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Since 2006 (if not before), February has been Dilla month for some music fans. Sadly, it's mostly due to the fact James Dewitt Yancey, better known as J Dilla, was both born and died in February (Feb. 7, 1974 to Feb. 10, 2006). Looking at the mere timespan of his musical career, from his first release in 1992 [YouTube sample] to his death 14 years later, you might think the story and impact wouldn't be too large or lasting, but you'd be mistaken. For example, Giovanni Russonello wrote a piece for NPR last year, titled "Why J Dilla may be jazz's latest great innovator," and in their recently released long-time-coming mixtape, Busta Rhymes and Q-Tip included a couple nods to "one of the godfathers of this boom-bap shit". Where did Dilla come from, where did he go, and why is his legacy still so strong? [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 8:53 PM PST - 22 comments

"Everything is fine and the world is beautiful. It's raining, it's dark, I woke up at 5:30AM, I'm commuting in traffic. I would have had a headache, I would have been miserable, I would have wondered how my life took me to this point. This point I'm at right now. But no, no, everything is fine. Life is beautiful. The rain drops are just falling and in each one I see the reflection of every persons life around me. Humanity is beautiful. In this still frame shot of traffic on this crowded bus I just found love and peace. Heroin is a wonder drug. Heroin is better than everything else. Heroin makes me who I wish I was. Heroin makes life worth living. Heroin is better than everything else." [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi at 8:45 PM PST - 106 comments

The English Baroque Festival Orchestra performs Händel's The Water Music with the English Bach Festival Dancers. (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (8) [more inside]
posted by winna at 7:27 PM PST - 5 comments

The state of ebony Bob Taylor on why your next guitar's fretboard may show some striation.
posted by Wolof at 7:06 PM PST - 44 comments

Desire paths [previously] show us where we want to walk. Snowy neckdowns, or "sneckdowns," show us where we don't need to drive. [more inside]
posted by Knappster at 7:04 PM PST - 22 comments

The Empathy Exams: Acting out pain until that pain becomes real, for $13.50 an hour. "My job title is Medical Actor, which means I play sick. I get paid by the hour. Medical students guess my maladies. I’m called a Standardized Patient, which means I act toward the norms of my disorders. I’m standardized-lingo SP for short. I’m fluent in the symptoms of preeclampsia and asthma and appendicitis. I play a mom whose baby has blue lips..."
posted by homunculus at 6:28 PM PST - 34 comments

The truth about the luxury of Qatar Airways [more inside]
posted by armage at 6:27 PM PST - 24 comments

My right arm seemed no longer a part of my body. I couldn’t control it; it was limp at my side, like the worst dead arm you can imagine, but completely out of nowhere.
posted by rcraniac at 5:24 PM PST - 24 comments

Anne Frank's box of marbles has re-surfaced.
posted by bearwife at 4:53 PM PST - 12 comments

Arthur Chu has won "Jeopardy" over the last few days by employing strategies rooted in game theory. This has caused consternation among some purists.
posted by reenum at 3:39 PM PST - 99 comments

mapschool [via mefi projects]
posted by aniola at 2:56 PM PST - 15 comments

The media have begun to arrive in Sochi for the 2014 Winter Olympics, which kick off this Friday. Aside from the typical local colour, journalists have flagged some, shall we say, idiosyncratic aspects of the facilities and accommodations. The quirk that has generated the most discussion? Well that would have to be the double-toilet stall, and the official PR response. Or it might be the hiring of a local company to kill stray dogs. Last minute dashes to the construction finish line are certainly nothing new for Olympic hosts. Perhaps this is just the Russian take on a time-honoured tradition. Previous coverage of the run-up to the Sochi Olympics here and here.
posted by dry white toast at 2:42 PM PST - 159 comments

Alaska's rape rate is the highest in the country -- three times the national average. To find out why, I went to Alaska to talk with victims, politicians -- and the rapists. [more inside]
posted by Blasdelb at 2:12 PM PST - 55 comments

7 Hand Gestures That Make You Look Like a Real Intellectual
posted by St. Peepsburg at 1:59 PM PST - 89 comments

"To be honest," he says, "I had got to the point in London when I started to feel a little frustrated. I know moaning is part of our national character, but I hate it. And I found myself moaning a lot about theatre. Why did they decide to put that on? How come he got to direct that? And why is it that they only want plays about black people who are part of the underclass or involved in street crime? Is it because those are the only types of plays about minorities that ageing white middle-aged reviewers feel they can understand? I just found myself moaning and moaning and moaning…" (slGrauniad)
posted by Kitteh at 1:21 PM PST - 12 comments

Academics launch torrent site to share papers and datasets [more inside]
posted by eviemath at 1:12 PM PST - 12 comments

Marc Wilson’s series The Last Stand documents the remains of coastal fortifications that lined Northern Europe during the Second World War — bunkers swallowed by the sea, pillboxes barely clinging to land, buildings ripped from their foundations and wrecked on the rocks — from Allied positions on England’s east coast and the far tip of the Northern Isles, to the once German-occupied archipelago of the Channel Islands and the remains of the Atlantikwall, the colossal Nazi defense network which stretched from Norway to Spain.

