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Yahoo's Blow to Work-Family Balance: Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer, the first pregnant woman to ever become CEO of a corporation, has ordered all telecommuting employees back to the office. (Previously on MeFi)
comment posted at 11:55 PM on Feb-26-13

Zhang Kechun's photo series "The Yellow River" contains 40 photos of China's second longest river, ranging from cinematic to surreal, plus a lyrical introduction to the series. [via BoringPostcards at MetaChat]
comment posted at 12:55 AM on Feb-27-13

Woman thought she hit, killed bird
comment posted at 9:57 PM on Feb-26-13

There's been quite the political earthquake in Italy this weekend: the latest national elections have up-ended all expectations, with Silvio Berlusconi's populist right bouncing back to a photo-finish against the forecasted favourite center-left coalition, headed by Pier Luigi Bersani. But it's neither of their results that will cause the real aftershocks - those are the sole honour (and, now, onus) of the most meteoric of political entities Europe has ever witnessed: former comic Beppe Grillo's 5-Star MoVement, formally founded just three years ago, have crowned their national electoral debut by earning over 25% of the popular vote, becoming Italy's leading political force.
comment posted at 8:47 PM on Feb-25-13
comment posted at 7:05 AM on Feb-27-13

Pope Benedict resigns
comment posted at 5:21 AM on Feb-11-13

An updated gallery of National Geographic photographer Steve McCurry's last roll of Kodachrome film.
comment posted at 10:29 PM on Feb-9-13

The Nordic countries are reinventing their model of capitalism
comment posted at 4:52 PM on Feb-8-13

“LEGO® sets are not cheap toys. They are made to the highest standards and have the price to go along with it. However, in the past couple decades it seems that the price of LEGO sets has become outrageous. New sets can sell for up to $500 retail and old sets can sell for twice that in a secondary market. This is a children’s toy, right? There is no way LEGO sets have always been this expensive; it is just molded plastic. Let’s take a look at the history of LEGO pricing and try to figure out what is going on.”
comment posted at 6:55 PM on Feb-7-13

A confidential Justice Department memo concludes that the U.S. government can order the killing of American citizens if they are believed to be “senior operational leaders” of al-Qaida or “an associated force” -- even if there is no intelligence indicating they are engaged in an active plot to attack the U.S.
comment posted at 1:48 AM on Feb-5-13

CBS banned SodaStream’s Super Bowl spot because, apparently, it was too much of a direct hit to two of its biggest sponsors, Coke and Pepsi.
comment posted at 6:56 AM on Feb-4-13

Today is the unveiling day of the results of ID tests that may reveal that a skeleton found under a car park in Leicester is that of the last King of England to be killed in battle, Richard III.
comment posted at 8:10 PM on Feb-4-13

Saving a Dying Language
comment posted at 7:24 PM on Feb-3-13

From April 2013 all working-age housing benefit claimants will experience a reduction in their benefit if their home has what is termed a 'spare bedroom'. Some people have a problem with this, and it is believed it will plunge 95,000 Britons into poverty. Prime Minister David Cameron has defended the tax saying it is important to "get control of housing benefit". Some who voted for the tax claim to have never heard of it, even though there are some high profile cases in the media detailing how people will suffer. The Bedroom Tax might be targeting the poor, but there may be a Mansion Tax in the planning stages to help balance the scales -- or not. It's a modern Window Tax!
comment posted at 5:49 AM on Feb-3-13

Remembering Afghanistan in the 1960s
comment posted at 10:48 PM on Feb-2-13

Waitress whose co-worker scanned uncharitable receipt from Applebee's customer is fired after story goes viral.
comment posted at 7:28 PM on Jan-31-13

One point needs to be made clear. It's not that the British government dislikes Bulgarians or Romanians; somebody needs to pick up the slack now the Polish builders have become too expensive. They're just worried that people in Budapest or Sofia don't know that Britain is, well, a bit shit, that you can't find a decent goulash for love nor money and that you may just not like it there. So they're proposing an ad campaign to warn of the dangers of living in Britain. Knowning that in this, its darkest hour, their country needs them, Guardian readers have responded in their literal dozens to contribute ad ideas. It's not as if they're short on material, after all.
comment posted at 7:54 PM on Jan-30-13

