 AM PST - 262 comments

Was David Hume inspired by Buddhist thinking in the 18th century? Alison Gopnik explores the idea in a touching article about her recovery from depression and divorce along with her discovery that Hume may have been influenced by more than just Descartes and Spinoza. [more inside]
posted by fremen at 11:10 AM PST - 13 comments

Inside a (WWI) German U-boat.
posted by kmz at 11:05 AM PST - 43 comments

An Oral History of Stephen King's directorial debut: Maximum Overdrive
posted by The Whelk at 10:51 AM PST - 41 comments

Heart of a Dog is musician and multimedia artist Laurie Anderson's first feature film in decades--a mix of live-action images and animation. The film is a personal reflection that grew out of a difficult period when Anderson lost her mother Mary Louise, her husband Lou Reed, and their beloved piano-playing dog Lolabelle within a short span of time. Although Heart of a Dog is a meditation on personal loss, grief, and acceptance, it also examines these themes on a larger scale when Anderson reflects on life in downtown New York in the period after 9/11. [more inside]
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 10:14 AM PST - 23 comments

YouTube user 11db11 has assembled every single background Ray Ellis track for the first season and some of the later seasons of the '67 Spider-Man cartoon as a single YouTube video. (SLYT)
posted by Shepherd at 10:12 AM PST - 28 comments

Tindallgrams is a collection of snarky memoranda of Howard W. "Bill" Tindall, Jr., a NASA Orbital Mechanics specialist working at MIT to coordinate software development for the Apollo spacecraft guidance systems. His memos, dating from 1966 through 1970, are epistles of triumph, frustration, and incomprehension that will be familiar to project managers throughout time. [more inside]
posted by Sunburnt at 10:10 AM PST - 12 comments

Lucy accidentally gets boozed up from "Vitameatavegamin" (Clip.) [more inside]
posted by Cookiebastard at 9:59 AM PST - 16 comments

Based on a cutscene discovered in the PC version of Metal Gear Solid V, players have formed a faction in the online portion of the game devoted to ridding the game world of nukes. The faction's name: the Metal Gear Philanthropists. They have created guides to removing nukes from other players and have set up leaderboards tracking individual disarmament efforts. In return, a pro-proliferation counterfaction has popped up, calling themselves the Metal Gear Patriots, supporting the spread of nukes within the online game.
posted by NoxAeternum at 9:03 AM PST - 33 comments

Our Racist Dogs by Kelly Mays McDonald [The Awl] Why do certain dogs attack certain people? Because they’re weaponized.

“Weaponized dogs are ever-present in humanity’s long legacy of colonialism and slavery. They have fought alongside many instances of human atrocity to perpetrate acts of physical and psychological violence that supersede the scope of a simple gunshot. European colonizers of the New World notably trained their dogs to “relish Indian flesh” by explicitly feeding them the bodies of the victims after a battle. Throughout America’s early history, slave masters and bounty hunters adopted bloodhounds as the primary means of tracking down runaway slaves by scent, which is widely depicted in popular media. What is left out of the popular narrative, however, is the fact that when they encountered people on the run, the dogs were often trained to bite and tear the flesh of slaves to hold them there until they could be shot, shackled and dragged back to their masters for public lynchings and beatings.”

posted by Fizz at 8:34 AM PST - 31 comments

Robot ethicists have launched the Campaign Against Sex Robots, seeking a ban on the development of robotic sexytimes. Robot ethicists Kathleen Richardson of De Montfort University and Erik Billing from University of Skövde are the co-creators of the Campaign Against Sex Robots, which seeks to bring awareness to the issue and proposes a robot sex ban. They compare it to similar campaigns that seek to limit development of “killer” robots.
posted by sciatrix at 7:59 AM PST - 294 comments

Beagle practices lifeguarding (YouTube)
posted by griphus at 7:50 AM PST - 26 comments

Thanks to a Freedom of Information request, Transport for London have released a geogrphically-accurate map of the tube. [PDF] [more inside]
posted by schmod at 7:17 AM PST - 22 comments

Pete Seeger - Concert in Sweden 1968. Seeger sings a mix of folk songs, protest songs, and songs from around the world. And as usual, he gets the audience to sing along with him sometimes.
posted by colfax at 7:09 AM PST - 4 comments

For the second time, Memorial University professor Ranee Panjabi refuses to wear an FM transmitter that will allow a hearing-impaired student to hear her lectures. The student, history major William Sears, is forced to drop out of her History of Espionage course. Now Memorial University has discovered an agreement that it signed with Panjabi nearly 20 years ago that allows her to refuse to wear the transmitter on religious grounds.
posted by Amy NM at 5:54 AM PST - 320 comments

The NYU Libraries have compiled a database of undercover investigative journalism dating back to the mid-nineteenth century. "The site, designed as a resource for scholars, student researchers and journalists, collects some of the best investigative work going back almost two centuries." [more inside]
posted by listen, lady at 5:46 AM PST - 5 comments

The 2015 Ig® Nobel Prizes were awarded on Thursday night at the 25th First Annual Ig® Nobel Prize Ceremony, at Harvard's Sanders Theatre.
About the awards.
previously here [more inside]
posted by oneswellfoop at 2:13 AM PST - 34 comments

In the midst of Portland, Oregon's ongoing building boom, one property in the Eastmoreland neighborhood has drawn special notice, as it’s home to three giant sequoias over 100 years old. When a local developer announced plans to cut them down to build two new homes, a coalition of neighbors and tree lovers banded together to raise $900,000 to buy the property. (A tree-sitter, perhaps unsurprisingly, has also been involved.) Things weren't looking good until an unexpected ally stepped in: South Park’s Matt Stone.
posted by gottabefunky at 10:38 PM PST - 33 comments

All those beautiful illustrations of the solar system and planetary orbits we find in textbooks, and books about space aren't really to scale. If the orbits were to scale then most of the planets would be too small to see in the image. So two guys decided to build and film a proper scale model of the solar system, out in the desert. [more inside]
posted by Joh at 10:35 PM PST - 39 comments

Holly Salzman of Albuquerque, NM, had to attend 10 court-ordered sessions with counselor Mary Pepper to resolve co-parenting conflicts with her estranged husband. Local KRQE reports that the class has highly religious overtones, which Salzman disagrees with but she could not get the courts to change the counselor. [more inside]
posted by numaner at 9:36 PM PST - 25 comments

Judy Collins has released a new album, duets with artists such as Willie Nelson, Don McLean, Jimmy Buffett, Bhi Bhiman and a number of others. As expected, her voice is beautiful and ageless. The Spotify playlist is here. A video for her duet with Thomas Dybdahl (From Grace) is on Youtube. Enjoy...
posted by HuronBob at 9:32 PM PST - 6 comments

Rolling Stone reporter Erik Hedegaard interviewed Terrence Howard about Empire and ... well, it's hard to explain.
posted by trillian at 7:55 PM PST - 28 comments

Michigan State Representatives Todd Courser (82nd District) and Cindy Gamrat (80th District) were close allies. Tea Partiers from opposite sides of the state, they shared an office and staff, and when Gamrat was expelled from the Republican caucus for posting inside information on Facebook, Courser posted a 3,300-word defense of her. You know how this is going to turn out -- the married-to-other-people family-values Representatives were having an affair. [more inside]
posted by Etrigan at 7:39 PM PST - 42 comments

Not one of these hippies looks dirty, or stoned, or tuned out; and they all apparently were a lot happier then I was led to believe. Or maybe this is not representative. Neat pictures though.
posted by COD at 5:40 PM PST - 101 comments

The Spooky Men's Chorale, an Australian male vocal group, have a song, Ba'hari Ghibb, which is described as a 13th century Sufi prophecy.
posted by Samarium at 4:58 PM PST - 24 comments

The Ballad of Captain Dwight-The story of Ed Dwight, the first black American trained to be an astronaut, via the memory palace [more inside]
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 12:45 PM PST - 9 comments

Here's Everything You Need To Know About Survivor: Second Chance, by Josh Wigler [more inside]
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 12:31 PM PST - 69 comments

Adam Purple passed away this last Monday. He suffered a heart attack while riding his bike across the Williamsburg Bridge. Adam Purple and the Garden of Eden (Vimeo).
posted by Gymnopedist at 11:53 AM PST - 15 comments

Here is some information on the "Killer Poke" of the Commodore PET 2001 computer, an infamous command that could actually damage hardware, by causing its monitor to lose sync. Like this. [more inside]
posted by JHarris at 11:28 AM PST - 63 comments

Winds of change at Dyson - James Dyson built a better vacuum. Can he pull off a second industrial revolution? [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 11:16 AM PST - 127 comments

"While people have long used online outlets to grieve loved ones and public figures, the intense, intimate mourning rituals for kids like Ryan are something else entirely. And while these rituals create a much-needed space for mourning in a culture that treats grief like it's contagious, not everyone wants their child subjected to such celebrity. But once begun, it's hard to stop."
posted by divined by radio at 11:12 AM PST - 40 comments

"One of my friends suggested we should do karaoke night so we found Freakin' Awesome Karaoke Express and decided to give them a go... We had a blast, their service was amazing and they had unbelievably great selection of songs... I never would have thought of seeking a mobile karaoke service, but they were fantastic... My friend had been to a block party where they were hired..." Only problem: Freakin' Awesome Karaoke Express does not exist. Fake reviews are endemic to online businesses, they are rated as trustworthy, and they are amazingly cheap to buy. [more inside]
posted by RedOrGreen at 11:03 AM PST - 13 comments

Jomsviking reenactors demonstrate the ancient sport of failing to hit each other with heavy bags. (SLYT)
posted by theodolite at 10:48 AM PST - 18 comments

Wily Jeopardy! Contestant Gets Alex Trebek to Say "Turd Ferguson" [more inside]
posted by prize bull octorok at 10:36 AM PST - 59 comments

Two Dogs One Ice Cream Cone. (SLYT)
posted by kmz at 9:50 AM PST - 24 comments

Confessions of an Anonymous Free to Play Producer
posted by Artw at 9:45 AM PST - 47 comments

Instead of websites shutting their comment sections, might they want to keep them in order to remain in control of the conversation?
posted by mippy at 9:43 AM PST - 15 comments

The Best American Crime Writing Series (renamed The Best American Crime Reporting in 2006) ran from 2002 to 2010 and presented the finest in true crime journalism. Many of the stories are available from the online magazines in which they were first printed or from other legitimate sources. Links to all 105 available stories appear below the fold. I have previously presented links to the stories from the 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2010 editions. Some of those links have gone bad, so they have been reworked. [more inside]
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 9:00 AM PST - 25 comments

Chooks in dinner suits. The Maremma dog project to protect the Little Penguins of Middle Island (previously) is going so well it's being continued.
posted by Flitcraft at 8:53 AM PST - 6 comments

2015 National Book Award Longlists Released [The Millions] [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 8:16 AM PST - 16 comments

In 2010, Plain Dealer reporter Rachel Dissell wrote about thousands of neglected rape kits at the Cleveland Police Department. Working with fellow reporter Leila Atassi, their continued, tenacious coverage led to the creation of a 'rape kit task force' to cover a massive backlog, and eventually, a law mandating timely testing. Since 2011, when the city began sending rape kits to the state’s crime lab, almost all of its 4,000 kits have been tested; of these, over 1,600 contained usable DNA. 350 cases have led to grand jury indictments, and as of this month, over 100 rapists have been convicted, some of multiple rapes. [more inside]
posted by zarq at 7:53 AM PST - 53 comments

Ladies and gentlemen thank you for coming to this all-hands meeting. We'll get started just as soon as you open your binders to page 246: Infographic Breakdown of Video Game Console Traffic on YouPorn (NSFW Text)
posted by griphus at 6:51 AM PST - 120 comments

"Preservation of old games involves more than just an extra patch. The journey from dusty unplayable relic to polished, cross-platform installer is a minefield of technical and legal obstacles. The team at Good Old Games remain the industry leaders in the restoration of classic PC games, tasked with reverse engineering code written more than 20 years ago, unraveling knotty licensing issues left behind by defunct development studios, and battling lethargy on the part of skeptical publishers. It’s a thrilling and, at times, gruelling process, but – as the GOG team will testify – it never fails to surprise." [more inside]
posted by SpacemanStix at 6:22 AM PST - 44 comments

the "lolita" covers. Tubmlr user gowns (reposted by Hark! A Vagrant's Kate Beaton) examines the subject matter, history, and implications of official book covers for Vladimir Nabokov's 1955 Lolita. (some NSFW book images) [more inside]
posted by Kybard at 6:15 AM PST - 53 comments

The eighth Rugby World Cup (@) kicks off tomorrow in England (and Wales), contested by twenty qualifying teams. While the All Blacks are unbackable (5/4) favourites to be the first team to retain Bill, the Cup is equally a celebration of the diverse world rugby family, offering the minnows a chance to pit themselves against the best. [more inside]
posted by wilful at 6:13 AM PST - 75 comments

Battleship Probability Calculator by C. Liam Brown. Finds the best squares to try during the game.
posted by Wolfdog at 6:11 AM PST - 14 comments

Great 1977 video interview with Mrs. Jessie Roestenberg describing a 1954 UFO experience in Staffordshire, West Midlands, England. This blog post shows part of a 1959 newspaper clipping with a photo of Mrs. Roestenberg (presumably from 1954, going by the apparent age of her children in the photo; click image for larger view), and a drawing she made of what she reported seeing, as well as an undated, unsourced photo of the by-now-elderly Mrs. Roestenberg holding an artist's rendering of the figures she described. [more inside]
posted by taz at 5:58 AM PST - 23 comments

