MetaFilter

Google is now offering PDFs of public domain books. Okay, this is a direct lift from Boing Boing but I figured it was too juicy for Metafilter to miss. On my first search I found An Historical Account of the Discovery and Education of a Savage Man, E. M. Itard's account (translated) of his experiences with Victor, the Wild Boy of Aveyron. What else is there, MeFiers?
comment posted at 10:24 PM on Aug-29-06
comment posted at 12:12 AM on Aug-30-06

United States authorities have dropped all charges against the man accused of murdering child beauty queen JonBenet Ramsey after a DNA test showed his DNA does not match that found on JonBenet's body.
comment posted at 1:03 AM on Aug-29-06

Ayten Ahmet is a 16 year old girl who wants to win the Miss Teen Australia Beauty pageant [some links here possibly NSFW]. The problem is some of Australia's Muslim leaders, such as Melbourne cleric Sheik Mohammed Omran, have branded her entry into the competition as a "slur on Islam". Ayten doesn't know what all the fuss is about, saying "As long as you present yourself well, respect yourself and respect others, that's what's important. Religion's not an issue." [more inside]
comment posted at 9:10 PM on Aug-27-06

Psychiatry by Prescription - Do psychotropic drugs blur the boundaries between illness and health?
comment posted at 7:24 PM on Aug-27-06

We Shall Not Be Moved: Some joined the US military as a patriotic duty, some to better themselves, but the horrors of serving in Iraq, including Abu Ghraib, changed everything. Deserters tell Gary Younge why they had to quit.
comment posted at 9:52 PM on Aug-27-06

On Sept. 11, CNN will replay its coverage from 2001 in real time, online. They will make their little-noticed Pipeline service free for the day.
comment posted at 5:28 PM on Aug-25-06

"I would have your wife right in front of you. I would smoke the last of your glaucoma medication. Then I will surely drink your liquor cabinet dry. However, know this my friend. I will never break an oath to uphold the public trust. My affidavit will be signed in my own blood. A Pirates crimson mark, with real binding effects into my after life. Laugh if you will then ask yourself if you could do it." James Hill is running for congress in Iowa's first district. He accepts no money from anybody.
comment posted at 7:33 PM on Aug-27-06

Every issue of the New Yorker on a portable hard drive. For $299 you get an 80GB hard drive loaded with every article, poem, short story, advertisement and lame cartoon that has appeared in the over 4,000 issues of The New Yorker Magazine since February, 1925. The vintage ads alone MIGHT be worth it (depending on res/format) but does anyone really WANT every one of those unfunny cartoons? Does anyone outside NYC even care that this magazine is still being published?
comment posted at 10:39 PM on Aug-24-06

Slo-Mo Home Depot. Improv Everywhere got 250 people to wander around a Home Depot in slow motion. [via]
comment posted at 11:07 PM on Aug-24-06

We recently saw people playing at being zombies, which is fun and all, but wouldn't you rather kill zombies than be one? I sure as hell would, so there's [more inside]
comment posted at 6:58 AM on Aug-24-06

People don't write manifestos like they used to... Whatever happened to the Surrealist Manifesto? How about the the Italian Futurist Manifesto (and its many spinoffs)? There's also First and Second OuLiPo Manifestos, Humanist (I, II, & III) as well as Post-Humanist Manifestos, not to mention Donna Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto: "...an ironic political myth faithful to feminism, socialism, and materialism...."
comment posted at 1:14 AM on Aug-25-06

New Line drops the SOAP today. After months of gags, comments, and speculation, the most-talked-about movie of the year, and one of the largest epidemics of viral marketing in film history, opens in theatres. So is the movie actually good? AICN says so. Rotten Tomatoes says so. And Samuel L. Jackson... let's let him speak for himself. And if you don't like it, go make your own.
comment posted at 4:44 PM on Aug-18-06

web2.0 logo creatr for yr web ideaz Beta
comment posted at 9:05 PM on Aug-17-06
comment posted at 4:48 AM on Aug-18-06

OutsideIn Korea - brought to the world by our own stavrosthewonderchicken. He asked what you would like to see on the site here. Now sit back while he brings it to you. Or not. Probably not, now I think about it. In any case, the man writes like a demon on crack (except twice as interesting) and, whether or not you have the slightest interest in Korea, you will be entertained by the stories. If you follow his personal site, you know what to expect. If you have never read his writings before, strap in, you're in for a bumpy ride.
comment posted at 5:41 AM on Aug-14-06
comment posted at 3:52 PM on Aug-14-06

This is what we all hoped the internet would be about. When we discovered the internet, most of us saw it as a way to connect to other people. Peter has only been on youtube for a week. His first video has been viewed nearly 300,000 times, and there isn't a single idiot teenager within range of the camera. Do you have a few minutes to spare? Spend them with Peter. Six videos, and hopefully, more to come.
comment posted at 7:22 PM on Aug-12-06
comment posted at 3:38 AM on Aug-14-06

