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Hobbits found near New Zealand! A new species of human, only 4 feet tall and dating to only 18,000 years ago, has been discovered in Indonesia. It's important enough that Nature has a special issue. Even better? The tiny people hunted tiny elephants. (Journal article here, for those of you with access.)
posted by louigi at 9:17 PM PST - 19 comments

Donnie Darko in his mind's eye. (One little boy, one little man) A pretty rad article on Donnie Darko, one of my favorite movies.
posted by hughbot at 9:01 PM PST - 29 comments

World (er... MLB) Champions once more. The last time the Boston Red Sox lost was in the 86 World Series. The last time they won was 86 Years Ago, when they beat the Chicago Cubs in the 1918 World Series. (The Cubs finished that season with 86 wins.) This year, after retiring the Anaheim Angels 8-6, they lost three straight to the New York Yankees in the ALCS and seemed to be on the verge of failing once again. Eight straight wins later, they finally manage to eighty-six the Curse of the Bambino.
posted by Mr Stickfigure at 8:52 PM PST - 43 comments

The curse, reversed.
posted by Vidiot at 8:50 PM PST - 11 comments

Meet Connor Kirby-Long, the 17 year old wonderkid of indie electronica. From his home in Saint Johnsbury, Vermont, Connor has gained attention releasing a string of internet-only EPs under the names Grandma (1, 2, 3), I, Cactus, (1) and his current moniker Khonnor (1, 2). This month Khonnor released his first full length cd, Handwriting, a stunningly beautiful album made with inspiration from artists such as Jim O'Rourke, Fennesz, Sonic Youth, The Smiths and David Sylvian.
Khonnor's official website has a cute flash game. Bonus: He used to blog. Is he hot or not?
posted by mr.marx at 8:07 PM PST - 11 comments

Christian-right views are swaying politicians and threatening the environment. Maybe that's why the Bush administration is trying to stifle scientific evidence of global warming. Meanwhile, some experts think global warming may cause stronger hurricanes. [Via Disinformation and the Intersection.]
posted by homunculus at 6:35 PM PST - 19 comments

Go outside and watch the eclipse [if it's night where you are]. Tonight's lunar eclipse -- visible on all continents except Australia -- marks the first time there has been an eclipse during a World Series game. If Fox is feeling generous, it could be the widest TV audience a total eclipse of a "Blood Moon" has ever had. If you're in the US, click on this time zone map to get a quicktime movie of what the moon will look like overhead in your state.
posted by jessamyn at 5:09 PM PST - 27 comments

Goths for Bush: We began with a short reading from Poe and discussed the true horrors of life under George Bush. It was agreed that there is no hope, only pain and sadness and that he would continue to provide us with the same. (via WOW)
posted by pandaharma at 3:31 PM PST - 9 comments

Ding-a-ling a-ling... Who needs MP3 when we have 'Written Jingles' ? Who can forget the classic, "Bingebabah bengebabah bungebabah." See also News Themes.
posted by feelinglistless at 3:02 PM PST - 1 comments

Missed Opportunity A Florida motorist was arrested on Wednesday on charges of trying to run down U.S. Rep. Katherine Harris.
posted by adamms222 at 2:34 PM PST - 38 comments

Counting the Real People’s Vote. A motion for the electoral college, a separation of voters into "real people" and the "secular urban base."
posted by four panels at 2:24 PM PST - 43 comments

Iraq says 'impossible' explosives taken before regime fall Bush: wrong before. Wrong again..."A top Iraqi science official said it was impossible that 350 tonnes of high explosives could have been smuggled out of a military site south of Baghdad before the regime fell last year...."
posted by Postroad at 1:18 PM PST - 42 comments

Retro Remakes is devoted to fan made remakes of classic video games.
posted by cmonkey at 1:10 PM PST - 5 comments

Amnesty International Condemns U.S. for War on Terror Torture
Amnesty's report accused Washington of stepping onto a "well-trodden path of violating basic rights in the name of national security or 'military necessity'."
posted by quonsar at 1:08 PM PST - 8 comments

Thinking Machine 4 explores the invisible, elusive nature of thought. Play chess against a transparent intelligence, its evolving thought process visible on the board before you.

