May 25
Excavations in Argentina have unearthed a new dinosaur with a short skull and tiny forearms:
Eoabelisaurus mefi.
[more inside]
posted by benito.strauss at 6:11 PM - 48 comments
Missing Foundation was an underground industrial band formed in Hamburg, Germany in 1984 and year later, in 1985, the band relocated to New York City. Formed by
Pete Missing along with two members of
KMFDM and
Florian Langmaack they were known for their destructive shows. They were active in
1988 riot in Tompkins Square Park (
attempting to start another one in 1993) and
lighting the stage of CBGBs on fire and
destroying their sound system. Other members include
Vern Toulon, the father of kid-punk band
Old Skull. One of the indelible and lasting marks of the group was their
logo:
inverted martini over a three pronged tally along with slogans such as "1988 - 1933" and "Your House Is Mine". The slogans were illusions to what founder Peter Missing described as society verge of collapse and that a police state was imminent. The years representative of the year the Nazi's overtook the Weimar Republic. The logo symbolized the bands personal slogan of "
the party's over". Founder
Peter Missing now lives in Berlin and his artwork has exhibited at
The Whitney, The Getty,
MOMA after riding out
some tough times in the mid-aughts.
posted by wcfields at 5:04 PM - 8 comments
"Barry also had a knack for interceptions. When a joint was making the rounds, he often elbowed his way in, out of turn, shouted "Intercepted!," and took an extra hit. No one seemed to mind."
A User's Guide To Smoking Pot With Barack Obama.
[more inside]
posted by T.D. Strange at 4:27 PM - 97 comments
Dominick Carpenter
builds and sells miniature cannons and mortars. Sometimes he
fires them.
[more inside]
posted by tigrefacile at 3:11 PM - 12 comments
Look at those baby cheetahs After a touch-and go birth, The National Zoo has some
new baby cheetahs. [more inside]
posted by angrycat at 2:54 PM - 19 comments
Need a blast of pure joy to start your holiday weekend? Here's
Isaac's live lip-dub proposal.
posted by roger ackroyd at 2:35 PM - 20 comments
Gamer Mom is a short piece of interactive fiction about a mom who plays games, and her family that doesn't.
[more inside]
posted by empath at 12:03 PM - 65 comments
Roy Buchanan -
♪ Hey Joe ♪, a grandmaster of the Telecaster lays bare the instrument's unique spectrum of tone.
posted by Ardiril at 11:59 AM - 48 comments
American cities going dark. Detroit is the poster child, 40 percent of the 88,000 streetlights are already broken, but under a new plan half the city is going permanently dark in an effort to get citizens to move. “You have to identify those neighborhoods where you want to concentrate your population,” said Chris Brown, Detroit’s chief operating officer. “We’re not going to light distressed areas". Other U.S. cities have gone partially dark to save money, among them Colorado Springs; Santa Rosa, California; and Rockford, Illinois. Bonus:
360-degree photo tour of abandoned rail station in Detroit.
posted by stbalbach at 11:54 AM - 93 comments
Look at Azerbaijan! But look beyond the shiny Eurovision Song Contest (
ESC) which will be held tomorrow in Baku. Look at the “
Dirty Secrets” [SLYT, BBC Panorama, 30 min., English] and at independent film maker Liz Mermin’s film “
Glanz und Schatten in Azerbaidschan” [SLYT, 30 min. German but more informative IMHO]. >
Locals that voted in the music contest for a country that was not in favor of the ruling family were investigated by the police. And then there is the story of two expensive donkeys (€42,000 each) and a
comedic video that landed a young man in jail. Let’s not forget the story of a journalist who was
blackmailed with secretly shot sex tapes.
Amnesty International and
Human Rights Watch often report of restrictions on freedom of speech and freedom of the press in Azerbaijan.
Shortly before the ESC
young musician Jamal Ali fled the country. While US peace corps volunteers don’t feel like criticizing much and sing a
song of their own [SLYT], we see
more arrests in Baku today.>
posted by travelwithcats at 11:31 AM - 12 comments
Kingdom of Loathing creator Jick and the rest of the Asymmetric
crew have spent the last four years developing a new game. Next month, the beta for the game is coming out:
Word Realms! Make sure to watch the video, it's full of hilarity.
[more inside]
posted by Night_owl at 11:13 AM - 16 comments
Republican-sponsored New York State Assembly bill would ban anonymous online speech. "AN ACT to amend the civil rights law, in relation to protecting a person's right to know who is behind an anonymous internet posting..." S6779, introduced by Rep. O'Meara, is brief: it establishes "a person's right to know who is behind an anonymous internet posting" as a civil right, and requires that NY-based "Web site administrator[s]" remove any anonymous postings. The
summary of the Assembly bill, A8688, whose text is identical, describes the bill as "a means for the victim of an anonymous
posting on a website to request that such post be removed, unless the anonymous poster is willing to attach his or her name to it."