The ARPANET came before it. And the World Wide Web and browser technology would later make it accessible for the masses. But in between, a small Ann Arbor-based group labored on the NSFNET in relative obscurity to build—and ultimately to save—the Internet.
posted by infini at 3:39 AM PST - 12 comments

With the introduction of Google's new logo, why not take a look at the extensive documentation explaining the details of their Material Design philosophy?
posted by cthuljew at 2:21 AM PST - 43 comments

To celebrate the 50th Anniversary of the launch of the "British Road Sign Project" to standardize the 'chaotic and confusing' signage that existed on British motorways*, London's Design Museum and the Made North Gallery recruited leading artists and designers to transform the familiar circle, triangle and square signs... in ways that are often anything BUT standardized, but sometimes eerily familiar.
*resulting in many designs that are now considered standard well beyond the British Isles
posted by oneswellfoop at 9:43 PM PST - 7 comments

Walt Disney - "An unprecedented look at the life and legacy of one of America's most enduring and influential storytellers -- Walt Disney."
posted by kliuless at 9:41 PM PST - 17 comments

The Best of Scribblers - an appreciation of Edward Gibbon and The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
posted by Chrysostom at 9:09 PM PST - 17 comments

This year’s hajj (the pilgrimage to Mecca that is required for all Muslims to make once in their lives if they are able) will probably begin next week, but a pall was cast over the event when a crane collapsed into the Grand Mosque, killing 107 and injuring hundreds more. [more inside]
posted by Etrigan at 12:58 PM PST - 49 comments

In 1824's Musical Biography, John R. Parker systematically describes the "complexions" and personalities of the major and minor keys. (For example, C major is well suited to the expression of war and enterprize,while C minor is complaining, having something of the whining cant of B. minor. A-flat major is the most lovely of the tribe, and B flat's the least interesting of any...too dull for song.) [more inside]
posted by Iridic at 12:28 PM PST - 51 comments

Exxon's Own Research Confirmed Fossil Fuels' Role in Global Warming Decades Ago
posted by cmoj at 12:19 PM PST - 46 comments

Humpback Whale Leaps Out Of Water, Onto Kayakers [more inside]
posted by poffin boffin at 12:07 PM PST - 105 comments

Here's Hunter S. Thompson in the 80s, a post on Rants, Ravings, Gibberish & Jabs. And here's an encode of a rare VHS video of Dr. Thompson at this time in his life, "The Crazy Never Die." (31m, NSFW for a little full nudity.) And here's video of a commercial for Dr. Thompson writing for the San Francisco Examiner.
posted by JHarris at 11:07 AM PST - 13 comments

Sara Hendren talks at the Eyeo Festival about how she, as an artist, came to work at an engineering college. Hendren teaches at Olin College in Needham, MA and runs the site Abler, a site about "art, adaptive technologies and prosthetics, the future of human bodies in the built environment, and related ideas." Hendren's talk name-checks the artist Claire Pentecost, who has elaborated idea of the artist as "public amateur": the learner who is motivated by love or by personal attachment, and in this case, who consents to learn in public so that the very conditions of knowledge production can be interrogated. [via Text Patterns]
posted by Cash4Lead at 11:03 AM PST - 2 comments

The Mystery of ISIS

The problem, however, lies not in chronicling the successes of the movement, but in explaining how something so improbable became possible. The explanations so often given for its rise—the anger of Sunni communities, the logistical support provided by other states and groups, the movement’s social media campaigns, its leadership, its tactics, its governance, its revenue streams, and its ability to attract tens of thousands of foreign fighters—fall far short of a convincing theory of the movement’s success.

[more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 10:31 AM PST - 63 comments

The GOP 2016 presidential candidates will again be split into two sessions for tonight's debates on CNN, but the pool is getting smaller, as Rick Perry suspended his campaign, bowing out before being in the second-tier debates for a second time, and former Virgina governor Jim Gilmore, with a hair above 0% nationally, will participate ... via Twitter*. But the biggest news on the main stage is the inclusion of Carly Fiorina, thanks to her rise in the few polls since the Fox debate (previously). [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 10:21 AM PST - 867 comments

Wild Connections: A Journey Beyond the Kayak In Antarctica
posted by Bulgaroktonos at 9:56 AM PST - 3 comments

Nine of world's biggest banks join to form blockchain partnership.

"We held several roundtables...to deeply consider what the possible implications of the blockchain were, and what it could possibly do to save money, and time, and to create a better paradigm for the world of Wall Street and finance," Rutter told Reuters on Tuesday. Those that have signed up to the initiative so far are JP Morgan, State Street, UBS, Royal Bank of Scotland, Credit Suisse, BBVA and Commonwealth Bank of Australia.

posted by clawsoon at 8:39 AM PST - 68 comments

Comic artist Sal Amendola describes the complicated editorial process behind creating one of the most respected Batman stories ever.
posted by sardonyx at 8:23 AM PST - 7 comments

Likely the largest collection of Soviet Bus Stops ever assembled.
posted by BuddhaInABucket at 7:43 AM PST - 13 comments

Famed Shakespearean actor Sir Patrick Stewart recently appeared on NPR to perform a dramatic rendition of T. A. Swift's classic work, Blank Space.
posted by schmod at 7:26 AM PST - 18 comments

An Interview with an identity thief. Bloomberg news profiles Dmitry Naskovets, member of a ring of thieves who help steal millions in fradulent credit card transactions.
posted by Diablevert at 6:59 AM PST - 37 comments

Manfried the Man is the new comic by Caitlin Major about the absolutely adorable hijinks of Manfried, who entertains his owner Steve, a middle-aged single cat. "Manfried is a grumpy, lazy, balding, overfed pet man. He is prone to inappropriate displays of affection, sleeping in the sun, leaving his coarse body hair all over the couch, and willfully knocking things off tables and benches. He keeps Steve company though, and occasionally will kill a mouse or spider to save Steve." Also appearing so far is Roger, the pet man belonging to Steve's neighbor Chelsea.
posted by ocherdraco at 6:42 AM PST - 21 comments

By playing in a sprinkler, of course, while listening to Tchaikovsky. [SLYT]
posted by lharmon at 6:37 AM PST - 11 comments

Every relationship brings with it a private language built on shared memories and experiences. Maybe it's a joke shared on a date, maybe a saying or misspoken phrase that privately comes to represent so much more. Following the death of her husband, publicist/copywriter and blogger Virge Randall writes about life after losing the shared language of love.
posted by garius at 5:21 AM PST - 54 comments

A short series from the Guardian.
What we eat
How we eat it
How we grow it
How we cook it
How we share it

posted by ellieBOA at 3:40 AM PST - 7 comments

TREE JOB FROM HELL! Massive 30-50 ton live oak fall balanced on a chimney removed with naught but slings and a bucket truck and chainsaws. (slyt, 30:23, not safe for home owners)
posted by loquacious at 1:50 AM PST - 38 comments

Perhaps you're familiar with Amazing Grace, the biggest selling gospel album of all time and most certainly the biggest selling album of Aretha Franklin's career. What you may not know is that Sidney Pollack filmed a documentary during the recording of that album. It was never completed due to analog technical issues, but 43 years later, in our modern digital age, those have been overcome and it's about to hit the festival circuit. But hold on! Literally moments before it was due to make its world premiere at Telluride, Franklin got an unprecedented court injunction to stop the movie from being shown. And the film has also been pulled from Toronto's film festival. Franklin filed an amended lawsuit yesterday to prevent any screenings, specifically citing any seeking to find a distributor.
posted by hippybear at 1:22 AM PST - 41 comments

A 14 year old in Dallas builds a digital clock. He takes it to school to show his teacher. The school has him arrested. [more inside]
posted by His thoughts were red thoughts at 11:02 PM PST - 660 comments

"The Franklin shipwreck is one of the biggest, most celebrated discoveries in 21st-century marine archaeology. It also cleaved open a nasty dispute over the facts of — and credit for — the historic find. As the news went public, the civil servants, researchers, and others who played major roles in the discovery said they found themselves elbowed to the sidelines as the political messaging machine kicked into gear." [more inside]
posted by wollaston at 6:27 PM PST - 23 comments

Gary Richrath , guitarist for REO Speedwagon, and writer of classic rock songs like "Riding The Storm Out", "Golden Country", and "Take It On The Run" has passed on at 65.
posted by jonmc at 5:58 PM PST - 32 comments

A few weeks ago, the restaurant critic for the East Bay Express found himself duped by reviews of a phony Chinese restaurant in the hills of El Cerrito. Was it a hoax or a glimpse of a possible future?
posted by Lexica at 4:03 PM PST - 76 comments

"I’ve been doing a series of comics about men being deceived by makeup."
posted by griphus at 4:02 PM PST - 80 comments

Georgia Brown was a well-known singer and star of musical theater, film and television in Great Britain. She defined the role of Nancy in the original 1960 production of Oliver!, a musical created by her childhood friend Lionel Bart, and went on to appear in dozens of stage and screen productions. But by the early 1970s, Brown had become increasingly dissatisfied with the television roles available to women, and the BBC asked her to choose a project. From her discussions with then-script editor Midge Mackenzie and with the help of producer Verity Lambert, the 1974 mini-series Shoulder to Shoulder was born. [more inside]
posted by Orange Dinosaur Slide at 4:00 PM PST - 2 comments

"Today, women’s magazines routinely urge readers to purge; personal organizers offer to coach clients in their pursuit of minimalist perfection; earlier this year, Marie Kondo’s book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, which promises to help people achieve “the unique magic of a tidy home,” became a bestseller. But for some people, the cultural embrace of decluttering can provide cover for more problematic behavior."

From The Atlantic: The Opposite of Hoarding [more inside]
posted by mama casserole at 3:22 PM PST - 83 comments

"This turns out to be a story about stories—how they merge into histories, how fragile they are, and how urgent." [more inside]
posted by Catenation at 3:02 PM PST - 7 comments

Bear Cubs vs Hammock
posted by Room 641-A at 1:57 PM PST - 20 comments

Local and international manufacturers, people, and companies collaborate in different ways on Open Source cars.
posted by juiceCake at 1:55 PM PST - 7 comments

“Head trainer Teri Turner Bolton presses her palms together over her head, the signal to innovate, and then puts her fists together, the sign for “tandem.” Comparative psychologist Stan Kuczaj records several seconds of audible chirping between [the dolphins] Hector and Han, then his camera captures them both slowly rolling over in unison and flapping their tails three times simultaneously. [...] Either one dolphin is mimicking the other [...] or it’s not an illusion at all: When they whistle back and forth beneath the surface, they’re literally discussing a plan.” [more inside]
posted by Rangi at 1:33 PM PST - 37 comments

Lifting as We Climb by Harvard Law's Randall L. Kennedy argues for, and covers the history of, respectability politics. From this month's Harper's.
posted by sp160n at 12:52 PM PST - 52 comments

A disobedient tool for taking unique photographs Camera Restricta is a speculative design of a new kind of camera. It locates itself via GPS and searches online for photos that have been geotagged nearby. If the camera decides that too many photos have been taken at your location, it retracts the shutter and blocks the viewfinder. You can't take any more pictures here.
posted by steinwald at 12:50 PM PST - 61 comments

If you've been seeing a lot of ads for DraftKings on your (U.S.) TV as the college and pro football seasons ramp up, you're not alone. The "daily fantasy" site has spent more than $100 million on television advertising this year, and last week outspent AT&T, Ford, Warner Brothers, GEICO, and everyone else. But what is this "daily fantasy" thing, and why is there enough money in it to outspend Fortune 500 companies? [more inside]
posted by Etrigan at 12:47 PM PST - 67 comments

My husband is honest enough to say he's never found my body sexually attractive. And yet, we have a happy marriage.
posted by roolya_boolya at 10:50 AM PST - 187 comments

Here is the Chrome extension Word Replacer II, and here is the Firefox extension FoxReplace. You can use them to replace words on web pages you visit with other words of your choosing. They could be used to duplicate the action of previous extension cloud-to-butt, or you might think of other things you could do with it. There's another extension for Chrome that automatically changes all uses of "millennials" to "snake people".
posted by JHarris at 10:21 AM PST - 40 comments

Televised storytelling is often characterized as “episodic” storytelling. Whereas a movie generally tells one long story, successful TV in the United States is often about the creation of an engine for continued storytelling. You can’t just tell a story and stop, you have to keep telling stories, until you hit that magic 100 or 200 episodes and the syndication checks start rolling in.

