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Using Metadata to Find Paul Revere.
posted by kenko at 11:22 PM PST - 23 comments

An interactive calendar showing birthdate rankings and estimated conception dates for each day of the year. Hover over your birthday to see how common it is (darker purple = more common), and what the estimated conception date is. This appears to use US data only, perhaps explaining the sudden drop in birthrate on July 4th, and the northern hemisphere-centric baby boom in the summer months.
posted by Joh at 10:41 PM PST - 77 comments

Facebook versus The Cloud "I got a call, 'Jay, there's a cloud in the data center'," Parikh says. "'What do you mean, outside?'. 'No, inside'." The data centre in question.
posted by GuyZero at 10:20 PM PST - 21 comments

Silent War. "On the hidden battlefields of history’s first known cyber-war, the casualties are piling up. In the U.S., many banks have been hit, and the telecommunications industry seriously damaged, likely in retaliation for several major attacks on Iran. Washington and Tehran are ramping up their cyber-arsenals, built on a black-market digital arms bazaar, enmeshing such high-tech giants as Microsoft, Google, and Apple. With the help of highly placed government and private-sector sources, Michael Joseph Gross describes the outbreak of the conflict, its escalation, and its startling paradox: that America’s bid to stop nuclear proliferation may have unleashed a greater threat."
posted by homunculus at 7:49 PM PST - 46 comments

One of the most striking features about daily life in China is how much of what one encounters has been appropriated from elsewhere. It’s not just the fake iPhones or luxury watches . . . . Above all are the physical spaces. . . . New architecture, when it is notable, is nearly always by foreigners or copying foreign styles, a tendency that has led Western architects to flood into China, often with second-rate projects for sale. . . . These are not just individual buildings but entire streetscapes, with cobblestone alleys, faux churches (often used as concert halls), towers, and landscaping designed to reproduce the feel of European and North American cities. The city of Huizhou features a replica of the Austrian village of Hallstatt; while Hangzhou, a city famous for its own waterfront culture, now includes a “Venice Water Town” that has Italian-style buildings, canals, and gondolas. Other cities in China now feature Dutch colonial-style townhouses, German row houses, and Spanish-style developments.

Architectural Mimicry in Contemporary China from the NYRB blog.
posted by Jasper Friendly Bear at 7:43 PM PST - 12 comments

Kittens gang up on a cardboard box. (SLYT)
posted by overeducated_alligator at 7:40 PM PST - 39 comments

McKenzie Wark, author of A Hacker Manifesto and Gamer Theory, has turned his attention to the Situationist International. [more inside]
posted by whyareyouatriangle at 7:00 PM PST - 17 comments

"Young ladies, indelibly fix this shape of head in your memories. Any man who will make a natural, kind and true husband will have a head in outline from a side view like this." Phrenology Diagrams from Vaught's Practical Character Reader (1902). Full 268-page book available in the LOC's Internet Archive.
posted by madamjujujive at 6:47 PM PST - 26 comments

An excerpt from the short film 5000 Feet is Best by Omer Fast. [more inside]
posted by ovvl at 4:49 PM PST - 8 comments

GamesMaster: The Inside Story
posted by rollick at 3:54 PM PST - 15 comments

Tumblr? Isn't that supposed to be full of furry porn, Teen Wolf fanfiction and teenagers determining the outer limits of priviledge? Not quite, as The Science of Reality shows. Run by Mae, "an aspiring journalist, photojournalist, science enthusiast, writer, & an artist of many fields" who loves "helping people discover the wonders of our universe through science".
posted by MartinWisse at 2:44 PM PST - 15 comments

John Oliver, a standup comedian from Birmingham in England, takes over from Jon Stewart as host of the Daily Show for the summer from tomorrow. The Guardian profiles him. [more inside]
posted by Wordshore at 1:35 PM PST - 91 comments

Around dusk on Feb. 17, Dr. Drew Pinsky was sitting at the computer in his hillside home in Pasadena, Calif., when he received an e-mail from a friend with some troubling news. Mindy McCready, a 37-year-old country singer and a star of the third season of “Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew,” a television show that made its debut on VH1 in 2008, had shot herself at her house in Heber Springs, Ark.
posted by josher71 at 1:06 PM PST - 66 comments

I will be satisfied if the federation of secret law, unequal pardon and irresistible executive powers that rule the world that I love are revealed even for an instant."
posted by bitmage at 1:04 PM PST - 1052 comments

The LA Times Hero Complex looks at diversity in SF and Fantasy fiction.
posted by Artw at 12:12 PM PST - 45 comments

The avant-garde art of book stacking in stores of Japan.
posted by Fizz at 10:36 AM PST - 22 comments

"How Not To Be Alone" Author Jonathan Safran Foer touches on loneliness and empathy in an era of "iDistractions" during his commencement address at Middlebury College. (SLNYT)
posted by raihan_ at 10:09 AM PST - 40 comments

Pitch Battles: How a paranoid fringe group made musical tuning an international issue.

The petition had its origins in one of the strangest conflicts to have overtaken classical music in the past thirty years, and many of these luminaries were completely unaware of what they’d gotten themselves into. The sponsor of both the petition and the conference that featured Tebaldi was an organization called the Schiller Institute, dedicated to, among other things, lowering standard musical pitch. ... But behind this respectable front lurks a strange mélange of conspiracy, demagoguery, and cultish behavior. At its founding in 1984, its chairman Helga Zepp-LaRouche laid out the Institute’s role in surprisingly apocalyptic terms

Originally published at The Believer.
posted by the man of twists and turns at 8:41 AM PST - 51 comments

RIP Iain Banks. [more inside]
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 8:36 AM PST - 372 comments

Recently, a recording of electronic music allegedly created by an East German Kosmische Musik enthusiast recruited to help the DDR's Olympic training programme appeared. This recording turned out to be a hoax created by two musicians from Edinburgh, but, as such, it is the latest in a long line of ersatz krautrock to emerge in recent years. [more inside]
posted by acb at 6:47 AM PST - 18 comments

"One day I dreamed that my parents, my brothers and I went to visit three islands and I jumped into the water without protection," she wrote in her diary. "I felt like I could be in the water and not drown. I was curious and I swam into the deep water and then I saw my skeleton with my name written on it." Roger Omar collects children's dreams, and asks artists to illustrate them. [more inside]
posted by taz at 6:08 AM PST - 18 comments

Woody Allen interviewed by France Roche for the French TV in 1979 (61min SLYT)
posted by lenny70 at 2:12 AM PST - 1 comments

Throughout human history and across the globe, whether as intimate artifacts of interpersonal relations or state-level monumental works, textiles have been imbued with political importance. Textiles can communicate and construct status, ethnicity, gender, power, taste, and wealth, and have functioned at the nexus of artistic, economic, and political achievement in human culture. As trade goods, creative medium, and social artifact, textiles have been instrumental in generating, supporting, and challenging political power.

The Textile Society of America 13th Biennial Symposium (2012) will explore the crossroads of Textiles & Politics.
posted by infini at 1:34 AM PST - 13 comments