From Martin Wattenberg (with Marek Walczak); they have been noted here before.
posted by e.e. coli at 12:44 PM PST - 11 comments

Hey, no crying in baseball! Who would you like the Red Sox to win it for? A Sox fanboard thread dedicates the hoped-for, possibly imminent World Series championship to loved ones living and dead. NSFW, if your employer frowns on tears streaming down your cheeks.
posted by stupidsexyFlanders at 12:16 PM PST - 28 comments

Get Your Bootleg On has lotsa bootlegs. This kind, not this kind. Inspired by this.
posted by turbodog at 12:02 PM PST - 3 comments

Find out about political donors in your neighborhood Fundrace Block Party searches political donor databases and, with the input of your address and zip code, will give you a map (and spreadsheet if you like) which tells you the names and addresses of your neighbors who have supported national political candidates, and how much they contributed. You can use this information to have a block party!

Although I think this is way cool (I'm surrounded by 51 contributors to democrats and only 11 to republicans), this also struck me as a bit scary from the privacy perspective (I now know who is giving money to the whom, and where they live). Who's in *your* neighborhood? (via kottke)
posted by jasper411 at 11:34 AM PST - 28 comments

Want a visit from the Secret Service? Talk smack about the president on your LiveJournal, and you too can be the recipient of a visit from the Men in Black. Looks like kablam was right.
posted by headspace at 11:33 AM PST - 51 comments

Girl Power or: Partnership status and the human sex ratio at birth: a paper by Karen Norberg

Could the sex of a child be influenced by the status of the parents' relationship at the time of conception? In a sample of 86,436 births in the United States, we find a small excess of sons among births to parents who were married or living with an opposite sex partner before the child's conception, compared to births to parents who were not. This is the first evidence that household arrangements can affect the human sex ratio at birth, and could explain the fall in the proportion of male births in some developed countries over the past thirty years.

(Data published on FirstCite registration required) via The Economist

(special note for mathowie: No word yet as to whether or not those single moms can also reliably produce offspring with an astigmatism.)
posted by lilboo at 9:34 AM PST - 12 comments

The Road To Abu Ghraib A generation from now, historians may look back to April 28, 2004, as the day the United States lost the war in Iraq... It was a direct—and predictable—consequence of a policy, hatched at the highest levels of the administration, by senior White House officials and lawyers, in the weeks and months after 9/11. Yet the administration has largely managed to escape responsibility for those decisions; a month from election day, almost no one in the press or the political class is talking about what is, without question, the worst scandal to emerge from President Bush's nearly four years in office... Given the particular conditions faced by the president and his deputies after 9/11—a war against terrorists, in which the need to extract intelligence via interrogations was intensely pressing, but the limits placed by international law on interrogation techniques were very constricting—did those leaders have better alternatives than the one they chose? The answer is that they did. And we will be living with the consequences of the choices they made for years to come.
posted by y2karl at 9:03 AM PST - 33 comments

Georgebush.com site blocked to viewers outside the United States. Surfers outside the US have been unable to visit the official re-election site of President George W Bush. The blocking of browsers sited outside the US began in the early hours of Monday morning.
posted by zaelic at 7:33 AM PST - 57 comments

In search of lost time It was Jack Kerouac who first defined Robert Frank's genius, who found in it some echo of his own vision of a vast, broken-down, but still epic, America, peopled with restless and lonely dreamers. 'Robert Frank, Swiss, unobtrusive, nice,' wrote Kerouac in his now famous introduction to Frank's collection The Americans , 'with that little camera that he raises and snaps with one hand he sucked a sad poem right out of America on to film, taking rank among the tragic poets of the world'.
Frank's exhibition, Storylines, opens this week at the Tate Modern in London.
posted by matteo at 6:44 AM PST - 6 comments

Super Mario Bros. on ice. "That looks like Mr. Belvedere!" [15 mb .mov]
posted by adampsyche at 4:59 AM PST - 26 comments

The Law of Jante (Janteloven) was codified by the Danish-born novelist Aksel Sandemose while he was living in Norway. The Law comprises ten 'commandments', and describes an unspoken code of conformity that Sandemose felt as a stifling inhibitive influence in the town where he grew up. Later commentators have used the term more generally to refer to the anti-individualist tendencies that have traditionally pervaded Scandinavian culture, and to denote 'the dark side of egalitarianism'. Of course, the Law needn't be interpreted in such a negative light, and egalitarianism has its good side too, the difficult question being: do the benefits of equality make it worthwhile suffering the strictures of Janteloven?
posted by misteraitch at 3:59 AM PST - 31 comments