Towards A "Case of The Week" Quotient [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 9:45 AM PST - 31 comments

“I didn’t take him seriously,” is what Joey says again and again to the people who keep asking the same questions again and again, including investigators who arrived at the trailer after one of the most notorious mass killings in recent American history. Why did he do nothing? they asked. What kind of people would do nothing? (Longform WaPo)
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 9:22 AM PST - 98 comments

The Jungle Book [YouTube] [Trailer] First trailer for Jon Favreau's live-action Disney adaptation of Rudyard Kipling's 'The Jungle Book'. Cast includes Scarlett Johansson as 'Kaa', Bill Murray as 'Baloo', Ben Kingsley as 'Bagheera', Idris Elba as 'Shere Khan', Lupita Nyong'o as 'Raksha', Christopher Walken as 'King Louie', and Neel Sethi as 'Mowgli'.
posted by Fizz at 8:57 AM PST - 63 comments

Eleven hours of live-action Neko Atsume [SLYT]. Neko Atsume on the blue previously.
posted by Itaxpica at 8:54 AM PST - 17 comments

In 2013, construction was finished on a bridge in Da Nang, Vietnam. It is six lanes wide, made of steel, has more than 2500 LED lights, is shaped like a dragon and can both breathe fire and spray water. The road is closed on weekend evenings for pyrotechnic shows. [more inside]
posted by jeather at 8:18 AM PST - 26 comments

"As long as 'feminine' is treated as a synonym for 'weak,' girls are going to continue to be underestimated and boys are going to continue to be bullied when they step out of the gender box they've been put in." Why does gender neutral clothing always mean 'boy' clothes for girls? [more inside]
posted by divined by radio at 8:13 AM PST - 126 comments

If you like Return Of The Jedi but hate the Ewoks, you understand feminist criticism - (slavc) An article by Caroline Siede at the A.V. Club. [more inside]
posted by under_petticoat_rule at 7:56 AM PST - 47 comments

In the wake of the murder of Shayan Mazroei by a white supremacist gang member in Orange County, Negeen Sadeghi makes the argument a lot of young Iranian-Americans are having with their elders. We are not white by American standards. We never were.
posted by BuddhaInABucket at 7:41 AM PST - 26 comments

In March 2012, a human rights organization’s documentary about a central African despot became the most viral video of all time, and the ensuing furor resulted in its leader’s bizarre public meltdown. On the second anniversary of the phenomenon, everyone involved is still figuring out what it all means.
--Two Years After KONY 2012, Has Invisible Children Grown Up?
posted by almostmanda at 7:38 AM PST - 9 comments

Justin Trudeau or Zoolander?
posted by CitoyenK at 7:30 AM PST - 17 comments

Watch the ESA's Sentinel-1A Earth observation satellite launched and deployed into Earth orbit via rocket-mounted cameras (SLYT).
posted by Gelatin at 7:14 AM PST - 3 comments

"OVER the last year Private Eye has revealed the extent of ownership of British land by offshore companies, generally for tax avoidance and often to conceal dubious wealth. Now the Eye has created an easily searchable online map of these properties, revealing for the first time the British property interests of companies based in tax havens from Panama to Luxembourg, and from Liechtenstein to the South Pacific island of Niue. Using Land Registry data released under Freedom of Information laws, and then linking more than 100,000 land title register entries to specific addresses, the Eye has tracked all leasehold and freehold interests acquired by offshore companies between 2005 and 2014."
posted by marienbad at 5:57 AM PST - 7 comments

Yes, the most crucial item that migrants and refugees carry is a smartphone.
posted by MartinWisse at 5:29 AM PST - 56 comments

"Right around the time I first joined the cast of Under the Dome, I was smoking a bowl with the Monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey."-a review of sorts of the final episode and series of the American tv show.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 5:10 AM PST - 38 comments

Why Futurism Has a Cultural Blindspot , or "We predicted cell phones, but not women in the workplace" by Tom Vanderbilt (previously)
from Nautilus Magazine's "2050" issue, which also features Lee Billings on Stanislaw Lem's futurism and Rachel B. Sussman visiting NASA’s Ames Research Center
posted by oneswellfoop at 3:03 AM PST - 32 comments

(Secretions, secretions everywhere, alert) As a zit popping video nears seven million views, the Guardian asks (popping video autoplay alert): "Millions are watching videos of cyst extractions, botfly removals and blackhead treatments. But what’s fuelling the explosive growth of the online community?" Also 12 pimple-popping videos, man pops tooth infection, a speciality website and reddit/r/popping. But, in medical advice, "think of a pimple as a little sack that holds oil, debris, and acne bacteria". On AskMeFi: "It tastes funny when I pop a zit." Previously (broken, but comments).
posted by Wordshore at 1:58 AM PST - 67 comments

10 cent stories, typewritten while you wait [via mefi projects]
posted by Paul Slade at 12:45 AM PST - 12 comments

René Redzepi Plans to Close Noma, Reopen It as an Urban Farm. Mr. Redzepi, 37, the godfather of the New Nordic movement and the chef at Noma, arguably the world’s most influential restaurant at the moment, was standing outside what looked like an auditorium-size crack den. Used spray-paint cans lay in heaps amid the weeds of an abandoned lot. Street art covered the walls of an empty warehouse; inside, teenagers rumbled around on skateboards. “Welcome to the new Noma,” the chef René Redzepi said on a bright summer day. “This is it.”
posted by nightrecordings at 9:21 PM PST - 23 comments

Typography design and illustration is still an active artform, and you can get an idea of the skills at play by looking at two rather different young penmen: Seb Lester (previously) and Jake Weidmann. While both started as self-taught artists, Seb designs fonts and draws free-hand typographic art pieces with no formal education in type design, while Jake mentored under calligrapher to the White House, Rick Muffler, and is the youngest of the 14 Master Penmen (one of the few programs where inductees must craft their own certificates). As an introduction to the craft and these artists, here's more of Seb Lester and his craft, and an interview with Master Penman Jake Weidmann, with displays of his works. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 9:11 PM PST - 7 comments

"We've developed an online version of the Distorted Tunes Test, a standardized survey in use for over 50 years.
posted by Confess, Fletch at 8:55 PM PST - 70 comments

How Aramaic gained - and lost - its status as the language of Middle East statecraft.
posted by Chrysostom at 8:48 PM PST - 16 comments

In his latest essay for The Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates (previously) examines "The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration." [more inside]
posted by DynamiteToast at 7:43 PM PST - 37 comments

"​I got out, and it’s not too late for you." - Sarah Nyberg on being the subject of an online hate mob. Meanwhile Zoe Quinn talks about sympathy for her abusers, and actions turned out to have consequences for internet troll Joshua Goldberg.
posted by Artw at 7:29 PM PST - 244 comments

Steve Albini Shows That Punk Rock Ethics Are Good Business “If you start from the premise of refusing to be an asshole, then a lot of other decisions kind of make themselves.” - posted at Psychology Today, of all places.
posted by davebush at 6:50 PM PST - 26 comments

Welcome to the Block Party: the internet after ad blocking
posted by R a c h e l at 6:33 PM PST - 130 comments

"Jewish grandma Isadora Alman pioneered the American sex-advice column, then found her work obsolete." - Jonathan Kiefer, Tablet. [Ask Isadora website / essays for Psychology Today]
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 4:32 PM PST - 9 comments

Adrian Frutiger, the Swiss type designer responsible for a number of classic typefaces including Univers, Avenir, OCR-B and the eponymous Frutiger, passed away on Saturday in Bern, aged 87. [more inside]
posted by acb at 3:58 PM PST - 26 comments

Deep Learning Machine Teaches Itself Chess in 72 Hours, Plays at International Master Level [more inside]
posted by phoque at 3:42 PM PST - 45 comments

How Bespectacled Doofus Rick Perry Fooled Every Dumb Pundit in America
So why is it that after Perry’s embarrassing 2012 campaign, and before his embarrassing 2016 campaign, it became hip, in the political press, to declare that Rick Perry was now a serious man with a legitimate shot at the presidency?
posted by davidstandaford at 1:27 PM PST - 105 comments

meet the man NASA paid $18,000 to lie in bed for 70 days straight
posted by and they trembled before her fury at 12:40 PM PST - 38 comments

The 32 Greatest Talk-Show Hosts Ever, as ranked by Vulture
posted by The Gooch at 10:24 AM PST - 83 comments

Here is John's Arcade, a resource about collecting, maintaining and playing classic arcade video and pinball machines. But the real reason I'm posting this is his YouTube channel, which is full of long videos (many over an hour) about arcade repair and maintenance. Like restoring an incredibly rare I, Robot machine, or Computer Space, the first video arcade game, or Quantum, a rare Atari game developed by GCC, programmers of Ms. Pac-Man. Or you can just watch him try to break 300,000 in Donkey Kong over several half-hour videos.
posted by JHarris at 10:14 AM PST - 14 comments

Open GeoFiction is a user-editable map of a fictional world built on top of the Open StreetMap platform. [more inside]
posted by baniak at 9:56 AM PST - 10 comments

How exactly does one go about making a map of a make-believe place? [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 9:40 AM PST - 12 comments

The First-Person Industrial Complex: The Internet prizes the harrowing personal essay. But sometimes telling your story comes with a price. (Slate)
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 8:50 AM PST - 15 comments

The Marshall Project couldn't find any tools providing detailed information on upcoming executions. So they built one. The Next to Die defaults to showing the next scheduled execution in the United States, but users can also browse by specific state (including Missouri, where execution rates are surging) and, from the intro page, view racial and method-of-execution breakdowns for executions to date.
posted by Shepherd at 8:21 AM PST - 8 comments

So you want to be a saint? [more inside]
posted by Etrigan at 8:13 AM PST - 18 comments

Death in Syria by Karen Yourish, K.K. Rebecca Lai and Derek Watkins [New York Times]

“With each passing day there are fewer safe places in Syria,” Paulo Sérgio Pinheiro, chairman of the United Nations panel investigating human rights abuses in Syria, wrote in a recent report. “Everyday decisions — whether to visit a neighbor, to go out to buy bread— have become, potentially, decisions about life and death.”

posted by Fizz at 7:52 AM PST - 14 comments

Franz Kafka meets Charlie Brown. Revisiting R. Sikoryak’s "Good ol’ Gregor Brown." The 100th Anniversary of The Metamorphosis, previously.
posted by Orange Dinosaur Slide at 7:44 AM PST - 7 comments

There has been a leadership change in the ruling Australian Liberal Government Live blog - Guardian
posted by unliteral at 6:56 AM PST - 98 comments

As Canadian hip-hop artist Sese releases a new, entirely Dragon Ball Z-themed mixtape, and gets hilariously quizzed on his trivia on VICE, Eric Francisco of Inverse ponders the many homages to DBZ in hip hop generally in an interview with Adult Swim creative director Jason DeMarco, who was associate creative director for Toonami at the time that it ran DBZ.
posted by J.K. Seazer at 5:13 AM PST - 5 comments

The modern market allows us to personalize that style. Casual is the sweet spot between looking like every middle class American and being an individual in the massive wash of options. This idea of the freedom to dress in a way that is meaningful to us as people, and to express various types of identity.
posted by ellieBOA at 4:31 AM PST - 308 comments

Lee Goldberg (previously) is a successful mystery novelist and TV screenwriter who, before he broke in to Hollywood, collected TV trivia... specifically about shows that DIDN'T become series. In 1990, he published "Unsold Television Pilots, 1955-1989", with 800 pages covering over 2000 'stillborn series' and the book became a best-seller and was made into two TV specials on different networks. Now, 25 years later, the 2nd Edition is out (sorry, no more recent shows, but he has cleaned up any embarrassing errors), and another TV screenwriter, Ken Levine (NOT the BioShock guy), has cherry-picked some of the most 'WTF' shows for his blog: Part One, featuring "McClone", "Ethel Is an Elephant", Bette Davis as "Madame Sin" and more... Part Two with Sonny Bono as a singing detective, George Carlin as a ghost detective, William Conrad as NOT a detective in a magical world called "Yazoo", and then some…
posted by oneswellfoop at 12:17 AM PST - 41 comments

A puzzle game inspired by functional programming, by David Peter. There are only a few levels available now, but with a bit of PureScript programming you can also create your own puzzles.
posted by logopetria at 11:55 PM PST - 10 comments

People of the United Kingdom! Will a robot take your job? (previously for data from the USA) [more inside]
posted by KirkpatrickMac at 9:50 PM PST - 33 comments

Before the law sits a gatekeeper. To this gatekeeper comes a man from the country who asks to gain entry into the law. But the gatekeeper says that he cannot grant him entry at the moment. The man thinks about it and then asks if he will be allowed to come in later on. “It is possible,” says the gatekeeper, “but not now.”

Franz Kafka's Before the Law, animated as a pinscreen prologue to Orson Welles' film adaptation of Kafka's The Trial (Pop Matters review), and a stand-alone "free interpretation" short titled The Guardian by N9ve Studios. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 8:07 PM PST - 6 comments

Tree Goats. That is all.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 6:57 PM PST - 43 comments

Josef Sudek (1896 - 1976) was a Czech photographer, best known for his haunting night-scapes of Prague. [more inside]
posted by Devils Rancher at 5:18 PM PST - 6 comments

The Badeau family have adopted over twenty children over the course of their marriage, spurred on by a mix of religion and a desire to help those who have no one left to turn to.
posted by reenum at 4:28 PM PST - 41 comments

The Food Lab's Complete Guide to Sous-Vide Steak (J. Kenji López-Alt, Serious Eats)

"As you can see, the steak cooked for just one hour stretches and pulls when you tear it. This gives the steak a pleasant amount of chew. It's still tender, but it tastes like a steak. By the time we hit four hours, that chew has been reduced a bit. Connective tissue has broken down and individual muscle fibrils split apart easily instead of sticking together, though a four-hour steak is still pretty decent."

