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A collective "I told you so" from all the layed-off American tech workers. Dell to Stop Using Indian Call Center for Corporate Customers. Apparently, there was a high volume of complaints about thick accents and scripted responses. You don't say? You mean explaining complex technical issues to end users over a phone are further complicated by mixing in large dialect and enunciation differences?
posted by Espoo2 at 8:29 PM PST - 40 comments

Why Isn't Judee Sill's Beautiful Music More Well Known? Everyone has a favourite musician who, for some reason, remains unknown and unfairly overlooked. My choice for a much-deserved and long overdue revival is the silky-voiced, eccentric, tragic, ethereal and ultimately mysterious Judee Sill, one of the great Seventies singer-songwriters. Who would you nominate? (Here are a few mp3s of demos and unreleased recordings which will give you an idea of her beautiful voice and highly-strung delivery and, hopefully, lead you to explore her two main albums.)
posted by MiguelCardoso at 8:14 PM PST - 50 comments

Cow-Girl Morph Tutorial: "A lot of people ask me how I do what I do at the Transforming Love Ring Fleshsculpting Page. I use a lot of different techniques for what I do, but they are applicable in a lot of different situations. Most of the following techniques are generally 'fleshsculpting' techniques, meaning they change the shape of the flesh and skin without changing the texture much." NSFW.
posted by cedar at 7:10 PM PST - 15 comments

1.26 million people killed every year on the road or from subsequent injuries... ..Four Qld road deaths in 5 hours. 42,815 people died in 2002 in automobile crashes in the United States. Shouldn't these facts give us the resolve to explore a better solution to our transportation needs? I do not see the national debate that these deaths would evoke if the cause was different. Why are we numb to this?
posted by JohnR at 4:00 PM PST - 76 comments

More children now than ever are being born from cesarean sections. It's known that giving birth this way can leave psychological damage to the mother, but what effect is it having on the children?
posted by atom128 at 3:36 PM PST - 39 comments

Sometimes it is a funny world. Sometimes.
posted by xmutex at 2:28 PM PST - 49 comments

Iranian vice-president is blogging. Mohammad Ali Abtahi is perhaps the only major politician who publishes his personal diary, and his secretly taken photos from official meetings (e.g. the ousted president of Georgia, Eduard Shevardnadze) on his weblog, which is unfortunately only in Persian. (via iranFilter)
posted by hoder at 2:24 PM PST - 9 comments

The 1911 Encyclopedia, or the LoveToKnow Free Online Encyclopedia, is advertised as "what many consider to be the best encyclopedia ever written. As a research tool, this 1911 encyclopedia edition is unparalleled - even today." But what about the definition for Negro? It reads in part: "A dark skin, varying from dark brown, reddish-brown, or chocolate to nearly black; dark tightly curled hair, flat in transverse section,1 of the 'woolly' or the 'frizzly' type; a greater or less tendency to prognathism; eyes dark brown with yellowish cornea; nose more or less broad and flat; and large teeth." Can an encyclopedia with definitions like these be considered useful at all?
posted by josephtate at 1:36 PM PST - 40 comments

Alhamdullah. "I do say that freedom is the Almighty's gift to every person," the president replied. "I also condition it by saying freedom is not America's gift to the world. It's much greater than that, of course. And I believe we worship the same god." Apparently, this is causing no small amount of controversy in the Christian God-believing circles. I was always under the impression that it was commonly accepted that Jews, Christians, and Muslims were all working for the same Guy. So, Bush finally says something that's not completely stupid, and he gets all kind of hell for it. Great.
posted by majcher at 1:26 PM PST - 55 comments

Lost Lives "A generation of Japanese youngsters has dropped out of society entirely, unable to cope, it seems, with the rapid syncopation of life in Asia's most developed nation. The phenomenon has been dubbed hikikomori, or social withdrawal, by psychiatrist Tamaki Saito, who estimates that one in every 40 Japanese households has such a loner. That's an astounding 1 million social dropouts". Great article on Asia and how its countries deal/don't deal with mental illness.
posted by SpaceCadet at 1:17 PM PST - 15 comments

Welcome to Mooves. Flash animation, short movies.
posted by ginz at 12:46 PM PST - 2 comments

Looking for that rare science fiction first edition? The Barry R. Levin Science Fiction & Fantasy Literature store just might have the volume you seek.
posted by starscream at 10:43 AM PST - 2 comments

iPod's Dirty Secret (Links to a page with an emdedded Quicktime movie.) Can anyone confirm or debunk this?
posted by badstone at 10:41 AM PST - 85 comments

ET Could Hack SETI. SETI, which uses down time on the computers of thousands of volunteers to search for intelligent signals from space, has a potential problem—besides information, a broadcast to us from an alien intelligence could also carry a computer virus. Leonard David writes in the main link's space.com article that physicist Richard Carrigan (who works here) takes it seriously. He thinks SETI should figure out how to decontaminate any signals it receives.
posted by jasonspaceman at 9:43 AM PST - 36 comments

Want to create a Christmas list that's not limited to items available at Amazon? There are several universal wishlist websites at your disposal.
posted by sanitycheck at 9:27 AM PST - 4 comments

Freewayblogger.com When you put a sign on the freeway people will read it until someone takes it down.
posted by srboisvert at 8:39 AM PST - 56 comments

Copito de Nieve, a.k.a. Floquet de Neu, the only known white gorilla dies at age 37. It was one of the symbols of my hometown Barcelona. Snowflake was the star of the Barcelona Zoo, he always surrounded by female gorillas (not surprisingly he produced 22 offspring but none of them albino) and was famous because of his bad mood and tendency to throw things around. He was finally put down today as his skin cancer condition was aggravating. There it goes a no small part of my childhood (although I preferred the dolphins, always so cheerful)... Snowflake no longer lives with Virunga and Coco... (sigh!)
posted by samelborp at 8:17 AM PST - 9 comments

About a turkey [NYT] explains why the modern industrial American turkey is so dry and flavourless. It's not your mother's fault, it's the turkey. There is hope: Slow Food honors and preserves flavor in food production. Think where to buy next year's turkey.
posted by Nelson at 8:12 AM PST - 49 comments

Computer generated singer, $200. Vocaloid software, which is due to be released to consumers in January, allows users to cast their own (or anyone else's) songs in a disembodied but exceedingly life-like concert-quality voice. Vocaloid will be able to "sing" whatever combination of notes and words a user feeds it. The first generation of the software will be available for $200. [NYTimes link]
posted by Outlawyr at 3:54 AM PST - 23 comments