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Excellent news if you're overwhelmed by feelings of being imposingly huge & impressive; this brief set of QTVR photos taken inside of a wind tunnel should help realign your sense of place in the world. Warning: those feeling tiny & insignificant should under no circumstances click the link in this post.
posted by jonson at 11:36 PM PST - 26 comments

Remember when Uwe Boll challenged his critics in the boxing ring? Some of them accepted and the event went down on September 23rd. One of the challengers was Lowtax, who had some fun with it.
posted by bob sarabia at 10:06 PM PST - 40 comments

He loves tradition: "[He] said he came to Virginia because he wanted to play football in a place where 'blacks knew their place'."

He gives free food to the poor: "After they had killed a deer, [he asked] where the local black residents lived. [He] then drove... to that neighborhood with the severed head of the deer. 'He proceeded to take the doe's head and stuff it into a mailbox'".

And even before "macaca", he enjoyed giving out clever nicknames: "[He] gave him the nickname 'Wizard,' because he shared a last name with.... the imperial wizard of the United Klans of America".

(But don't call him a Jew! That would be an "aspersion.")
posted by orthogonality at 9:09 PM PST - 145 comments

A case of Horlicks for 1,000 - 2,000 British Pounds (the lot description doesn't contains a mention of any actual Horlicks though). Horlicks has been around since 1883. Their early efforts at promotion included the invention of a condition they called 'Night Starvation'. As well as press, radio (they sponsored Dan Dare) and television advertising they also featured in the cinema at one time. These films, made by George Pál, are quite surreal. Although Horlicks seems to be made from the same ingredients as Maltesers, the company has pushed their product in India as making children "taller, stronger and sharper" - tying it in with the Superman Returns movie. Back home in England, Horlicks is made fun of despite the fact that it is one of the ingredients in a jolly nice self-saucing pudding.
posted by tellurian at 9:07 PM PST - 40 comments

RED ONE is a 12.6 megapixel digital film/HD camcorder developed by Jim Jannard, founder of the Oakley sunglasses company. The camera will retail for $17,500, and is alleged to outperform HD and digital film cameras from established companies like Sony, Arri, Panavision and Dalsa (whose offerings all cost well in excess of $100,000). The general consensus among pundits in media production circles is that Jannard's camera will be a true disruptive technology. Last night, no less than 24 hours after the very first publically available sample images from the camera's "Mysterium" sensor were posted to the RED Digital Cinema website, the company's development offices were broken into. According to Jannard, "Everything they took was camera and camera file related...there is no question all they came for was RED camera stuff." (Additional obligatory and annoying YouTube links: First public demonstration of the RED camera at the IBC convention in Amsterdam and the RED Q & A session that followed.)
posted by melorama at 7:06 PM PST - 79 comments

"The streets of 2030's New York remain the only venues not under the thumb of the monolithic corporations. Manhattan’s three major hacker gangs have developed black-market technology that enables them to jack into the phone network though the payphone nodes, and redirect the payment deposited into that phone into their own coffers." The premise of a new cyberpunk novel? Nope. A new street game you can play with your friends.
posted by maniactown at 6:51 PM PST - 16 comments

Plunging into the shadows: "In thinly traded, lightly regulated and untransparent markets, the bold can make an awful lot of money—and they can lose it on an even more extravagant scale... In today's caffeine-fuelled dealing rooms, a barely regulated private-equity group could very well borrow money from syndicates of private lenders, including hedge funds, to spend on taking public companies private. At each stage, risks can be converted into securities, sliced up, repackaged, sold on and sliced up again. The endless opportunities to write contracts on underlying debt instruments explains why the outstanding value of credit-derivatives contracts has rocketed to $26 trillion—$9 trillion more than six months ago, and seven times as much as in 2003."
posted by kliuless at 6:39 PM PST - 27 comments

Don't mess with my Citgo sign!
posted by freshwater_pr0n at 3:27 PM PST - 44 comments

Have you ever run into Trotskyites before? You know, those dour, uptight dudes handing out free papers at demonstrations? They can spout some pretty colorful rhetoric but apart from that, most of them lead dull, constricted lives devoted to Party meetings and getting out the Party newspaper. Juan Posadas was the exception to this rule. Señor Posadas was a high-octane Trotskyite superfreak who advocated a pre-emptive nuclear strike on the USA in order to hasten the proletarian revolution. He looked to the skies and saw UFOs as evidence of the triumph of communism on other planets. Fidel Castro banned the Cuban section of his movement for trying to organize an attack on the U.S. base at Guantanamo. They don’t make ‘em like Posadas anymore. That’s for sure. (If you’re curious, there’s an archive of his works stored here. And some people are still keeping the faith.)
posted by jason's_planet at 3:14 PM PST - 50 comments