[more inside]
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 4:04 PM PST - 49 comments

A 17th-Century Woman Artist’s Butterfly Journey Despite her long career, her influence on contemporary natural knowledge, her vivid descriptions of distant Suriname, and her intrepid spirit, when she died in 1717 the city of Amsterdam’s register of deaths described her simply as a woman “without means.”
posted by Michele in California at 1:41 PM PST - 9 comments

Tony Zhou is back with a love letter / lament for his cinematically ubiquitous hometown: "Vancouver Never Plays Itself".
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 12:10 PM PST - 50 comments

WhyNotBarbershop2 is lifting random Reddit comments, and the results are both hilarious & great.
posted by spock at 11:54 AM PST - 16 comments

The US Department of Education has released the College Scorecard, matching financial aid data to federal tax returns. At some expensive colleges, the salaries of students 10 years after enrollment are bleak, and there is an earnings gender gap at every top university. [more inside]
posted by Dip Flash at 10:58 AM PST - 41 comments

The Queen of Trees is a documentary (52 minutes) on the sycomore fig tree, focusing on the intricate mutualism between a fig tree and its fig wasp. Filmmakers Victoria Stone and Mark Deeble spent two years camped out in the Kenyan bush to capture fascinating scenes of life around the sycomore, including inside the figs.
posted by parudox at 10:01 AM PST - 17 comments

"It is simply easier for some people to believe that the United States government has concocted a vast conspiracy to take away all of our guns than it is to believe that it is too easy for a mentally ill person to acquire one and shoot anyone they want. And now those same people are taking it out on the families of the victims of gun violence after a tragedy." What Do You Say To A Roanoke Truther? Ben Collins, The Daily Beast
posted by The Whelk at 9:40 AM PST - 76 comments

Here is what causes the kill screens of Ms. Pac-Man and why they happen long before level 256. Here is why you can sometimes control the attract mode demo in Galaga. Computer Archeology explains the "no fire" cheat in Galaga, which causes the enemies to stop firing if you keep two specific bugs alive long enough. (What, you don't know what Galaga is? galaga.info has you covered.) [more inside]
posted by JHarris at 8:45 AM PST - 25 comments

Cats vs. Zombies
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 7:48 AM PST - 9 comments

A Dying Young Woman’s Hope in Cryonics and a Future - (SLNYT) Kim Suozzi knew she was dying, but believed that cryonic preservation had a “1 or 2 percent chance” of offering her another shot at life. And for that, it was worth trying.
posted by CrystalDave at 12:50 AM PST - 84 comments

Extinct tree grows anew from ancient jar of seeds unearthed by archaeologists [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 10:29 PM PST - 25 comments

After two devestating fires - Rocky and Jerusalem - Lake Country is hit again. This time with the Valley Fire. Lake County is an hour north of Napa in the San Francisco Bay Area, and it has spent the past three months more or less constantly on fire. In just under seven hours, the fire has burned an estimated 20,000 acres. This time, it's heading straight for two of the larger communities in the area: Middletown and Hidden Valley Lake. Four firefighters have been treated for second degree burns received while fighting this new, explosive fire. [more inside]
posted by guster4lovers at 9:28 PM PST - 105 comments

Doctors often say that you shouldn't use cotton swabs like Q-Tips to clean out your ears because you risk damaging the ear drum. But in that case, why does it feel so good? After all, people around the world have been using picks, candles, rakes, scoops, and swabs to clear out the wax for centuries. Turns out that while a build-up of wax can cause deafness, manually scooping that wax often shoves it further down the ear canal and makes everything worse. Worse, removing that wax makes your ears feel itchy--which makes every go-around with the old Q-Tip feel that much more satisfying. Previously.
posted by sciatrix at 8:33 PM PST - 165 comments

The Most Misread Poem in America by David Orr [The Paris Review]

“And almost everyone gets it wrong. This is the most remarkable thing about “The Road Not Taken”—not its immense popularity (which is remarkable enough), but the fact that it is popular for what seem to be the wrong reasons. [...] Frost’s poem turns this expectation on its head. Most readers consider “The Road Not Taken” to be a paean to triumphant self-assertion (“I took the one less traveled by”), but the literal meaning of the poem’s own lines seems completely at odds with this interpretation. The poem’s speaker tells us he “shall be telling,” at some point in the future, of how he took the road less traveled by, yet he has already admitted that the two paths “equally lay / In leaves” and “the passing there / Had worn them really about the same.” So the road he will later call less traveled is actually the road equally traveled. The two roads are interchangeable.”

[more inside]
posted by Fizz at 7:13 PM PST - 69 comments

My Story, Mystery: A Letter to Hild of Whitby by Nicola Griffith "DEAR HILD, You were magnificent, I think, but hidden: a black hole at the heart of history. We can trace you only by your gravitational pull. We know, for example, that the very first piece of English literature — Cædmon’s Hymn, certainly the earliest extant example of Old English vernacular and very possibly the first created — was forged in the fire of your influence; that in the so-called Dark Ages you built and ran Whitby Abbey, the foundation at the center of what became Northumbria’s Golden Age. There you hosted and facilitated the meeting of kings, princes, and bishops that changed Britain. But we have no account of you beyond a five-page sketch in a 1300-year-old history, most of which recites the standard hagiographic miracles and visions of the time. We have no gossipy Life, no scholarly monograph, no racy romance cycle. There isn’t even a grave."
posted by dhruva at 7:11 PM PST - 5 comments

David Ortiz , Boston Red Sox baseball player who (in)famously spoke for the city of Boston(NSFW) in the wake of the 2013 marathon bombing, just hit the 500th home run of his career, becoming just the 27th player to reach the mark.
posted by waitingtoderail at 7:09 PM PST - 13 comments

Tiny Hamster takes a vacation to Disney World. (Also a behind the scenes.) Previous Previous tiny hamster shenanigans.
posted by Athanassiel at 6:50 PM PST - 10 comments

Nihilisa Frank presents a pastel and neon utopia of pithy sayings to keep your despairing heart warm as you feel the weight of the universe crushing down upon you.
posted by ardgedee at 5:40 PM PST - 16 comments

In this case, applicant seeks registration of NO FUCKS GIVEN for hats, headbands, hooded sweatshirts, pants, shirts, and wraps. NO FUCKS GIVEN is the standard unit of measurement used to describe the amount an individual cares about something. [via jessamyn]
posted by not_on_display at 5:17 PM PST - 37 comments

Alex Gonzalez's "Lovecraft Letters" re-imagine problematic online dating messages as NSFW communication with unnameable creatures from beyond (1 2 3 4). Mallory Ortberg's hilarious "Texts from H.P. Lovecraft" focus on HPL himself, while Richard Svensson's brief video "The Lovecraft Alphabet" and David Haden's "Consult Mr. Lovecraft" plot generator present cute illustrations or parodies of HPL's work. [more inside]
posted by Monsieur Caution at 3:11 PM PST - 8 comments

Audiobooks for the Damned takes the novelizations of films from the seventies and eighties, records audiobook versions, and uploads them to YouTube. [more inside]
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 2:01 PM PST - 20 comments

On August 25, a group of 100 men of color lined up outside Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School, in Hartford to greet and cheer for the children on their first day of school. “In an urban community, people say that black men [aren’t] valued or there aren’t enough black men doing something,” Pastor AJ Johnson explained. “I wanted to prove everyone wrong.”
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 1:53 PM PST - 9 comments

corpora is a Github repository containing machine-readable lists of interesting words and phrases that "are potentially useful in the creation of weird internet stuff." The corpora range from the mundane (common English words, animals, corporations, pizza toppings) to the obscure (types of knot, wrestling moves, Lovecraftian deities) to the absurd (states of drunkenness, deceased Spinal Tap drummers, unrhymable words).
posted by schmod at 12:33 PM PST - 40 comments

California has long been home to immigrants from around the world (and from within the U.S.). What is less known, however, is that such longstanding histories of immigration and internal domestic migration have made California a fertile ground for extremely diverse and vibrant accordion musical cultures. With that, here is background on four immigrant populations —Italians, Creoles, Lebanese/Middle Eastern, and Mixtec/Mexican — to give more background the Squeezebox Stories, about an hour of history and tales of the accordion, filtered through customs and cultures found in California. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 12:17 PM PST - 25 comments

Illustrated: The Radical Indian Activist Who Influenced Mexico City, Lenin And Einstein
posted by infini at 11:27 AM PST - 12 comments

Shark Game: Shoal Sharker is an incremental game about the mystery and majesty of sharks in a strange blue sea.
posted by boo_radley at 10:27 AM PST - 101 comments

SF writer, biologist and all-around harbinger of doom Peter Watts (a partial previously) has another animal story for us. Warning: some moderate levels of bondage and magical testicles.
posted by maudlin at 10:26 AM PST - 11 comments

Al Jazeera has recently published a series of articles: -
Heartache and suffering: Slavery in Brazil.
Escaping forced Labour - ex-slaves push for justice in a system that often fails them.
Mining Misery, Subcontracting slavery: How big companies in Brazil get away with it.
posted by adamvasco at 9:17 AM PST - 1 comment

"The bohemian aspect, in terms of style and decor, was clearly part of the beachcomber look—the guy in tattered clothes who built his shack from found objects and natural materials like bamboo and driftwood. It became this escapist thing for urbanites to go to these places and feel bohemian for a while. If you look at 1930s photos of restaurants like Trader Vic’s in Oakland or Don the Beachcomber in Los Angeles, these places were full of jetsam and flotsam that didn’t exist in the normal, mid-century home at the time." Tiki Hangover: Unearthing the False Idols of America's South Seas Fantasy (Hunter Oatman-Stanford, Collector's Weekly)
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 8:51 AM PST - 39 comments

If you've visited Starbucks, the grocery store, or Pinterest this week, you know the surest sign of Autumn isn't back-to-school, it's Pumpkin Spice. But is there something more at work here than a collective love of nutmeg, cinnamon and cloves?
posted by jacquilynne at 7:56 AM PST - 84 comments

Here, from the cool cats at Mister Kitty, is Stupid Comics, covering all the finest in terrible artwork and regrettable writing. Here's a very small portion of what awaits you: Teenage Mutant Ninja Ripoffs - Madam Satan - Badly Drawn Anime Heroine Skye Blue and more pseudo-manga - Lois Lane marries Astounding Man - Kissing Canvas - Badly drawn 80s comics: The Protectors - How To Publish (bad TMNT knockoff) Comics - I Can't Believe It's Not Archie: 1, 2, 3, 4 - Vampire Girls (prob NSFW) - OMG GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY - The Human Race - "You've got the wrong Lincoln there!" - Faux-go - Sexy Jaguar Adventures (NSFW) - Comics Advisor - Reggie Mantle actually flips a bird [more inside]
posted by JHarris at 7:37 AM PST - 19 comments

Sure, you marveled at the first close up photos of Pluto that the New Horizons spacecraft captured as it soared past the planet. But that was only about 5% of the total photo set. Starting now, the spacecraft will be sending home everything. [more inside]
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 7:25 AM PST - 39 comments

25 thoughts on seeing Pretty Woman 25 years late
posted by Rhomboid at 7:14 AM PST - 33 comments

Jeremy Corbyn, socialist token once chosen to broaden debate... wins Labour race!
Look at his rivals -- Burnham and Cooper and Kendall all grumble, deplore. Who are they for?
All the Corbyn people -- where do they all come from? All the Corbyn people -- where do they all belong?

Jez's agenda: Nato and Trident and railways and people's QE. Experts agree!
Chuka Umunna, right-leaning leader (and one-time Barack wannabe), pleads unity!
All the Corbyn people -- what will they all become? All the Corbyn people -- will Labour play along? [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi at 3:47 AM PST - 443 comments

Arthur Heming, the Canadian painter who — having been diagnosed with colourblindness as a child — worked for most of his life in a distinctive pallete of black, yellow, and white. [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 10:22 PM PST - 6 comments

Lorde, Flight of the Conchords, Peter Jackson and All Blacks record charity song. Just about every famous New Zealander packed into Neil Finn’s studio for Team Ball Player Thing, a fundraiser for Battens disease research.
posted by spreadsheetzu at 9:32 PM PST - 22 comments

Next Saturday the electorate of Canning, in Western Australia, will go to the polls for a by-election triggered by the death of the sitting member, Don Randall. All eyes* are on Canning because its outcome will likely determine the fate of Australia's current Prime Minister, Tony Abbott. In February, in the aftermath of an attempted leadership spill of his position and amongst flagging opinion polls, Abbott declared 'good government starts today' and pleaded with his party room to give him six more months in which to turn his position in the polls around. Canning is currently a government-held seat, sitting on a margin of 11.8%, and it seems that the metric on which Abbott will be judged is how much that margin shifts. [more inside]
posted by Quilford at 8:48 PM PST - 209 comments

The Tracks Go Off In This Direction - a 30 minute Star Wars audio visual mix by DJ Food/Strictly Kev.
posted by Artw at 7:42 PM PST - 5 comments

Uber would like to buy your robotics department Today’s early-stage inquiry — so-called basic research, the Level 1 work, where scientists are still puzzling over fundamental questions — is financed almost exclusively by the federal government. It’s too far out, too speculative, to attract much investment; it isn’t clear if anyone will make any money on it. This wasn’t always the case.
posted by modernnomad at 7:40 PM PST - 27 comments

The oldest use of the f-word has been discovered, dating the word some 165 years earlier that had ever been seen. It appeared in the name "Roger Fuckebythenavele" in court plea rolls from December 8, 1310. Fuckebythenavele was being outlawed. [more inside]
posted by gusandrews at 7:39 PM PST - 33 comments

Picture yourself as a stereotypical male "As it turns out, there is zero statistically significant gender difference in mental rotation ability after test-takers are asked to imagine themselves as stereotypical men for a few minutes. None. An entire standard deviation of female underperformance is negated on this condition, just as a man’s performance is slightly hindered if he instead imagines himself as a woman."
posted by dhruva at 7:06 PM PST - 27 comments

Here's a live set by Leo Kottke, the phenomenal acoustic guitarist, who turns 70 today. [more inside]
posted by John Cohen at 5:54 PM PST - 30 comments

California Legislature Approves Assisted Suicide [New York Times]

In a landmark victory for supporters of assisted suicide, the California State Legislature on Friday gave final approval to a bill that would allow doctors to help terminally ill people end their own lives. Four states — Oregon, Washington, Montana and Vermont — already allow physicians to prescribe life-ending medication to some patients. The California bill, which passed Friday in the State Senate by a vote of 23-14, will now go to Gov. Jerry Brown, who will roughly triple access to doctor-assisted suicide across the country if he signs it. Mr. Brown, a former Jesuit seminarian, has given little indication of his intentions.

posted by Fizz at 4:35 PM PST - 35 comments

You can look up property records and confirm the person you are going to meet is in fact the owner of the building, but that only proves that the name on the property record and the name on the Craigslist email you received match. So then you start searching online for photographs, to make sure the person you meet matches the photo of the person he or she claims to be [...] You’re doing all of this in about 10 minutes, by the way, because you need to be the first person to the listing after it posts.

