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Moscow is home to the largest number of billionaires and in Russia, there are nearly 100 billionaires. Due to recent economic developments and the drop in oil prices, the oligarchs, who rose to prominence under Gorbachev, have lost a combined total of $200 billion. Help is here.
posted by gman at 7:17 PM PST - 21 comments

Armchair travel via three superb audio slide shows by photographer Reinhard Krause:
Monlam, the Tibetan Great Prayer Festival - Aba China
Catholics celebrate Christmas in rural China
Tibetan prayer meeting in Tongren [more inside]
posted by madamjujujive at 6:52 PM PST - 9 comments

浄閑寺—Jokanji, the "Throw Away" Temple "From the street, it looks like many other Tokyo temples, but behind the new main building is an old cemetery that has one particular point of interest, a crypt and monument to twenty-five thousand prostitutes interred there."
posted by gomichild at 6:42 PM PST - 14 comments

70,000 BC: The Earliest Known Examples of Paleolithic Art
668 BC: Ashurbanipal Attempts to Collect all Knowledge
150 BC: Earliest Analog Computer
593 AD: First Mention of Printing in China
1454 AD: The Gutenberg Bible
1964 AD: Creation of ARPANET
From Cave Paintings to the Internet, a timeline of the history of information technology. [more inside]
posted by Horace Rumpole at 5:18 PM PST - 10 comments

The Free Site Validator is for all y'all web designers who are tired of putting each and every page through the W3C Markup Validation Service. Enter the URL you'd like checked, start the report and you'll soon have every page of the site examined for valid markup and link rot. It also uses OpenID so you might already have an account! [via 456 Berea Street] [more inside]
posted by sciurus at 5:13 PM PST - 14 comments

iBioSeminars is a new project from the American Society for Cell Biology to release freely available lectures from leading scientists on the web. It features talks on such diverse areas as stem cells, malaria, HIV, and biofuel production.
posted by pombe at 4:36 PM PST - 4 comments

Eagle Ager
posted by geos at 4:30 PM PST - 18 comments

"The King of Rock Steady," (or "Godfather" as he was sometimes known) Alton Ellis, passed away earlier this month at the age of 70. A romantic at heart with one of my favorite voices, he leaves 20 children two weeks after finally receiving royalties for the Sean Paul song "Still in Love With You". [more inside]
posted by sleepy pete at 4:24 PM PST - 17 comments

Gobekli Tepe: The World’s First Temple? "Predating Stonehenge by 6,000 years, Turkey's stunning Gobekli Tepe upends the conventional view of the rise of civilization."
posted by homunculus at 3:30 PM PST - 29 comments

The Unfinished Swan is an unfinished video game set in an entirely black and white world. Players can splatter paint to help them find their way through an unusual garden. A video of the gameplay.
posted by GuyZero at 3:22 PM PST - 32 comments

Bernt Aune's corneas are 123 years old, which possibly makes them the oldest living human tissue on record. [more inside]
posted by andeles at 2:30 PM PST - 27 comments

The Kid's Halloween Candy Code from cockeyed.com. [more inside]
posted by loquacious at 1:48 PM PST - 65 comments

We've seen it done before with Ms. Dewey (previously), but all the same, meet Max Kerning. He's also on Facebook and Twitter. He's a total shill (Sutcase Fusion 2) but still worth checking out. [more inside]
posted by cjorgensen at 1:22 PM PST - 13 comments

Dancing with Ink: by Taiwanese photographer Liu Chunxing (刘纯兴).
posted by of strange foe at 1:04 PM PST - 9 comments

The nine biggest US banks aren't using $125 billion in federal bailout money to make loans. They're going to use taxpayer dollars to buy other banks. [more inside]
posted by up in the old hotel at 12:43 PM PST - 80 comments

Seventy years ago today was the original broadcast of "The War of the Worlds". Listen to it, uninterrupted, here. The program reportedly caused a mass panic across much of the Northeast. [more inside]
posted by backseatpilot at 12:31 PM PST - 13 comments

The phenomenon of homemade roadside signage for Obama is not much in evidence on the other side. See also Obama signage and other art at The Obama Art Report, and many individual homemade Obama signs. Neither campaign is, shall we say, overly happy with renegade signage, however.
posted by beagle at 12:10 PM PST - 41 comments

Obama just got endorsed by The Economist. Yes that Economist. My favorite economic publication and often noted for its pragmatic conservative-centrist approach. Good stuff here.
posted by Lacking Subtlety at 12:05 PM PST - 132 comments

Lovely Package: The leading source for the very best that package design has to offer.
posted by chunking express at 11:39 AM PST - 28 comments

Making the Sculpture. Tom Otterness, the guy behind those sculptures that make riding the A almost bearable (aka Life Underground), explains how bronze casting is done in a way even an idjit like me can understand.
posted by dame at 11:12 AM PST - 16 comments

Steve Winter has won Wildlife Photographer Of The Year. More shortlisted images. Previous winners.
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 10:53 AM PST - 6 comments

Of all the People in the World "uses grains of rice to bring formally abstract statistics to startling and powerful life" . via
posted by Dormant Gorilla at 10:46 AM PST - 14 comments

Approximately two years ago, James Kim died after he and his family were stranded, snowbound, in their car on the Oregon coast (Previously, previously, and (selflink) previously). But what if he'd had a Personal Locator Beacon (PLB)? [more inside]
posted by scrump at 10:33 AM PST - 36 comments

We need a way to have, buy, and sit on fewer and better things. — from the CICINA, a 20 minute video presentation on their effort to compare all things in a massive bracketed set of 2¹⁴ binary judgements. Which is better: Apples or Oranges?
posted by blasdelf at 9:44 AM PST - 22 comments

Marina Hyde blogs on the Guardian website about the ludicrous press release circulating about Lily Allen's new album, referring to her as 'the Wordsworth of her generation'. Then Lily herself uses her right to reply,snipes about the journalist's affair with Piers Morgan, and debate ensues about the difference between her cheeky public persona and the fragile, defensive lass within. [more inside]
posted by mippy at 9:41 AM PST - 32 comments

SLYT. From the creator of Aqua Teen Hunger Force, NC Neighbors, Vote 08 (NSFW). [more inside]
posted by pearlybob at 9:05 AM PST - 28 comments

Back in 1972, there was a fellow who had a novel idea for a porno flick. But when his producer objected to the movie's title, fearing no one would understand it, Gerard Damiano reassured him: "Don't worry, "Deep Throat will become a household word." And indeed it did. Now, 36 years after the infamous and influential film's release, director Gerard Damiano, aka Jerry Gerard, has gone on to that deep, deep throat in the sky. [more inside]
posted by flapjax at midnite at 6:29 AM PST - 73 comments

"You cannot overestimate how threatened the scientific establishment is by the fact that it now looks like the materialist paradigm is genuinely breaking down.", argues psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwartz, part of a growing "non-material neuroscience" movement, an approach that evokes Cartesian dualism - the belief that the mind is not linked to the body, taking on the qualities of a soul. However growing the movement might be, others argue that the end of materialism is far from nigh. (via)
posted by Marisa Stole the Precious Thing at 3:42 AM PST - 263 comments