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Free at last, free at last, thank Mars almighty Opportunity is free at last. After a several week long struggle, the Mars Opportunity Rover is free from the sand trap many across the world had predicted would bring it to an end.
posted by mk1gti at 11:11 PM PST - 22 comments

"There is a desire among women to look authentic in their fake hair color." The demand for brown hair is rising. Is it because the most beautiful women in the world are brunettes? Whatever the reason, this may be just in time to save blondes from extinction. Of course, when the masses flock, the glitterati flee. If you want to be on the cutting edge, orange is the color. So is Ann Althouse positioned to displace Michelle Malkin as a Higher Being?
posted by Gordon Smith at 9:47 PM PST - 22 comments

Former Nixon speechwriter (and Ferris Bueller's economics teacher) Ben Stein loses his mind over Mark Felt: "There is a lot of debate about whether or not Mark Felt was a hero. Obviously, I don't think so. I think the hero was Richard Nixon, fighting for peace even as he was being horribly mistreated and crucified just for his fight for peace." And that's not nearly the worst of it.
posted by Ty Webb at 8:37 PM PST - 107 comments

PBwiki is a super simple, extremely clean route to having, what you always wanted (admit it), your very own wiki. Just enter your username and email address, and wait for the password to be sent to you, and you're off and running. No need for your own web space, no messing around with CGI, PHP or Python, and if you're worried that the site will vanish and take your stuff with it, you can even download your entire wiki in a ZIP file. It's not the first free wiki farm out there, but it's just about as simple and clean as one can get.

But what do you do with it once you have one? I've been using a personal wiki for keeping track of ideas, places and characters for a (rather sprawling) novel project; the simplified page markup of a wiki combined with easy hyperlinking make them great for brainstorming. You could also start up a game of Lexicon, which is well-suited for play on a wiki, and as previously seen in these parts. Or, you know, you could just start your own Everything. (Originally found on bOINGbOING.)
posted by JHarris at 7:09 PM PST - 17 comments

"Our demands most moderate are , we only want the earth". Today is the birthday of James Connolly.
posted by sgt.serenity at 4:25 PM PST - 39 comments

Edinburgh's Scotsman newspaper has launched a digital archive covering all editions from 1817-1950. There are several stories with an American slant which may be something that interests you. There is coverage on such things as the hanging of the notorious bodysnatchers Burke and Hare. Unfortunately, after viewing the free archives it is a paysite, but I still think it's worth a look as there is easily a couple of hours of interesting reading on the free articles that are included. The set-up and look of this site is brilliant as well.
posted by ClanvidHorse at 1:20 PM PST - 9 comments

The Guinness Diet Challenge.
posted by srboisvert at 1:15 PM PST - 18 comments

Like mutation, but rinses out in four generations! A new study finds that exposure to high levels of environmental toxins produces epigenetic changes in rats' sperm. "Epigenetics does not involve DNA sequence changes but chemical modification of the DNA." Ultimately, this may help to explain why certain human diseases, such as breast and prostate cancer, are becoming more common. The increase in the incidence of these diseases cannot be accounted for by a normal rate of genetic mutation, but epigenetic damage could be the culprit.
posted by bricoleur at 11:58 AM PST - 7 comments

The Hidden History of the United Nations: "The history told about the defeat of Nazism and the founding of the United Nations in the 1940s has become distorted. A false view of the past is being used today to shape how we think about our future. The military power of the victorious wartime allies is offered as a model for running the world, while the UN’s supposed utopianism is seen as ineffective and irrelevant. This is a travesty of the facts."
posted by jenleigh at 11:16 AM PST - 15 comments

Julians Beever draws on sidewalks with chalk. His drawings range from insects to commercial objects to self portraits. I don't know if he designs them on a his laptop, but as with LCD screens, viewing angle is critically important.
posted by alms at 10:16 AM PST - 29 comments

Separated at Birth? Bret Schundler and Howard Dean
posted by warbaby at 9:51 AM PST - 17 comments

Atlas reveals global devastation....... a new atlas just released by the UN showing before and after satellite imagery of the last 30 years (more or less) of human impact. NEATO!
posted by tarantula at 9:37 AM PST - 23 comments

The making of a D-Day tradition... I immediately get goosebumps when I hear the score of Band of Brothers...I'm not sure why, maybe it was my local connections (Dick Winters, Bill Guanere, Albert Blithe, Babe Heffron, Thomas Meehan, Ralph Spina, Harry Welsh, and Robert Strayer are all from Philadelphia), the surrounding suburbs, or Pennsylvania), or maybe it was because the original airings took place in the shadow of 9/11 (the premiere was September 9th, 2001, with the D-Day drop occuring in the second episode, Day of Days, on 9/16/2001), but this series will ALWAYS have a special place in my heart. Everything is done so beautifully, from the special effects, to the sound, the music, to the dutiful translation from Stephen Ambrose book to the screen. It's certainly worthy of the 9.5 out of 10 that IMDB readers had given it. Every year now since, either HBO (On Demand - you have to subscribe to HBO plus have digital cable) or the History Channel has played Tom Hanks' and Steven Spielberg's masterful WW2 epic. You can think of it as Saving Private Ryan, but 3 times as long. Even if war movies are not your thing, I can almost guarantee that they will see the human side of the soldier and becomely deeply invested in the characters. Follow the men of Easy Company from training and the running of Currahee, to the parachute jump on D-Day, through the liberation of Europe, the horror of a German concentration camp, and eventually to the end of the war, to Hitler's mountaintop retreat. I'm not the only one - check out the numerous fan sites to BoB (forum shorthand for Band of Brothers) here, here, and here, as well as entries on TVTome, Wikipedia, and Television without Pity. If you want to try before you commit to watching the whole thing, I'd recommend the episodes Day of Days, Crossroads, and the Breaking Point.
posted by rzklkng at 8:52 AM PST - 24 comments

Other Africas. Critical observers have long noted that museum collections from Africa are composed largely of the spoils of colonial pillage. Thus the Africa we normally encounter in museums—the Africa of masks and ritual objects displayed on walls and in glass cases—is a fetishized Africa of colonial nostalgia. The objective of this exhibit is to offer images of Other Africas, perspectives that lead us away from the desolate and romanticized Africa of the Western imagination toward those places where African modernities are emerging.
posted by tpoh.org at 7:20 AM PST - 27 comments

How the Right Rationalizes Racial Inequality in America (Part One - The Labor Market) & (Part Two - Criminal Justice) by Tim Wise
posted by y2karl at 7:10 AM PST - 32 comments

african dress traditions as shown in a collection of old photographs ... (some photos show bare breasted women)
posted by pyramid termite at 5:34 AM PST - 9 comments

Great Cthulhu emerges from his slumber. Disaffected, reactionary, pro-sex tourism and anti-Islam, Europe's most controversial living writer Michel Houllebecq lovingly profiles H.P. Lovecraft. [via rw]
posted by Bletch at 5:07 AM PST - 16 comments

“Could you cut four inches off to make it work?”.... how to talk to an Artist.
posted by R. Mutt at 4:47 AM PST - 46 comments