The People You Have to Trust to Rent an Apartment
posted by griphus at 1:55 PM PST - 62 comments

'Dry Eye' Has Ruined People's Lives — And Stumped The Medical Community
Some people suffer eye pain so excruciating they feel suicidal, yet ophthalmologists see nothing wrong. Meet the 82-year-old doctor whose radical idea about the real source of this pain is turning heads.
posted by Pfardentrott at 1:29 PM PST - 42 comments

It’s important to remember that scientists present their data in ways that their fellow scientists can comprehend. Technical jargon and statistical error bars can efficiently communicate the legitimacy of a scientific breakthrough to a scientific audience. However, these same features can be both confusing and distracting when presented to a wider audience. For the public to be excited and informed about the latest scientific breakthroughs, technical data visualizations need to be transformed into engaging visual stories that a wider community can understand.
posted by sciatrix at 1:20 PM PST - 6 comments

An enemy is just a frend you don't really know yet. So the new series of Dr Who is fast approaching, here's the prologue. (Iplayer link here)
posted by biffa at 1:19 PM PST - 36 comments

Anytime fraternities come up on Metafilter a lot of people express confusion as to why anybody would join. This essay, in addition to be well written and insightful in general, does a really good job of answering that question.
posted by COD at 12:53 PM PST - 55 comments

Since 1933, the Cambridge University Library has had a pristine copy of Shi zhu zhai shu hua pu, the Ten Bamboo Studio collection of calligraphy and painting from 1633. Because the book was so fragile, the butterfly bound (Google books preview) manual for teachers of art and writing was not opened until it could be properly digitized. That day has come, and the entire book is online, giving the world a view of “the earliest and the most beautiful example of multicolor printing anywhere in the world,” according to Charles Aylmer, head of the Chinese department at Cambridge University Library. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 12:05 PM PST - 13 comments

The latest research on giraffe sounds... This was some fairly interesting reading. I have personally heard a giraffe make the sound described as a 'burst'. I have had a giraffe snort at me. I also have heard a sort of whiffling sound not described in this article. Take a listen.. it's pretty cool
posted by Katjusa Roquette at 11:07 AM PST - 19 comments

Inside the Lost 1980s Dungeon and Dragons Movie
posted by Bulgaroktonos at 10:37 AM PST - 75 comments

Sweden Simulator; a browser-based virtual-reality simulation of many of the common experiences of Swedish life. [more inside]
posted by acb at 10:17 AM PST - 24 comments

Test your knowledge of science facts and applications of scientific principles by taking our short 12-question quiz. Then see how you did in comparison with a nationally representative group of 3,278 randomly selected U.S. adults surveyed online and by mail between Aug. 11 and Sept. 3, 2014 as members of the Pew Research Center’s American Trends Panel.

posted by infini at 9:41 AM PST - 156 comments

Did Thomas Pynchon publish a novel under the pseudonym Adrian Jones Pearson?
posted by holmesian at 9:40 AM PST - 39 comments

Chuck Wendig, author of the new Star Wars novel Aftermath, has told fans who have objected to his inclusion of a gay character that “You’re not the good guys ... You’re the shitty, oppressive, totalitarian Empire.” [more inside]
posted by Gin and Comics at 9:10 AM PST - 66 comments

"We should imagine instead a three-way relation of aggressor, victim, and witness" : ruminations on bullying and victimhood from David Graeber.
posted by doctornemo at 8:54 AM PST - 29 comments

Many millennials – the age group generally defined as those between 18 and 34 – don’t think much of their own generation, according to a new poll. (Guardian)

[more inside]
posted by postcommunism at 8:43 AM PST - 137 comments

"Considering the conditions at the time, we understood that the Hittites were highly successful in the kitchen as well as in other areas." In case you're tempted, though, keep in mind that their FDA agents were pretty brutal: "Underlining the hygienic measures taken in Hittite kitchens, Akkor said if a chef with a large, unmanaged beard or long, unmanaged hair cooks in the kitchen or an animal wandered into the kitchen, he or she used to receive a death penalty along with their family."
posted by Amberlyza at 8:26 AM PST - 16 comments

From NiemanStoryboard's Annotation Tuesdays, Josh Roiland annotates his ‘Literary Journalism in America’ Syllabus. NiemanStoryboard previously.
posted by OmieWise at 8:25 AM PST - 2 comments

Scholars who use the New York Public Library are boiling with frustration. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. In 2014 the library, under pressure from a coalition that included four senior scholars, abandoned its controversial Central Library Plan, which entailed gutting the stacks at the 42nd Street Library and selling the popular Mid-Manhattan Library across the street. But the situation hasn’t turned out how many critics had hoped.
posted by Chrysostom at 8:20 AM PST - 21 comments

According this latest numbers from IFPI, while the music-buying audience in the USA is still the biggest in the world, the most valuable music fans are actually the proud people of Norway. This may be due, in large part, to the fact that since 2009 piracy in Norway has plunged by 76%.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 6:26 AM PST - 18 comments

Here is Justin Alexander's "Jaquaying the Dungeon," a crash course in old-school D&D adventure complex design, for all you grognards out there.

• 1.Definition - Jennell Jaquays wrote many classic RPG adventures for a variety of systems and publishers, notable for their non-linearity.
• 2.Techniques - On non-linear dungeon construction.
• 3.Philosophy - Why do non-linear dungeons matter, how to make good use of it.
• 4. Applied to Keep on the Shadowfell - Jaquaying a typical linear dungeon module.
• 5. General application - Othter ways Shadowfell could have been improved, summation.
• 6.Ways to connect dungeon levels - An appendix of ways to connect dungeon levels to each other.
• 7.Tips and Tricks - Tricky ideas to delight/annoy players.
• Justin Alexander's Gamemastery 101 is further loaded with good GMing advice.

posted by JHarris at 6:10 AM PST - 60 comments

GoPro on a weather balloon over Arizona (photo)
Reddit comment describing the student project
Video showing preparation details and more footage of the earth (stay for the slo-mo shot of the balloon bursting at high altitude) [more inside]
posted by michaelh at 4:26 AM PST - 5 comments

stories.. that expose both the depths of what was taken from them and the challenges of rebuilding the lives they once had
posted by pos at 3:52 AM PST - 11 comments

She didn't actually get expelled...[update in article] History Professor Denies Native Genocide: Native Student Disagreed, Then Says Professor Expelled Her From Course
posted by hippybear at 2:46 AM PST - 81 comments

Glen Keane drawing in VR -- (SLVimeo) Glen Keane, animator (The Little Mermaid, Tarzan, Beauty and the Beast) & son of Bil Keane, explores drawing with the Valve/HTC Vive VR system. [more inside]
posted by CrystalDave at 12:55 AM PST - 11 comments

Weatherman pronounces the city of "Llanfairpwllgwyngyll​gogerychwyrndrob​wllllantysiliogogogoch" flawlessly on live TV.
posted by SpacemanStix at 9:45 PM PST - 85 comments

WSJ Personal Tech columnist Geoffrey A. Fowler: We Need the Right to Repair our Gadgets. [more inside]
posted by cashman at 8:40 PM PST - 48 comments

Coca Cola + propane = Mega ROCKET [more inside]
posted by unliteral at 8:02 PM PST - 25 comments

His superPAC is selling a poster of a ripped, tattooed Ted Cruz; the candidate says that the only thing was wrong with the picture is that he doesn't smoke. If Trump smells like victory to you, you may be interested in "Empire" (not an actual campaign site offering). Maybe you'd prefer Rand Paul's head on a stick. Dems may opt for a Hillary pantsuit tee shirt. Or, if you like Bernie Sanders and puns, you can go for this mug.
posted by Morrigan at 6:31 PM PST - 35 comments

Metafilter's own Jessamyn West has an extended discussion the future of the Library of Congress and why it's relevant outside of the library community on the Circulating Ideas podcast. [more inside]
posted by adamsc at 5:05 PM PST - 6 comments

Francisco E. Balderrama on Fresh Air: America's Forgotten History Of Mexican-American 'Repatriation' In the 1930s, during the Depression, about a million people were forced out of the U.S. across the border into Mexico. It wasn't called deportation. It was euphemistically referred to as repatriation, returning people to their native country. But about 60 percent of the people in the Mexican repatriation drive were actually U.S. citizens of Mexican descent. [more inside]
posted by Golden Eternity at 4:01 PM PST - 31 comments

Justin Timberlake and Jimmy Fallon Perform the History of Rap Part 6 [YouTube] [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 3:44 PM PST - 61 comments

Not all comments are created equal: the case for ending online comments - Jessica Valenti for The Guardian. Previously: All of the commenting, none of the comments., What We Comment About When We Comment About Commenting
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 3:35 PM PST - 58 comments

The Rise and Fall of an All-American Catchphrase: 'Free, White, and 21'
posted by mhum at 2:05 PM PST - 60 comments

On the Other Hand Steve Whitmire's been playing Kermit the Frog for 25 years. And on prime time television again real soon now.
posted by DigDoug at 1:25 PM PST - 17 comments

Subtraction surveyed 4000 designers from 198 countries to identify the tools they liked and used for brainstorming, wireframing, interface design, prototyping, project management and version control.
posted by jenkinsEar at 11:27 AM PST - 68 comments

This is epic and cheaper than most San Francisco housing.... Just think of all the cool fun we could all have!
posted by Katjusa Roquette at 10:55 AM PST - 44 comments

We live in a world filled with viruses; they are everywhere that host species exist.
The Human Virome's Permanent Mark

The virome doesn’t get as much love as its charismatic older brother, the microbiome. Studies of the bacteria that live inside us have caught the public imagination, showing that we contain a teeming diversity of critters whose populations affect everything from our diets to our immune systems. Thanks to cheap DNA sequencing, you can send samples of your microbiome to a lab and have a quick census taken; services like American Gut will even give you a colorful chart showing you which bacteria have been found and in what numbers. (Strictly the virome is part of the microbiome, which includes all the viruses, protozoa, and fungi living in one environment ― but bacteria are the stars of the show.)

[more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 10:39 AM PST - 10 comments

First Library to Support Anonymous Internet Browsing Effort Stops After DHS Email

In July, the Kilton Public Library in Lebanon, New Hampshire, was the first library in the country to become part of the anonymous Web surfing service Tor. The library allowed Tor users around the world to bounce their Internet traffic through the library, thus masking users’ locations. ... After a meeting at which local police and city officials discussed how Tor could be exploited by criminals, the library pulled the plug on the project.