Call it the $55,000 cat bite.
comment posted at 10:33 PM on Jan-28-13

A documentary film about Norman Borlaug, the Iowa farm boy who saved over a billion people from starvation. (1:06:47) Americans have little knowledge of one of their greatest sons. Why do schoolchildren in China, India, Mexico, and Pakistan know the name and work of Nobel Peace Prize winner [His speech] Norman Borlaug while so few of his countrymen have never heard of him? How did a dirt-poor farm boy from rural Iowa grow up to save a billion people worldwide from starvation and malnutrition and become the father of the Green Revolution? What were the inherited traits and environmental factors that shaped his astonishing journey and led to successes that surprised even him? What can we learn from his life and views that might help the human race survive the next critical century?
comment posted at 4:58 PM on Jan-28-13

There are two types of subway riders in the world. Those who wonder, during an idle moment at a station, if they could beat the train to the next stop; and those who attempt to do so. Observe.
comment posted at 12:59 AM on Jan-25-13

"Almost a decade since the end of the hit American TV series Friends, the show — and, in particular, the fictitious Central Perk cafe, where much of the action took place — is enjoying an afterlife in China's capital, Beijing. Here, the show that chronicled the exploits of New York City pals Rachel, Ross, Monica, Chandler, Phoebe and Joey is almost seen as a lifestyle guide."
comment posted at 1:44 AM on Jan-24-13

Actual Facebook Graph Searches.
comment posted at 4:26 AM on Jan-23-13

Why Everybody Films at the Same Damn NY Chinese Restaurant. You know, the one that doesn't actually exist.
comment posted at 4:40 PM on Jan-20-13

Bertrand Russell in Bollywood: The Old Philosopher’s Improbable Appearance in a Hindi Film, 1967 [SLYT] "The year was 1967. Russell was by then a very frail 95-year-old man. Besides finishing work on his three-volume autobiography, Russell was devoting much of his remaining time to the struggle for peace and nuclear disarmament. To that end, he sometimes made himself available to people he thought could help the cause. (See our March 2012 post, “How Bertrand Russell Turned the Beatles Against the Vietnam War.”) So when he was asked to appear in a movie called Aman, about a young Indian man who has just received his medical degree in London and wants to go to Japan to help victims of the atomic bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Russell said yes." [via: openculture.com]
comment posted at 7:51 PM on Jan-17-13

The costs of importing non-native foodstuffs: Despite the call to vegans in the headline, this is an issue that effects all eaters as international lands are stripped to feed the appetites of more wealthy nations. The appetite of countries such as ours for this grain has pushed up prices to such an extent that poorer people in Peru and Bolivia, for whom it was once a nourishing staple food, can no longer afford to eat it. Imported junk food is cheaper. In Lima, quinoa now costs more than chicken.
comment posted at 10:47 PM on Jan-17-13

Can non-Europeans think? So the question remains why not the dignity of "philosophy" and whence the anthropological curiosity of "ethnophilosophy"?
comment posted at 8:41 PM on Jan-17-13

Ashes and Snow
comment posted at 5:19 PM on Jan-13-13

Western tourists (mostly female) visiting Southeast Asia (Thailand, Vietnam, and Bali) are ending up dead, likely poisoned. Local officials have blamed the use of the insecticide DEET as an exotic ingredient in so-called "Bucket Drinks", or the use of Chlorpyrifos in hotel rooms. But Deborah Blum, an author and poison expert, doesn't buy into the insecticide theories offered by local officials. She thinks this looks like targeted murders. Since writing about the poisonings, she says she's been contacted by people who claim poisoning foreigners is common in 5-star hotels, and the police and owners cover it up.. A Facebook group was formed not only so that world travelers could share safe travel tips, but also so that notice of the unexplained, and often uninvestigated, deaths could be made public.
comment posted at 3:54 AM on Jan-10-13

"The Big Bang Theory is the worst kind of bully – the one that pretends to be your friend and then takes the piss out of you behind your back. It will take your viewership, it will take your money and it will laugh in your face as it systematically puts you down." The Problem with The Big Bang Theory.
comment posted at 7:06 AM on Jan-9-13

Piers Morgan stares his chief critic in the face. Alex Jones [previously] is a controversial radio DJ responsible for, amongst other things, starting a petition to have CNN's Piers Morgan deported for comments critical of the Second Amendment. Jones was invited by Morgan to debate gun rights on Morgan's primetime show. This is what happened.
comment posted at 6:33 PM on Jan-8-13

Secret and Lies of the Bailout. "The federal rescue of Wall Street didn’t fix the economy – it created a permanent bailout state based on a Ponzi-like confidence scheme. And the worst may be yet to come." [Via]
comment posted at 1:23 AM on Jan-8-13