Slideshow
posted by infini at 12:59 PM PST - 8 comments

At first sight the search for peace and stability in Iraq, and the search for physical and mental fitness in the extreme contortions of modern Yoga seem to have absolutely nothing in common. But curiously they do. Both the terrible structural problems and distortions that underly Iraqi society today, and the strange, contorted poses that millions of people perform every day in things like Bikram's Hot Yoga, actually come from the fevered imagination of the British ruling class one hundred years ago. As they felt Britain's power declining they wanted desperately to go back into the past and create a purer and more innocent world, uncorrupted by the messiness of the modern industrial world - a new Eden forged both by strengthening and purifying the human body and by inventing new model countries round the world. And we are still suffering from the consequences of that terrible nostalgia. BODYBUILDING AND NATION-BUILDING
posted by timshel at 12:33 PM PST - 11 comments

Ordinary Bill is a perfectly good comic strip loosely based on creator Will Wilson's and his girlfriend's lives. Last Sunday that connection was more noticable than usual, as Wilson used his cartoon stand-in to propose to her. Fortunately, she said yes.
posted by MartinWisse at 12:15 PM PST - 35 comments

The women's magazine parody The Reductress (previously) has unleashed the end-all be-all of brand-dropping, pill-popping nightlife columns: Slave To The Night Thoughts by Our Nightlife Editor, Dafna VanClifton
posted by The Whelk at 11:51 AM PST - 20 comments

How a 1908 Anti-Suffrage Cartoon Became an Internet Sensation (poster, tumblr) [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 11:43 AM PST - 72 comments

"Putin needs external enemies and internal enemies. The external enemies are the U.S. and Europe. Internal enemies, they had to think about. The ethnic topic is dangerous. Two wars in the Caucasus, a third one, nobody knows how it would end. Jews? After Hitler, it's not kosher. We—" she waves a hand at herself and Zhenya—"are the ideal. We are everywhere. We don't look different, but we are. It's our turn. Just our turn." A GQ reporter visited Russia to speak to gay rights activists, and also to their enemies (some of whom, warning, describe committing acts of violence). Previously.
posted by showbiz_liz at 11:40 AM PST - 22 comments

Who Killed the Jeff Davis 8? A serial killer has allegedly been preying on Louisiana prostitutes. But a new investigation reveals a far scarier theory.
posted by (Arsenio) Hall and (Warren) Oates at 11:17 AM PST - 39 comments

Jared Lorenzen briefly played backup quarterback in the NFL and became famous for his unusual size (for a quarterback). When videos of him dominating minor league arena football recently appeared online, SBNation tracked his entire fascinating post-NFL history in Jared Lorenzen: 300+ pound QB, American folk hero.
posted by mathowie at 9:26 AM PST - 52 comments

A new attempt to decipher the Voynich manuscript has been made - this time from a botanical perspective. The Voynich manuscript, is an illustrated codex hand-written in an unknown writing system. The book has been carbon-dated to the early 15th century (1404–1438), and may have been composed in Northern Italy during the Italian Renaissance. The manuscript is named after Wilfrid Voynich, a book dealer who purchased it in 1912.[Wiki]. [more inside]
posted by yoyo_nyc at 8:41 AM PST - 93 comments

Happy birthday Facebook! To celebrate ten years, Facebook has created a special "A Look Back" movie for each user with some highlights of the user's timeline. (Requires Facebook account.)
posted by grouse at 7:22 AM PST - 179 comments

Thomas Baekdal writes on How In-app Purchases Have Destroyed The [Game] Industry:

We have reached a point in which mobile games couldn't even be said to be a game anymore. Playing a game means that you have fun. It doesn't mean that you sit around and wait for the game to annoy you for so long that you decide to pay credits to speed it up. And for an old geezer like me who remember the glory days of gaming back in the 1990s, it's just unbearable to watch.

Drew Crawford answers:

See, in the in-app purchase model actually predates phones. It predates video game consoles. It goes all the way back to the arcade, where millions of consumers were happy to pay a whole quarter ... to pay for just a few minutes.

posted by frimble at 7:12 AM PST - 147 comments

Fans of classic southern R&B and soul, and I'm talking the Stax variety, should get down on their knee and genuflect toward Norway, and then sing the praises of the BBC down every corner and alleyway of the city of Memphis. Why? Well, for hosting and for documenting a sweaty, burning, solidly funky evening back in 1967: Otis Redding & Friends Stax Volt Revue
posted by flapjax at midnite at 7:06 AM PST - 28 comments

Satya Nadella, a 22 year veteran of Microsoft, is the company's new CEO. Founder Bill Gates will step down as Chairman. [more inside]
posted by gwint at 7:04 AM PST - 65 comments

Icons, a promotion for The Sunday Times’ Culture section, is a short video that features a cleverly done shifting series of iconic cultural images done in a single take. [slv(imeo) | via]
posted by quin at 6:45 AM PST - 9 comments

So, I calmly announced to my wife: “I’m going to build my own coffin. I just thought you should know.”
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 5:51 AM PST - 27 comments

Watching Ten Minutes of Transformers Transforming did make me a little dizzy. Three movies worth of transformations in 1080p.
posted by tarpin at 3:31 AM PST - 68 comments

A man who served as UKIP's Commonwealth spokesman for a year is the former leader of a kidnapping gang in Pakistan, BBC Newsnight can reveal. Mujeeb ur Rehman Bhutto's gang were behind a high-profile kidnapping in Karachi in 2004 and he then took a £56,000 ransom payment in Manchester. In 2005, Bhutto, of Leeds, admitted being the gang's "boss" and was jailed for seven years by a UK court. UKIP said Bhutto, 35, had "recently" resigned his party membership.
posted by marienbad at 2:20 AM PST - 26 comments

When the Song Dies

In Scotland, folk songs serve as memories, of places and the dead who once inhabited them. Exploring the theme of change, When the Song Dies seeks to bring the audience under the captive spell of the old ways. Featuring a range of contributors, the film is a poignant reminder that the dead linger on, all around us, in the houses and landscapes we live in, and in the language and music of our culture. Whilst Scottishness is at the heart of the film, this story is as universal as it is specific. It is the story of a culture that is, like so many, in danger of fading from human memory.

A 15-minute film directed by Jamie Chambers.
posted by Lezzles at 12:46 AM PST - 6 comments