[more inside]
posted by metaquarry at 10:03 AM PST - 66 comments

Ian Parker from the New Yorker managed to secure time with and access to Apple's chief designer, Sir Jonathan Ive so as to write this extended profile of the man, his obsessively secretive workplace - and his dislike of orangey-brown..
posted by rongorongo at 9:11 AM PST - 44 comments

Do you want to go on a karaoke adventure? One that you know you have never been on? Then, go to KARAOKE_EBOOKS! [more inside]
posted by ignignokt at 8:55 AM PST - 6 comments

Mexico v. US Soccer Match Preview
posted by OmieWise at 7:20 AM PST - 11 comments

This legion of bureaucrats enables a world of pitiless surveillance; no segment of campus life, no matter how small, does not have some administrator who worries about it. Piece by piece, every corner of the average campus is being slowly made congruent with a single, totalizing vision. Why We Should Fear University, Inc.
posted by gerryblog at 7:18 AM PST - 53 comments

Possibly In Michigan is a surreal short film from 1983 about domestic violence and stalking (contains some horrifying imagery). It was directed by Cecelia Condit, whose 'enchanting and often unsettling videos, a mix of gorgeously saturated imagery and shadowy subject matter, have been called “feminist fairy tales”.'
posted by dng at 7:15 AM PST - 5 comments

Yo, Kubrick freaks (and that's pretty much everybody here, right?), check this fantastic collection of behind-the-scenes pics from the set of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 6:56 AM PST - 27 comments

When you’re alone in a cabin in the Alaskan wilderness, the simplest question becomes the most complicated: How do you fill a day?
posted by paleyellowwithorange at 5:51 AM PST - 47 comments

Here is Let's Glitch Super Mario World, an in-depth series of 47 YouTube videos (each from 10 to 30 minutes long) that demonstrate breaking the game in myriad ways, with clear descriptions of what is going on.
posted by JHarris at 5:49 AM PST - 11 comments

This Face Changes the Human Story. But How? This is the story of one of the greatest fossil discoveries of the past half century, and of what it might mean for our understanding of human evolution.
posted by ladybird at 5:30 AM PST - 76 comments

Black dog tales - Stories of the shuck, the skeff, the barghest, the hairy jack, the cu sith, the gwyllgi and more, the black dog across the British isles and beyond. Here's a map of sightings.
posted by Helga-woo at 4:37 AM PST - 12 comments

Is this a sandwich? Teaching the Platonic Dialogues through sandwiches. A philosophy professor thinks of a new way to get her students to think about the Socratic method. [more inside]
posted by colfax at 4:00 AM PST - 139 comments

How my negative review of Legend was spun into movie marketing gold
posted by philip-random at 11:32 PM PST - 45 comments

"For nearly three years, there has been considerable controversy and confusion about whether a business-card sized papyrus fragment dubbed the Gospel of Jesus' Wife is an authentic ancient artifact or not. The current scholarly consensus already holds that the fragment is forgery. In addition, a recent development has confirmed that the Gospel of Jesus' Wife is a forgery created using a specific internet edition of the Gospel of Thomas [pdf]. It seems that the Gospel of Jesus' Wife forgery debate has finally come to an end. " [Previously]
posted by Knappster at 9:28 PM PST - 16 comments

Germany’s famous unit of immortal soldiers pose with their heads in their hands, 1921. The Immortals, ordinary men resurrected from death by a process as yet unknown, served with honour in the First World War until they were liquidated (by being burned to death, the only way they could be killed) by the Weimar Republic in 1924. [more inside]
posted by yasaman at 9:02 PM PST - 17 comments

"On the Road With the Unluckiest, Most Unloved Team in Professional Baseball." [more inside]
posted by Charity Garfein at 7:53 PM PST - 10 comments

Time indeed does not exist on Prince albums. Perhaps that’s why he’s kept releasing one or two every few years even long after his hit-making days ended. At age 24, on “1999,” he established a dichotomy—“I don't wanna die / I’d rather dance”—and at age 57, he seems to be taking that idea of dance-or-die more literally than ever. Who cares if fewer and fewer people are listening? Who cares if releasing exclusively to Tidal will limit his audience further? What matters is that Prince is working, and that the holy devoted will follow him.

Spencer Kornhaber reviews HITNRUN Phase One on The Atlantic, warning that both Prince and "the gnarly funk-rock and R&B that made Prince famous" are in short supply on the album, which is produced by Joshua Welton, who said the album is "an experimental Prince record for fans who just don’t care about him sounding like a certain thing." [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 7:34 PM PST - 21 comments

"To be a Warrior would mean running all night, every night, through the sweltering summer streets of Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, and the Bronx. It would mean showing up for work at six in the evening and not wrapping until the crew could see the sun rise over the East River. It would mean hopping subway turnstiles and enduring the taunts of the local street gangs. The line separating art and life would become blurred, the making of the film an adventure in and of itself." Jackson O'Connor of the Village Voice on the 1979 cult classic "The Warriors."
posted by goatdog at 7:33 PM PST - 35 comments

Wall Street moves in on rental homes [more inside]
posted by aniola at 7:15 PM PST - 41 comments

to buy sports car. they had come from their kindergarten to buy a Jaguar but did not have any money. [more inside]
posted by pos at 6:05 PM PST - 12 comments

Following a unanimous vote, Seattle teachers are on strike. Among their demands are guaranteed recess time for schoolchildren, caseload caps for counselors, taskforces devoted to ending racial bias in disciplinary measures, increased access to special education, and a pay raise for the first time in six years. [more inside]
posted by femmegrrr at 6:02 PM PST - 53 comments

During halftime on Saturday, the Kansas State Marching Band was supposed to make a formation showing the Enterprise spaceship ramming the University of Kansas Jayhawk. Things did not go as planned. [more inside]
posted by damayanti at 5:54 PM PST - 53 comments

Driven to Kill. The "hit-to-kill" phenomenon in China where a driver who has accidentally struck a pedestrian will stop to run over them again, or multiple times, to ensure they are dead. Trigger warning for text descriptions of gruesome vehicular murder. Lots of links to photos and videos in the article that you should click at your own discretion.
posted by allkindsoftime at 3:06 PM PST - 81 comments

How does it blinker our perception of cinema’s history when picture after gorgeous monochrome picture of elaborate movie sets have as their focus a white male director? As part of Sight & Sound magazine's Female Gaze issue, Isabel Stevens has compiled a collection of images of women directors at work.
posted by Awkward Philip at 3:00 PM PST - 8 comments

As the video on YouTube reaches 100 million views, Shut Up and Dance by the Cincinnati band Walk the Moon continues to sell and receive frequent radio airplay. [more inside]
posted by Wordshore at 2:38 PM PST - 68 comments

"North America's only premium, handcrafted firewood manufacturer": The CBC's faux-news show This is That lays into the world of artisinal nonsense with fine craftsmanship and loving attention to detail.
posted by ryanshepard at 1:24 PM PST - 46 comments

new research has revealed that when we learn our mother tongue, we do after all acquire certain habits of thought that shape our experience in significant and often surprising ways.
posted by bq at 11:38 AM PST - 104 comments

One Man One Day ("One Day More" Cover - Les Misérables) [SLYT]
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 11:09 AM PST - 51 comments

In its all-too-brief 3½ year run, Comedy Central's sketch comedy powerhouse Key & Peele burned brightly, leavening Peabody-award-winning social commentary with sublime silliness and Hollywood-quality production values, all centered on the impeccable character acting of co-stars Jordan (Peele) and Keegan-Michael (Key). By the time its end was announced, characters like the Substitute Teacher, the East/West College Bowl players, and Obama's Anger Translator had captured the popular consciousness, while skits like TeachingCenter and Negrotown deftly spotlighted our most pressing problems. With the finale airing tonight, and the dynamic duo free to tackle other projects, why not revisit the program's concentrated brilliance in the form of ~100 of their very best short bits available on the web, sorted loosely by topic. [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi at 10:27 AM PST - 76 comments

America's Mad Scientist: 24 hours with Elon Musk (Clickhole)
posted by michaelh at 10:01 AM PST - 23 comments

The slow-chemistry movement [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 9:41 AM PST - 17 comments

First created in 1997, Gene Ray's Time Cube disappeared on August 24, 2015. Timecube.org now points to nothing. Twitter mourns. Snapshots of Time Cube continue to exist on the Internet Archive. The status of Gene Ray, creator of Time Cube, who would be 87 this year, is unknown.
posted by Shepherd at 9:31 AM PST - 78 comments

I love the Victorian era. So I decided to live in it. (SL Vox)
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 9:18 AM PST - 679 comments

Marcel Duchamp designed an Art Deco chess set which was available on the web as a 3D printable design. Now the makers have removed it from the internet because French copyright law protects it though it's in the public domain in the US, with implications for the future of shareable things. (The chess set design previously on Metafilter.)
posted by immlass at 8:31 AM PST - 38 comments

For those workers that currently earn the state’s minimum of $8.75 per hour, there are no neighborhoods in which median asking rent could be paid affordably. The extent to which rent growth has outpaced income growth in New York City means low-wage workers face three options: find several roommates to lower their personal rent burden, take on more than one job, or move out of New York City.

The High Burden of Low Wages: How Renting Affordably in NYC is Impossible on Minimum Wage
posted by griphus at 8:30 AM PST - 100 comments

Mozilla Firefox cofounder Blake Ross couldn't wait for the season 3 premiere of HBO's Silicon Valley, so he did the next best thing and wrote his own script which is pretty much indistinguishable from an actual episode.
posted by Pope Guilty at 8:14 AM PST - 22 comments

In 2011, Ardbeg, a prominent Scotch whisky distiller, sent vials of its whisky to the International Space Station to mature. Those vials have been returned to Earth and subjected to taste tests alongside samples of the same whisky matured at Ardbeg's distillery. [more inside]
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 8:11 AM PST - 40 comments

Fear by Marilynne Robinson [New York Review of Books]

“There is something I have felt the need to say, that I have spoken about in various settings, extemporaneously, because my thoughts on the subject have not been entirely formed, and because it is painful to me to have to express them. However, my thesis is always the same, and it is very simply stated, though it has two parts: first, contemporary America is full of fear. And second, fear is not a Christian habit of mind. As children we learn to say, “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for Thou art with me.” We learn that, after his resurrection, Jesus told his disciples, “Lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age.” Christ is a gracious, abiding presence in all reality, and in him history will finally be resolved.”

posted by Fizz at 7:53 AM PST - 23 comments

I can already hear it. “But if race doesn’t matter, why are you making a big deal about the representation of races in these narratives? Isn’t that making it matter?” To those people, I would say that including brown people in fantasy/sci-fi is not only easy and costs nothing to accomplish (let’s be honest, probably costs less in the case of casting for movies), but also is extremely important to the imagination and production of a fair and equitable society. (slMedium)
posted by Kitteh at 7:51 AM PST - 14 comments

Teresa Buchanan, associate professor of education at LSU, was fired for using profanity in the classroom and allegedly comparing women unfavorably to men. THe administration defends their actions by equating Dr. Buchanan's conduct to sexual harassment. Faculty at LSU and the AAUP have both objected to alarming administrative overreach in what they both see as grounds for censure rather than dismissal. Several media reports are linked off of this Language Log post.
posted by jackbishop at 7:44 AM PST - 43 comments

One lawyer’s crusade to defend extreme pornography. Myles Jackman is Britain’s leading obscenity lawyer. But he does not merely defend the accused: his life’s great plan and purpose is to rid this country once and for all of its laws criminalising extreme pornography – laws that he regards as morally and socially iniquitous. (contains descriptions of sex and pornography)
posted by dng at 6:48 AM PST - 14 comments

Here's The Adventures of Milkman, How To Be Swell, The Lost Brady, Phoebe, Classic TV Rewinds, and the "Guy Series" (which has a couple of unexpected cameos), as well as three collections of commercials, all callbacks from 80s-90s Nick At Nite, and that age when MTV's success inspired channels to put more personality into their promotion. [more inside]
posted by JHarris at 5:24 AM PST - 22 comments

Banbarra’s entire discography can be summed up in exactly one 7-inch, 1975’s two-parter “Shack Up,” released on United Artists under the auspices of one “Coyote Productions Inc.” But no matter what trail you follow, any further info on this group gets cold pretty fast.

Nate Patrin explains why despite its inauspicious beginnings, "shack Up" became one of the most influential breaks in sampling history.
posted by MartinWisse at 1:16 AM PST - 8 comments

Earth View presents natural works of abstract art from satellite images of our planet, sized for desktop wallpaper, or as a random image for each new browser tab.
posted by Bora Horza Gobuchul at 9:53 PM PST - 16 comments

[The Big Lebowski's] most important contribution to the study of information seeking behavior is its illustration of how a highly complex information search is not about finding the “answer,” but rather is about an individual's ability to make sense of, and create meaning from, the process of information seeking. . .

“New shit has come to light”: Information seeking behavior in The Big Lebowski (PDF) by Emily Dill and Karen L. Janke. [more inside]
posted by Banknote of the year at 9:03 PM PST - 56 comments

Riley MacLeod writes a moving meditation on masculinities.
posted by Deoridhe at 8:41 PM PST - 4 comments

The Final Discworld Book Is Bittersweet For Many Reasons. "The latest Discworld book, The Shepherd’s Crown, doesn’t just have the task of wrapping up the story of Tiffany Aching, trainee witch. It’s also the very last Discworld book, since author Terry Pratchett sadly passed away earlier this year. The good news is, this is a solid ending to both stories." Although Pratchett friend and collaborator Neil Gaiman notes that the story is unfinished (major spoilers in that link!!). Tasha Robinson, writing at NPR, says the book shows us how to mourn Pratchett (spoilers), and Karin Kross at Tor also strikes an elegiac tone in her review. An excerpt is available at NPR, and the book was released in full last week. (Previously) (Also previously.)
posted by leesh at 5:50 PM PST - 51 comments

"The academy is no longer an investment of time worth making... I was a priest who had lost his faith, performing the sacraments without any sense of their importance." Yet another sad piece on academia, woe.
posted by pos at 5:44 PM PST - 93 comments

‘‘I could as easily make a Collection for you of all the past Parings of my Nails,’’ Benjamin Franklin wrote to his sister Jane in 1767, after she asked him to send her all his old essays on politics. It was as if, in dashing off articles, he’d been sloughing off pages, like a snake shedding skin. Franklin liked to think of himself as a book: a man of letters, spine of bone, flesh of paper, blood of ink, his skin a cover of leather, stitched. When he wrote, he molted. He could be as sneaky as a snake, too, something to bear in mind when reading his autobiography, as sly an account as anything Franklin ever allowed himself the grave indiscretion of putting on paper.