Review Raja Review Raja doesn’t share his real name with anyone, but he is happy to share the unlikely story of how a white guy who was born in Tweed and grew up in Belleville became Review Raja, a connoisseur of Tamil films, or Kollywood, and a celebrity in the Tamil community in Canada and abroad.
comment posted at 10:21 PM on Jan-6-13

Why electronic devices are dangerous on planes.
comment posted at 7:27 PM on Dec-31-12

The Royal Air Force Museum London will be launching in Summer 2013 a signature exhibition commemorating and celebrating the national institution that is Airfix. This will chart the history of this Great British Institution by displaying original Box Art as well as Airfix’s most popular models from the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s in the Museum’s Art Gallery. In preparation, this post will focus upon the history* of the company, its founding in the late 1940s by a Hungarian immigrant, through its boom years in the 1960s, the later years of decline and under investment, and finally its current resurgence in the market place. Look at the ways in which Airfix products are developed, including the painstaking research and the cutting edge technology used to design and manufacture modern kits. (text inspired by numerous sources)
comment posted at 6:30 PM on Dec-26-12

The story behind Mitt Romney’s loss in the presidential campaign to President Obama
comment posted at 4:42 AM on Dec-24-12
comment posted at 6:49 AM on Dec-25-12

The video for "Gangnam Style" is the first to reach one billion views (short scale) on YouTube.
comment posted at 7:58 AM on Dec-21-12

In May 16, 1961, Park Chung-hee ended the Second Republic of South Korea by military coup. On December 18, 2012, his daughter, Park Geun-hye, became South Korea's president by democratic election under the Saenuri party against human rights lawyer Moon Jae-in, of the DUP.
comment posted at 3:29 PM on Dec-19-12

The intro scene to 'Midnight in Paris' (2011. SLYT)
comment posted at 4:01 AM on Dec-18-12

The Guardian, the 191-year-old British daily newspaper whose name is synonymous with broadly left-leaning values, is reported to be planning to open an Australian online-only news operation. The venture (which has not been confirmed) is said to be headed by current Saturday Guardian editor Katherine Viner, and to be a joint venture with Australian philanthropist Graeme Wood, who already runs a not-for-profit media site). The Guardian already runs a US online news operation (previously) with local reportage and commentary.
comment posted at 6:38 PM on Dec-17-12

An amateur linguist loses control of the language he invented
comment posted at 11:12 PM on Dec-17-12

Can autonomous vehicles navigate the law? This year has been full of big news about the progress of self-driving cars. They are currently street legal in three states and Google says that on a given day, they have a dozen autonomous cars on the road. This August, they passed 300,000 driver-hours. In Spain this summer, Volvo drove a convoy of three cars through 200 kilometers of desert highway with just one driver and a police escort. Cadillac's newest models park themselves. The writing, one might think, is on the wall. But objects in the media may be farther off than they appear.
comment posted at 12:10 AM on Dec-17-12

Ravi Shankar, sitar virtuoso, has died at 92.
comment posted at 11:06 PM on Dec-12-12
comment posted at 11:36 PM on Dec-17-12

John McAfee [recent previously], eccentric Silicon Valley mogul and creator of a McAfee antivirus software, lowered his taxes by relocating to Belize a few years ago. But his expatriate neighbor Gregory Faull was not a fan McAfee's dogs, prostitutes and partying. After Faull was shot to death last month Belize police named McAfee a "person of interest" in the case. McAfee went on the lam and invited Vice Magazine to join him, which must've seemed like a good idea at the time. McAfee was soon arrested and has since been fighting extradition back to Belize from a Guatemalan jail. McAfee said yesterday he just wants to return to a "normal life" in the U.S.
comment posted at 6:43 PM on Dec-10-12

As part of his long-term Genesis project, Sebastião Salgado shares photographs of the nomadic Nenets of northern Siberia.
comment posted at 11:53 PM on Dec-9-12

A tale of two shipping containers in photos.
comment posted at 10:25 PM on Dec-9-12

Rosalind.info is a website with bioinformatics problems inspired by Project Euler (previously, previouslier.)
comment posted at 10:11 PM on Dec-9-12

The University of California recently released its design for a new logo, and has launched an extensive visual rebranding campaign around it. Though the aim of the new logo is to convey a spirit of modern innovation, detractors feel it lacks the gravitas of the old seal, likening the new logo to a Swedish cake roll, and have started a petition to halt the change to the University's visual identity.
comment posted at 8:28 PM on Dec-9-12

From the Atlantic's In Focus:2012: The Year in Pictures
comment posted at 5:50 PM on Dec-4-12