SomethingAwful is trying to create another viral campaign via blogs, youtube and myspace and ytmd. It surrounds an especially freaky spinoff of a simpsons video made for reasons unknown. SA has been noted in the past for making the "popped collar" viral campaign as well. Expect animated gifs and crackpot references galore. Of course, be wary of attempts to mask this great scheme (nsfw). Of course, Team Barry is always one to expose.
comment posted at 1:15 AM on Aug-6-06
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comment posted at 7:51 PM on Aug-6-06

English tutors complain of Chinese abuse. As the Chinese economy keeps expanding, so does the number of foreigners in China. Like the people in the article some of them have had horrible experiences, others have had funny experiences and many have had sleazy experiences (NSFW text). And they all blog about it!
comment posted at 8:49 PM on Aug-5-06
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comment posted at 5:39 PM on Aug-6-06

Kittenfilter! If ever a one-link YouTube post was justified, this must surely be the one.
comment posted at 8:11 PM on Aug-4-06

Can pathogens effect culture? Possibly.
comment posted at 3:21 AM on Aug-3-06

Work Friendly is the greatest website ever for people trying to get away with web browsing at work. You enter a URL, it launches a new window styled to resemble a Word Document window. It even includes a "Boss" key to convert the page to regular text. Check out MeFi in it. [via waxy]
comment posted at 4:41 PM on Aug-2-06

Carnival of Mel: Moxie and Steve H are getting drunk and blogging it in real time. It's a controlled (ha!) experiment to see if it makes them anti-semitic, the way Mel Gibson says it does.
comment posted at 5:32 PM on Aug-1-06

Wikiality: the reality that the majority of people agree upon. Stephen Colbert is at it again, provoking some chaos in his segment, "The Word," by asking viewers to change the Wikipedia entry on elephants to say that the population has tripled in the last three months. How can Wikipedia deal with the problem of vandalism? Here's an interesting article from the New Yorker about "the world’s most ambitious vanity press."
comment posted at 5:34 PM on Aug-1-06

Get Rich Slowly, a personal finance web site (created by our jdroth), has been educational to someone who spent most of his life until now pretending financial matters don't exist. His blog is updated frequently, and contains insightful tips on living frugally, eliminating debt, saving and investing. Between his site, and another very educational site entitled I Will Teach You To Be Rich (start here), I've greatly expanded my knowledge about managing my money effectively. Perhaps most importantly, they're both consistently interesting and easy reads. [more inside]
comment posted at 4:44 PM on Aug-2-06
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comment posted at 9:06 PM on Aug-2-06

"Workers were also told not to flirt with one another." After eight years of "fiasco", Wal-Mart bails on Germany.
comment posted at 7:08 PM on Jul-29-06

Photosynth is a new image processing technology from Microsoft that takes a collection of images (say, of a famous location), analyzes them for similarities & rebuilds the location in virtual space for the user to fly though, zooming in on details, panning around like a 3D Hockney piece. Video of how it works here.
comment posted at 5:36 PM on Jul-29-06
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comment posted at 1:39 AM on Jul-30-06

Owen Wilson has denied any connection between his new movie, "You, Me and Dupree," and '70s supergroup Steely Dan, a spokesman for the actor said Friday. The band recently posted a letter on their Web site claiming that Wilson's Dupree character was based on their Grammy-winning song, "Cousin Dupree," about a couch-hopping houseguest. In a statement released by his spokeswoman, Ina Treciokas, Wilson said: "I have never heard the song `Cousin Dupree' and I don't even know who this gentleman, Mr. Steely Dan, is. I hope this helps to clear things up and I can get back to concentrating on my new movie, `HEY 19.'"
comment posted at 5:38 PM on Jul-29-06
comment posted at 8:25 PM on Jul-29-06

Ever Wonder? "[H]oping to push existing boundaries, this paper will put the accumulated knowledge of two animals to the ultimate test, in an attempt to answer the age-old question of who would win in a fight between a penguin and a lemur. Courtesy of MeFi's own Milkman Dan.
comment posted at 8:06 PM on Jul-28-06

Lit majors - English prof. drops knowledge
comment posted at 10:41 PM on Jul-25-06

Moscow's decadent post-Communism nightclub scene. Stalin's yacht pushes up the Moscow River at eight a.m., and nobody cares if you missed it. The world's longest-running after-party just keeps going. In a shipboard ballroom, Russia's lucky few tend to their good time. Music like a lot of loud nothing pounds through the girls lathered in Valentino, Gaultier, and Bulgari. Defying you with their eyes, they throw off a kind of heat that has never burned you before. The men with money and new style hang around the edges with satisfied smiles, their low-vibrating calm punching through thousand-dollar sunglasses. They'll kiss you, they'll kill you, you'll know where you stand.
comment posted at 11:09 PM on Jul-25-06

WinMX is back (kind of). It was such an unbelievably awesome file sharing program that its makers had to pull their peer caches after being served a cease and desist order in September 2005. Now it has been reincarnated as MXpie. Even better . . . it's not spyware or adware.
comment posted at 1:24 AM on Jul-25-06