Jill Lepore revisits the legacy of Benjamin Franklin, who in his time was “the most accomplished and famous American who had ever lived.”
posted by jenkinsEar at 5:10 PM PST - 25 comments

SAVING FOR A DAUGHTER BUT NOT A SON: THIS FATHER IS STARTING A FUND TO COMBAT THE WAGE GAP Meaning if we raise our daughter as the "equal" of our son, we'll still have come up 21.7 percent short. How do we give Ivy the same opportunities as Abe? Do we praise her 21.7 percent more? Hug her 21.7 percent harder?
posted by Michele in California at 4:05 PM PST - 83 comments

When arcade game manufacturers produced cabinets in the '80s, they made them to be placed in all sorts of arcades, malls and other areas of young-skewing entertainment. Fast forward to 2015, and while arcades aren't as prevalent — or as popular — as they once were, they're still hanging around. And within these locations, new business models are developing. Many traditional arcades are changing their ways, moving away from the coin-based business model that has long been part of the arcade ecosystem. Meanwhile, combination arcade bars are springing up across the country, bringing their own methods of monetizing games with them, along with other changes to pull the machines in line with more adult — and modern — usage.
posted by josher71 at 4:05 PM PST - 29 comments

Rubix cube solved in free fall!! [via Popular Mechanics & Dave Pell]
posted by chavenet at 1:46 PM PST - 20 comments

Broke: A moving essay about poverty, fairness, and college football.
posted by rouftop at 1:21 PM PST - 29 comments

The True Size Of… is an interactive demonstration of the limitations of the Mercator projection. [more inside]
posted by zamboni at 1:21 PM PST - 42 comments

In a very real way, what people tuck into their pockets signals what they care about. "Pockets matter because they’re personal. What we wear at our waists is at least as intimate as what we wear on our wrists, and what we’ve worn there over the centuries tells us a lot about who we are, how we’ve changed, and how we’ve stayed the same. We’re greedy; we’re vain; we’re hungry; we’re late. We want to start fires and listen to a thousand songs."
posted by xingcat at 1:11 PM PST - 68 comments

It's not the wind, and it's not internal heating. Scientists, "hiking through the woods at 4am with a laptop, a lantern, custom-built electronics, and a hole saw" have finally rigorously tested the various hypotheses about how the elaborate mounds which termites build drive the air needed for their fungus farms in and out. [more inside]
posted by clawsoon at 12:03 PM PST - 8 comments

Chandra Bahadur Dangi, who stood at just 21 inches tall (54.6 cm), has passed away at 75 years old, after being ill with pneumonia. He was the shortest adult ever recorded and confirmed by Guinness. [more inside]
posted by numaner at 10:50 AM PST - 10 comments

"It's not easy to get different types of people to just organically become friends," [Edward Schiappa, a media studies researcher at MIT] says. So how do you get the benefits of intergroup contact theory in a socially segregated world? That's where television and my good friend the Fresh Prince come in.

How Shows Like 'Will & Grace' And 'Black-ish' Can Change Your Brain - Maanvi Singh summarizes research into the potential for more inclusive and diverse television programming to reduce prejudices, for NPR's Codeswitch.
posted by filthy light thief at 10:43 AM PST - 45 comments

As we enter the final hours waiting for the long-awaited debut of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, let's look at a previous debut: Colbert's first ever television appearance. In 1993 (two years before his first 'various characters' gig on Comedy Central's "Exit 57"), he had a brief role near the end of an episode of "Missing Persons" (first 45 seconds of the clip, credit at 1:50), a short-lived police procedural starring Daniel J. "Hill Street Blues" Travanti and co-produced by another Legendary TV Stephen (J. Cannell). [more inside]
posted by oneswellfoop at 10:25 AM PST - 11 comments

On what would have been Freddie Mercury's 69th birthday, John Paul Jones and Roger Taylor join the Foo Fighters onstage to play "Under Pressure."
posted by gottabefunky at 10:15 AM PST - 39 comments

Inside the Agent Raid That Changed Hollywood in One Day

When UTA raided CAA, poaching 10 top talent reps in less than 24 hours, it did more than set off a conflict that threatens to draw in every agency in town, it shined a light on a dark truth: Bankable stars, like oil, are a vanishing resource.

[more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 9:29 AM PST - 42 comments

Sure, Lego has some Marvel minifigs mainly those from the movies. But what if you wanted minifigs of every character ever represented in Marvel comics. [via mefi projects]
posted by Going To Maine at 8:13 AM PST - 46 comments

You judge books by their covers. Then we judge you. Cool? Cool. [more inside]
posted by carrioncomfort at 7:51 AM PST - 67 comments

The Night Terrors present Megafauna, a composition for organ, theremin, drum set, and synthesized bass. [more inside]
posted by Pope Guilty at 7:50 AM PST - 10 comments

Why the healthy school lunch program is in trouble. [The Washington Post]

Student E114 is a case in point. E114 -- the identification code she was assigned by researchers studying eating habits at her public elementary school somewhere in the Northeast -- left the lunch line one day carrying a tray full of what looked like a balanced meal: chicken nuggets, some sort of mushy starch, green beans and milk. Exactly 13 minutes later she was done. The chicken nuggets and the starch were gone. But the green beans? Still there in a neat pile and headed straight for the trash. Before/after photos of what students ate.

[more inside]
posted by Fizz at 7:26 AM PST - 180 comments

God Bless The United States Of Police Horses Licking Dogs [more inside]
posted by poffin boffin at 7:14 AM PST - 24 comments

Here, in their own words, is the story of the development of Diablo II, and what it was like to be at Blizzard North in those days lasting from early 1997 to mid-2000.
posted by curious nu at 6:56 AM PST - 22 comments

Conveyer Belt Font. More mathematical and puzzle fonts/typefaces you can play with in your browser. Read about them in the article Fun with Fonts: Algorithmic Typography. [PDF]
posted by Wolfdog at 6:40 AM PST - 6 comments

Electricomics, Alan Moore's new free comics app for Apple tablets has arrived, and it comes with an anthology featuring work from Garth Ennis, Leah Moore, Colleen Doran and Big Al himself. Moore gives an interview about the project here.
posted by Paul Slade at 5:55 AM PST - 15 comments

Here is The Drones, a free "light-hearted after-dinnerish roleplay game" based on Bertie Wooster's social club from out of P.G. Wodehouse. And here is Wuthering Heights, the free roleplaying game about tortured brooding Byronic heroes.
posted by JHarris at 4:36 AM PST - 21 comments

The Daily Mail is suing Gawker. The Daily Mail's web wing, Mail Online, is suing Gawker for defamation over the story headlined: “My Year Ripping Off the Web with the Daily Mail Online". [more inside]
posted by Devonian at 3:17 AM PST - 58 comments

Barbara Knickerbocker-Beskind has been an occupational therapist, inventor, author and recently started a new career as a designer for famed firm IDEO. Her work there is on products to support the ageing community - which benefits from her perspective as a 91-year-old.
posted by Stark at 2:50 AM PST - 16 comments

The music video for Imitation of Life by R.E.M. is a 20-odd second locked off shot, which they repeat forwards and backwards for the duration of the song. I wanted to see if they showed the whole wide 20 second shot throughout the music video. They don't. So I filled the gaps as best I could. I also then scaled and moved the whole video in order to watch how the video plays out. [The original video.]
posted by smcg at 2:07 AM PST - 27 comments

From Coalition to Catastrophe: The Electoral Meltdown of the Liberal Democrats.
posted by MartinWisse at 12:47 AM PST - 39 comments

Ham. Escalator.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 9:55 PM PST - 80 comments

Hopping, tumbling and flipping over are not typical maneuvers you would expect from a spacecraft exploring other worlds. Traditional Mars rovers, for example, roll around on wheels, and they can't operate upside-down. But on a small body, such as an asteroid or a comet, the low-gravity conditions and rough surfaces make traditional driving all the more hazardous. Enter Hedgehog: a new concept for a robot that is specifically designed to overcome the challenges of traversing small bodies.(via)
posted by AElfwine Evenstar at 9:50 PM PST - 8 comments

In the grand scale of naval hardware, the Phoenix isn't much to look at. It's 136 ft long and forty years old. It has a small crew of twenty including paramedics and drone operators. But over the past two years it has rescued 11,000 migrants from the Mediterranean. It is the sole vessel operated by the Migrant Offshore Aid Station (MOAS) unless you also count the two onboard dinghies. The station was started and funded by Paul Catrambones in 2013 before turning in part to private donations. How MOAS conducts Search and Rescue. [more inside]
posted by storybored at 8:15 PM PST - 4 comments

Letters from medieval students asking their parents to send cash.
posted by Itaxpica at 7:02 PM PST - 31 comments

Georgia Tann was an influential adoption advocate who popularized adoption in the US from 1920s to the 1950s. She arranged adoptions for movie stars like Joan Crawford and Lana Turner and essentially devised the modern closed adoption. But Tann's babies were not necessarily unwanted, and in fact she frequently stole them from poor parents or told parents their children were dead. Worse, the children in her care were often neglected or abused, and Tann would adopt children to anyone with the money to pay her exorbitant fees. Remarkably, Tann's legacy of corruption, neglect, and child theft went unremarked until after her death.
posted by sciatrix at 5:20 PM PST - 26 comments

The Closest Thing To Animals, A short story by Sofia Samatar. [more inside]
posted by moonlight on vermont at 5:02 PM PST - 5 comments

"This is how America is: you are expected to give everything you have, and if you don't you're unsuccessful." (slBBC)
posted by Kitteh at 4:51 PM PST - 129 comments

One of the poets appearing in the anthology Best American Poetry 2015 is Yi-Fen Chou. In the anthology, the poet's bio states baldly that he has found greater success in the publication of his poetry since he adopted his pseudonym rather than using his real name, which is Michael Derrick Hudson. Naturally, this has been poorly received. Sherman Alexie, guest editor of the anthology, explains his decision to keep the poem in the anthology anyway, despite his anger at having been deceived. [more inside]
posted by Countess Elena at 4:05 PM PST - 49 comments

In a world where marketing for films can cost hundreds of millions of dollars, movie studios count on one musical genre to make its trailers stand out: TRAILER MUSIC. [more inside]
posted by jet_pack_in_a_can at 3:48 PM PST - 22 comments

The value of fiction was clear to Virginia Woolf, who argued that nonfiction consists of half-truths and approximations that result in a "very inferior form of fiction." In Woolf's terms, reading ambitious fiction isn't comfortable or easy. Far from it: "To go from one great novelist to another—from Jane Austen to Hardy, from Peacock to Trollope, from Scott to Meredith—is to be wrenched and uprooted; to be thrown this way and then that." The illuminations that fiction offers are gained only with considerable effort. "To read a novel is a difficult and complex art," Woolf wrote. "You must be capable not only of great fineness of perception, but of great boldness of imagination if you are going to make use of all that the novelist—the great artist—gives you."

– The Virtues of Difficult Fiction by Joanna Scott. She was interviewed by Larry Mantle on public radio show AirTalk about her essay. In the passage above Scott's quoting Woolf's How Should One Read a Book?
posted by Kattullus at 3:04 PM PST - 16 comments

Felix Salmon reports on the continuing saga of Cooper Union (previously on MetaFilter). With NY Attorney General Eric Schneiderman's recent intervention, the school appears ready to stop digging its financial grave, but blocks away, faculty, staff, and students believe a similar story is playing out with New York University's NYU 2031 initiative. The plan, described as "a real estate deal" in a private conversation with an NYU trustee, is the brainchild of controversial NYU president John Sexton. [more inside]
posted by tonycpsu at 2:12 PM PST - 21 comments

One person's harbinger of river health is another's slayer of kings is another's invasive species. Take, for example, sea lampreys. They are making a comeback in rivers around the UK thanks to conservation efforts. [more inside]
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 12:26 PM PST - 17 comments

TECHGNOSIS, Technology and The Human Imagination [msn] | Jason Silva and Erik Davis
posted by kliuless at 12:12 PM PST - 1 comment

Wired Magazine introduces us to Socality Barbie:

Socality Barbie is a fantastic Instagram account satirizing the great millennial adventurer trend in photography. It’s an endless barrage of pensive selfies in exotic locales, arty snapshots of coffee, and just the right filter on everything. Anyone who’s flipped through an issue of Kinfolk gets the aesthetic. And it’s everywhere on Instagram.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 11:34 AM PST - 86 comments

David C Roy designed and handcrafted over 150 different one-of-a-kind kinetic sculptures. Common elements in his work include motion and wood. They are powered by constant force springs. [more inside]
posted by growabrain at 9:42 AM PST - 8 comments

September 7th is Buddy Holly's 79th birthday. Restoration of the last guitar that he ever played: How to play Peggy Sue on guitar. The Buddy Holly Center in Lubbock, Texas. And, of course, the music (MLYT):
Not Fade Away
Maybe, Baby
That'll Be the Day
Every Day
posted by dfm500 at 8:31 AM PST - 22 comments

A profile on Michel Houellebecq. [The Guardian] [Books]

“It’s not my role to be responsible. I don’t feel responsible,” he says. “The role of a novel is to entertain readers, and fear is one of the most entertaining things there is.” To him, the fear in Submission comes in the dark violence at the novel’s start, before the moderate Islamist party comes to power. Was he deliberately playing on a mood of fear in France? “Yes, I plead guilty,” he says. For Houellebecq, the job of a novelist is foremost to hold a mirror up to contemporary society.