[more inside]
posted by chesty_a_arthur at 11:10 AM - 79 comments
The Pope's butler arrested following Vatileaks investigation. [telegraph.co.uk] Vatican police have arrested Pope Benedict XVI's personal butler following an investigation into the leaking of sensitive church documents.
posted by Fizz at 10:50 AM - 39 comments
What Should We Call Me? (a very silly tumblr for your Friday)
posted by lunasol at 8:52 AM - 39 comments
two dimensional blobs [SLCracked-Photoplasty] Cheer-up everybody! Cracked readers show us what they think video game background characters are thinking.
[more inside]
posted by marienbad at 8:49 AM - 12 comments
Are you curious how the brand of a large suite of complementary products is developed? It's more interesting than you might think.
Adobe describes the decisions that went into the new icons, splash screens, and other brand elements of Creative Suite 6.
posted by gilrain at 8:47 AM - 18 comments
Wesley Brown, the first black man to graduate from the
U.S. Naval Academy,
has died. He was 85 years old.
[more inside]
posted by Rangeboy at 7:55 AM - 13 comments
The Pog A Day Blog. One man's quest to bring you a lot of pogs (although not quite every day).
[more inside]
posted by codacorolla at 7:46 AM - 30 comments
Light and Matter has put together an excellent explanation of the
Three Basics of Exposure and Photography using (mostly) eight bit graphics.
[more inside]
posted by quin at 7:15 AM - 5 comments
Movie Simpsons is a tumblr that juxtaposes Simpsons movie homages with the original.
posted by zamboni at 6:49 AM - 35 comments
Fifty-one years ago today, our president proposed to put Man and his towel on the moon and return it safely to the earth by the end of the decade.
[more inside]
posted by tilde at 6:21 AM - 34 comments
SSS is a 1988 experimental film featuring rapid-fire clips of dancers on the streets and junkyards of New York's East Village, "painstaking synched" to improvised music by Tom Cora (cello), Christian Marclay (turntables), and Zeena Parkins (harp). It's by filmmaker Henry Hills, whose official site is
here. More collage films
here, including
Radio Adios, the quick cut-up
KINO DA!,
Money ("
a manic collage film from the mid-80s when it still seemed that Reaganism of the soul could be defeated," with appearances by John Zorn, Fred Frith, Arto Lindsay, Ron Silliman among others), and
Gotham, one of three films Hills made for Zorn's Naked City project.
posted by mediareport at 5:55 AM - 11 comments
She's Alive... Beautiful... Finite... Hurting... Worth Dying for is a beautiful non-commercial attempt from
www.sanctuaryasia.com to "highlight the fact that world leaders, irresponsible corporates and mindless 'consumers' are combining to destroy life on earth. It is dedicated to all who died fighting for the planet and those whose lives are on the line today. The cut was put together by Vivek Chauhan, a young film maker, together with naturalists working with the Sanctuary Asia network." (
Vimeo link).
[more inside]
posted by Ahab at 3:45 AM - 28 comments
In 2002,
Brian Banks was a sought-after high school football
phenom until he was accused of kidnapping and raping a female student. On the advice of his lawyers, he pleaded no contest and served 6 years in prison. Then his accuser
recanted. That's when the Innocence Project
stepped in to
help exonerate Brian Banks.
CA Innocence Project filing here; informative if you skip right to the "Statement of Facts" part.
posted by lalex at 12:18 AM - 137 comments
May 24
Whales have
a sensory organ unlike anything we’ve ever seen, reported originally in today's issue of
Nature.
posted by latkes at 10:21 PM - 50 comments
No matter how you ate them... Sam J. Porcello, the originator of the creamy filling in the Oreo cookie has died.
posted by HuronBob at 10:18 PM - 40 comments
May 25, 1977 - 2012. Celebrate 35 years of Star Wars by getting your groove on with Meco's classic
Star Wars and
Other Galactic Funk.
[more inside]
posted by hippybear at 10:10 PM - 21 comments
Star Wars: The Radio Play -
Seven top voice actors table read Star Wars (YouTube) at
Emerald City Comicon. "Join voice actors Billy West, Tara Strong, Maurice LaMarche, John DiMaggio, Kevin Conroy, Jess Harnell, and Rob Paulsen as they re-create the magic of the Star Wars films, albeit in their own special way!" Characters include: Fry, Bender, Batman, Yakko, Wakko, Pinky, The Brain, Morbo, Bubbles, IronHide, Dr. Zoidberg, Jake the Dog, and many impressive celebrity impressions: Shatner as C3PO, Walken as R2D2, Tony Soprano as Greedo, Twilight Sparkle as Han Solo...