And God said
"C:\>RUN HEAVEN AND EARTH"

Oops.
posted by moonshine at 3:03 PM PST - 46 comments

See one, do one, teach one. This has been the mantra of medical education on the wards for a very long time. But is it fair to the patient on the receiving end of that third-year medical student's awkward physical exam? Since their first use over forty years ago at the University of Southern California, standardized patients (or simulated patients, medical actors or teaching associates) have been employed to help medical students learn how to examine patients. This internist signed his own mother up and much to his surprise found it helped her as much as her students [NB: requires registration or BugMeNot; .pdf available here].
A special subset of these teachers, called gynecologic teacing associates, bravely allow medical students to go where they've often never been before (with a white coat on). One 2nd year medical student found the experience helpful enough to write about it in the Village Voice [clinically NSFW]. And naturally, as technology marches on, even teaching associates may be downsized [technically NSFW].
posted by scblackman at 12:56 PM PST - 20 comments

Does the tolerance for abuses committed during the “war on terrorism” have any implications for the health of democracy at home?

The President’s broad new powers in the signing statements that enable him to override Congress have corroded the American system of checks and balances. American law enforcement agencies can now wiretap American civilians and detain citizens and permanent residents without charges, and consequently without evidence. Last week the House passed legislation to build a 700-mile Israeli-style fence on the U.S.–Mexico border and to deploy there many of the surveillance technologies tested in Iraq. Perhaps the domestic installation of wartime technologies and military surveillance in civilian settings has become acceptable to us because we have become accustomed, as Soviet citizens did during the endless Stalinist purges, to open-ended wars—wars with no opening salvo and no concluding treaty. Whether or not one agrees that American detention centers and secret prisons are the “Gulag of our time,” the comparison deserves serious consideration. It might help us shine a torch into the dark corners of repression, where the totalitarian qualities of our own society lurk, before the scale of violence ascends to Gulag dimensions.

Six Questions on the American “Gulag” for Historian Kate Brown
See also Bush seeks immunity for violating War Crimes Act
posted by y2karl at 12:27 PM PST - 50 comments

Interview with President Clinton.
posted by rxrfrx at 11:17 AM PST - 182 comments

CDX: great Flash adventure by BBC History (in association with Preloaded) for their "Ancient Rome" series.
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane at 10:52 AM PST - 10 comments

Sita Sings the Blues is a feature film (in progress) combining the ancient Indian epic Ramayana, the 1920's blues vocals of Annette Hanshaw, and classically informed but modern animation. The animator wanted to envision what the Ramayana would look like told through the eyes of its much loved and much maligned female character, Sita. This is not the first time the Ramayana has been retold from Sita's perspective, Sanctuary, a play by Hema Ramakrishna is a feminist reinterpretation that has garnered a lot of controversy. Retelling the Ramayana is part of the tradition.
posted by arcticwoman at 10:34 AM PST - 7 comments

Being and Seeming: the Technology of Representation an essay by novelist Richard Powers
posted by MetaMonkey at 10:20 AM PST - 11 comments

"Democrats passed those black codes and Jim Crow laws. Democrats started the Ku Klux Klan." The National Black Republican Association airs a radio ad (mp3).
posted by four panels at 9:41 AM PST - 42 comments

The popularity of podcasting has grown by leaps and bounds in the past year. Evan Williams, co-founder and former CEO of Pyra Labs, the makers of Blogger, is a co-founder of Odeo, a resource for podcast listeners and podcasters. More info here. Odeo is just one of many podcast directories; personally, my favorite is Podcast Pickle. Another great resource for audio content is PodioBooks.com, founded by Evo Terra. PodioBooks are serialized audio books which are made available in podcast format, many read by their authors. [more inside]
posted by eclectica at 9:11 AM PST - 29 comments

Line Rider. It is all downhill.
posted by srboisvert at 5:04 AM PST - 55 comments

The Ballad of Big Mike. “Where are you going?” he asked. “To basketball practice,” Michael said. “Michael, you don’t have basketball practice,” Sean said. “I know,” the boy said. “But they got heat there.” Sean didn’t understand that one. “It’s nice and warm in that gym,” the boy said. As they drove off, Sean looked over and saw tears streaming down Leigh Anne’s face. And he thought, Uh-oh, my wife’s about to take over. ... “One night it wasn’t going so well, and I got frustrated,” Mitchell says, “and he said to me, ‘Miss Sue, you have to remember I’ve only been going to school for two years.”’
posted by caddis at 4:50 AM PST - 40 comments

IGN's top 50 Marvel Comics covers including this wonderful farmgirl She-Hulk (well, she DOES have two green thumbs!), this amazing Wolverine Origins painting, and...umm...superhero zombies?
posted by Kickstart70 at 4:22 AM PST - 35 comments