[more inside]
posted by Fizz at 5:16 AM PST - 63 comments

Here is Chocolatey, a package manager for Windows built on NuGet, like apt-get on Debian-based Linux systems. It requires copying and pasting a couple of command lines for initial installation, but once it's installed you can use it to install ChocolateyGUI to automate installing, upgrading and uninstalling software with a friendlier interface. Once it's working, it's a good way to quickly install software. Here you can browse the packages it can download and install for you.. [more inside]
posted by JHarris at 3:40 AM PST - 38 comments

How the way you type can shatter anonymity—even on Tor [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 9:05 PM PST - 63 comments

Jo Aubin has Alzheimer's. He's 38. He had a hard time naming the building they were in, and he couldn’t recall one of the three words immediately after he heard them. But his pentagon diagram was flawless and, again, rendered in fine, artistic pen-strokes. For a sentence, Jo wrote, “I am myself always and not at all.” It reads as achingly evocative, but it’s possible there was something else going on. “Is this really deep, or is he starting to lose his thoughts?” Borrie wondered. This time, Jo scored 20 out of 30.
posted by un petit cadeau at 8:51 PM PST - 29 comments

1974, Trans Am: John Wayne is McQ - He's a busted cop, his gun is unlicensed, his methods are unlawful, and his story is incredible (IMDB, trailer)
1976, Dune buggy: Connie Stevens is Scorchy! - She's Killed A Man, Been Shot At, And Made Love Twice Already This Evening... And The Evening Isn't Over Yet! (IMDB, trailer) (If you only watch one, this is the one for its over-the-top 1970s ridiculousness)
2000, Cadillac Seville: Sylvester Stallone in Get Carter - The truth hurts (IMDB, trailer)
2011, Volvo S60: Short film/Volvo commercial from National Film Festival for Talented Youth [more inside]
posted by ShooBoo at 8:50 PM PST - 29 comments

Josh Marshall built a sailboat. Josh Marshall, the editor and proprietor of now-venerable political blog Talking Points Memo, had a fascinating post today. After his son wanted to collect driftwood, Marshall thought of making a model boat for his son. Then he asked himself why he could not build an actual boat. So he did. [more inside]
posted by Ironmouth at 7:15 PM PST - 46 comments

me irl - Mefi's own The Devil Tesla describes the project: "Me irl is a subreddit where every post must be titled 'me irl'. The prompt is to post 'selfies of the soul'. It has 250k subscribers, and is responsible for several of the highest scoring links on reddit of all time, including #7. This is the burden I carry with me." [via mefi projects]
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 6:04 PM PST - 65 comments

Go ahead: Press the button. A number is printed on the tape. Press again and another number appears. Keep going. A few more. Notice anything special about those numbers? The sequence begins: 5, 3, 11, 3, 23, 3, 47, 3, 5, 3, 101, 3, 7, 11, 3, 13, 233, 3, 467, 3, 5, 3, . . .
posted by Wolfdog at 4:30 PM PST - 25 comments

The banteng is everything domestic cattle are not: rainforest-dwelling, wild, elusive, obscure, almost mystical
they are also probably the next on the extinction list after rhino in Sabah.
A little more about Bos-javanicus and wild cattle conservation.
posted by adamvasco at 1:10 PM PST - 4 comments

What were the food and cooking techniques of the Viking Age? you could ask The Viking Answer Lady or get pollen analysis, reconstruction tips, and recipes from The Viking Food Guy, or you could just ask Chef Jesper Lynge (Daily Mail) who is attempting to revive Viking Cusine from his cafe in an Danish Iron Age graveyard. ( Recipies and descriptions )
posted by The Whelk at 9:13 AM PST - 41 comments

How Schools Are Handling An 'Overparenting' Crisis via NPR
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 8:20 AM PST - 118 comments

Bruce Banner will no longer be the Incredible Hulk.
posted by blue_beetle at 5:30 AM PST - 37 comments

Infosys founder NR Narayana Murthy: Making of a legend
posted by infini at 5:11 AM PST - 18 comments

In the years preceding World War II, news outlets from home magazines to the New York Times ran profiles of the Nazi leader that portrayed him as a country gentleman — a man who ate vegetarian, played catch with his dogs and took post-meal strolls outside his mountain estate. These articles were often admiring — even after the horrors of the Nazi regime had begun to reveal themselves, says Despina Stratigakos, an architectural historian at the University at Buffalo. Her new book, “Hitler at Home,” will be published Sept. 29 by Yale University Press... She notes that while many historians have dismissed Hitler’s personal life as irrelevant, his private persona was in fact painstakingly constructed to further his political ends.

How media ‘fluff’ helped Hitler rise to power [more inside]
posted by Spinda at 4:43 AM PST - 70 comments

Here is video of an unusual moment in David Beckham's varied career: the time he was called upon to defeat Mister Woe and the monsters of the Fourth Division. It's GO! GO! BECKHAM! Here's when he fought a giant bird with his soccer powers. Here is the beginning of his adventure on Soccer Island, and here's a complete speedrun.
posted by JHarris at 3:32 AM PST - 11 comments

The influential "Lord of Lowbrow", The Pizz (born Stephen Pizzurro), passed away in Long Beach on Sunday shortly after posting a final photo to Instagram. He was 57. [more inside]
posted by neushoorn at 12:42 AM PST - 11 comments

In 1986, ABC executive SQuire (sic) Rushnell attempted to begin a Christian franchise on par with the Care Bears with a live-action/animated special: Kingdom Chums: Little David's Adventure (multi-video version) (also adapted as a book). Only one of several attempts to continue the series came to fruition: the initially direct-to-video Kingdom Chums: Original Top Ten (multi-video version).
posted by BiggerJ at 10:51 PM PST - 10 comments

Urban Myth Confirmed True as Archaeologists Discover Hidden Tunnels in Mexico "Talk of a maze of underground tunnels beneath the Colonial city of Puebla in Mexico have long been disregarded as mere urban legend. However, city authorities have now confirmed that their existence is no myth. Believed to date back as early as 1531, when the city was founded, the subterranean tunnels are believed to extend as far as 10 kilometers beneath the historic center of the city." (more here (in spanish))
posted by dhruva at 9:33 PM PST - 15 comments

How over a million American families live on $2 per day, by Dylan Matthews, VOX [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 8:31 PM PST - 46 comments

This is not an easy read, but I felt that it was worth reading: PC Comedy and Paul Revere
posted by Joe in Australia at 8:10 PM PST - 78 comments

A Germaphobe’s Guide to Buying a Metrocard starts off in favor of BART fare machines over MTA machines, but that's before the author learns about the designer's "leave no rider behind" ethos.

“The soda machine is like [the MTA’s] first prototype, you start the transition by inserting money, then you make a selection and hopefully the selection comes out, which may not happen,” Udagawa said with a laugh. “[At] a store, no one pays upfront. So you go in, you check out the products, check out the prices, you gain confidence and then you decide to pay.”

posted by cardioid at 4:43 PM PST - 70 comments

"Reactions to that one simple gesture (a marriage proposal, from a woman) contain sexist multitudes. After all, women are conditioned from an early age—by Disney, their families, the wedding industry—to hope for marriage, but simultaneously discouraged from taking any initiative in making that marriage happen. And men are expected to fear—or at least resist—matrimony. Should they decide they'd like to wed, they're required to spend an enormous amount of financial and emotional capital to create a (preferably public) display of atypically masculine vulnerability and emotionality. The sheer popularity of YouTube proposals complete with flash mobs, tear-y eyed assembled family, and the bride's shocked gasps caught in three angles is a strong indicator of the pedestal upon which we place these stories. With the reverse proposal, all this fanfare is still required, but both partners face the prospect of a lifetime of ribbing and weird comments from strangers..."
posted by John Cohen at 3:17 PM PST - 82 comments

It’s an all-girl supergroup like no other: Pretenders leader Chrissie Hynde, Jamaican-born singer Grace Jones, Sleater-Kinney guitarist and “Portlandia” star Carrie Brownstein, folkie Jewel, punk poet Patti Smith and 1970s icon Carly Simon. Only these women aren’t reviving Lilith Fair. They’re part of the latest trend in book publishing. In a genre once wholly dominated by male rockers, female musicians are now finding their voices — and their book deals.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 1:50 PM PST - 28 comments

Growing out of the 2002 NTK Festival of Inappropriate Technology, Opentech is a one-day conference in London on the topic of open source and open data in its broadest sense. Speakers have included Danny O’Brien (of NTK fame), Bill Thompson, Suw Charman-Anderson and many others, and the conference has launched or promoted several important UK tech organisations and campaigns including the Open Rights Group and Ada Lovelace Day. [more inside]
posted by crocomancer at 1:39 PM PST - 5 comments

Richard Shindell is an American folk songwriter. He currently lives in Buenos Aires, Argentina, with his wife and their children. A few selected highlights from an amazing songbook are inside. [more inside]
posted by jbickers at 11:49 AM PST - 12 comments

Former Vancouver Police detective Lori Shenher's book, That Lonely Section of Hell: The Botched Investigation of a Serial Killer who Almost Got Away, is a memoir about investigating the disappearances of women who would turn out to have been murdered by serial killer Robert Pickton. The Globe and Mail has published an excerpt here. [more inside]
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 11:48 AM PST - 34 comments

Australian Man builds clay roof hut in the woods using only primitive tools and his own two hands
posted by roaring beast at 11:38 AM PST - 34 comments

Have you ever been cornered and asked, “So, what do you do?” Or maybe, “What’s your major?” Sometimes, it can be tough be explain. Everyone thinks they know what a pro athlete does. But do we really know? We asked MLS All-Star Chris Wondolowski of the San Jose Earthquakes to explain his job without any cliches. What You Don’t Know About: Being a Striker
posted by josher71 at 10:56 AM PST - 16 comments

"Hey, we're in the parking spot of the Soyuz crew that's arriving tomorrow, so we gotta move our spaceship."
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 10:46 AM PST - 13 comments

Hitler's World by Timothy Snyder [New York Review of Books]

In Hitler’s world, the law of the jungle was the only law. People were to suppress any inclination to be merciful and were to be as rapacious as they could. Hitler thus broke with the traditions of political thought that presented human beings as distinct from nature in their capacity to imagine and create new forms of association. Beginning from that assumption, political thinkers tried to describe not only the possible but the most just forms of society. For Hitler, however, nature was the singular, brutal, and overwhelming truth, and the whole history of attempting to think otherwise was an illusion. Carl Schmitt, a leading Nazi legal theorist, explained that politics arose not from history or concepts but from our sense of enmity. Our racial enemies were chosen by nature, and our task was to struggle and kill and die.

posted by Fizz at 10:41 AM PST - 50 comments

Each photograph is the product of an incredibly meticulous process, in which Lee asks each model to rotate slightly as he takes anywhere from 20 to 30 photos. [NSFW]
posted by mimo at 10:25 AM PST - 17 comments

The arrogance of Roger Goodell — Dan Wetzel on NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell's humiliating legal defeat resulting from the Deflategate scandal. [more inside]
posted by tonycpsu at 9:28 AM PST - 99 comments

Should you send that text? Bustle has the answer with a handy flowchart. [more inside]
posted by Margalo Epps at 8:45 AM PST - 24 comments

RIP Rico Rodriguez, most commonly know simply as 'Rico', the reggae and ska trombonist. He worked as a solo artist as well as with many other bands and musicians including Prince Buster and Jools Holland's Rhythm and Blues Orchestra but was probably best known as a member of The Specials. [more inside]
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 8:45 AM PST - 22 comments

How to read historical British texts. A tutorial on how to read Secretary Hand. Practice.
posted by Wrinkled Stumpskin at 8:34 AM PST - 8 comments

In ten states, people who have ever been convicted of a drug-related felony are barred for life from getting food stamp benefits. [more inside]
posted by southern_sky at 8:08 AM PST - 103 comments

Steve Silberman's new book Neurotribes is out and getting buzzed. Reviewed at New York Times. Reviewed on NPR. Author interview on Erik Davis Expanding Mind podcast. If you are new at metafilter you might be interested to know that Silberman is also known as digaman at metafilter, although his last comment is from October 2012. The book is a greatly expanded version of his work on autism which has previously appeared in Wired as a number of articles including The Geek Syndrome.
posted by bukvich at 7:58 AM PST - 27 comments

Stephen Colbert Reading Flannery O'Connor's "The Enduring Chill" (SLSoundCloud).
posted by Cash4Lead at 5:42 AM PST - 7 comments

It's been a long time since LA musician Chris Dane Owens first graced the blue (previously). His desire to make epic fantasy music videos clearly remains the same, however, and last year he finally released Light Speed. Porn-taches! Exploding dragons! Sword fights! Pegasuses! A bright green Gretch sparkle jet guitar! What more could a person possibly desire? [more inside]
posted by garius at 5:14 AM PST - 26 comments

Here's some information on claw, also called crane, machines. Did you ever play one of those games to try to win a plush toy, only for the prize to tumble out of the claw at first grasp, or even outright drop it halfway up? Think you just didn't play well enough? Maybe the machine just decided to make you lose by randomly reducing claw power. Here's more information. Via Dubious Quality, although I did page through a few manuals on my own.... [more inside]
posted by JHarris at 2:53 AM PST - 31 comments

Just over a hundred years ago, Frederick Jury lost his brass luggage tag. A few days ago Nicola White, a mudlark, found it on the Thames foreshore. Through Twitter, Nicola, and a bunch of local and family historians, were able to put together his story. [more inside]
posted by Helga-woo at 1:38 AM PST - 13 comments

"The search for alien life has recently taken a surprise twist away from Mars and toward Europa, an ice ball of a moon in orbit around Jupiter. To understand why, you just need to look at these three numbers: Zero 1.33 billion 3 billion.... [more inside]
posted by storybored at 9:29 PM PST - 48 comments

23 Free Hitchcock Movies Online - Open Culture [Previously] [more inside]
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 9:06 PM PST - 19 comments