(via reddit)
posted by flex at 9:00 PM - 36 comments
Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA) are a new service from U.S. weather service and FEMA. Starting in June, they will send a text message with a strange tone to your mobile device if you are in range of a Tornado Warning, Tsunami Warning or other major event (in the U.S. only). Major events include "Presidential Alerts." You do not need to sign up.
Washington Post Capital Weather Gang has a few more details.
posted by LobsterMitten at 8:33 PM - 56 comments
"The World's most popular game is also its most corrupt, with investigations into match fixing ongoing in more than 25 countries. Here's a mere sampling of events since the beginning of last year: Operation Last Bet rocked the Italian Football Federation, with 22 clubs and 52 players awaiting trial for fixing matches; the Zimbabwe Football Association banned 80 players from its national-team selection due to similar accusations; Lu Jun, the first Chinese referee of a World Cup match, was sentenced to five and a half years in prison for taking more than $128,000 in bribes to fix outcomes in the Chinese Super League; prosecutors charged 57 people with match fixing in the South Korean K-League, four of whom later died in suspected suicides; the team director of second-division Hungarian club REAC Budapest jumped off a building after six of his players were arrested for fixing games; and in an under-21 friendly, Turkmenistan reportedly beat Maldives 3-2 in a "ghost match" -- neither country knew about the contest because it never actually happened, yet bookmakers still took action and fixers still profited." [
All the world is staged: Bribed players, fake games. Criminal syndicates can fix any match, anywhere.]
posted by vidur at 8:15 PM - 34 comments
"A day after the 44th nuclear test explosion in the U.S. rent the still Nevada air, observers cautiously inspected
department store mannequins which were poised disheveled but still haughty on the sand in the homes of Yucca Flat."
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 8:05 PM - 29 comments
"Patient research work involving more than 5 thousand photographs resulted in a
1 minute film that AlmapBBDO created to advertise Getty Images, the world leading image database for creating and distributing visual contents. " [SLYT]
posted by ephemerista at 7:37 PM - 11 comments
A short wordless documentary on
Chris Burden's (previously, previousylier) 2008 installation
Beam Drop
posted by 1f2frfbf at 6:17 PM - 14 comments
A relatively small group of people from Appalachian, the dark-skinned
Melungeons (previously) have been a source for speculation and conjecture for many years. Exactly who where their ancestors? Portuguese? Turks? Roma? Cherokee? A recent
DNA study (108 page pdf) posted in the Journal of Genetic Genealogy (
site link)
says otherwise (WaPo article).
posted by edgeways at 3:12 PM - 91 comments
Robert Snow, now retired, was Captain of the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department, who in his career was in charge of the department of the Homicide and Robbery and the department of Organized Crime. He has written numerous articles and books on police work, and considered himself
a skeptic of supposedly supernatural occurrences. But on a dare, he visited a past life regression therapist, and what he experiences made him doubt his beliefs. In an hour-long session, he seemed to recall memories of a cave dweller, an altar girl in Greece, but it was his views of the life of a 19th century painter were the most vivid. In that experience,
Snow recalled a number of specific memories or events, but was certain they were fabricated memories from things he had seen or heard in his life in the 20th century. In an attempt to debunk his experiences, he ended up
validating his past life memories of being
James Carroll Beckwith, a painter most commonly remembered not for
his art, but his friendship to more renown painters like
John Singer Sargent.
[more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 2:47 PM - 169 comments
"The national debate over private equity so far has hinged on the question of whether experience in the field qualifies Mitt Romney, the former Bain Capital executive, for the presidency. But a more vexing, and largely unanswered, question lies just beneath the surface: How is it, exactly, that an investment company can make millions even as the company it's ostensibly trying to turn around goes bust? For that answer, we turned to what may seem like a less-than-reliable source:
Tony Soprano [NSFW: language]."
posted by ericb at 2:29 PM - 53 comments
"Here’s a paper we’re working on, which argues that we should (for some purposes at least), think of markets, hierarchy and democracy in terms of their capacity to solve complex collective problems [and] makes the case that democracy will on average do the job
a lot better than the other two ways..." Henry Farrell and Cosma Shalizi on a
cognitive approach to democracy (
pdf).
[via]
posted by daniel_charms at 1:39 PM - 12 comments
"When your dog gazes up at you adoringly, what does it see? A best friend? A pack leader? A can opener?" Gregory Berns of Emory University decided to put a couple canines in an MRI scanner to try and find out what goes on inside their heads (adorable news footage
here). The results have recently been
published in PLoS ONE.
posted by Panjandrum at 1:36 PM - 62 comments
« Older posts