February 9
Seattle is only one of five cities in the United States with a trackless
electric trolley bus system.
King County Metro operates 159 trolley buses on 14 routes that ply over 70 miles of trolley wire, and travel 2,906,297 miles annually. Last year, Metro
found that operating new electric trolleys offered a superior financial scenario to new diesel buses. This is even before considering how much better a trolley performs on Seattle's steep hills, or how much less pollution it creates, being supplied by hydroelectric power. If you want to know a little more about how the system works, see some of the
photos posted by a King County bus operator known as
VeloBusDriver. Some of these photo sets explain
the controls of an ETB,
the innards of an ETB—so much cleaner than a diesel but so much more dangerous to poke around in—and
aspects of how the trolley wire itself works, including the "special work" necessary for tasks such
switching routes or
traversing a drawbridge.
posted by grouse at 9:46 PM - 20 comments Peyton Manning is known as
one of the best NFL quarterbacks of all time. He holds many NFL
all time records and led his team to victory in in
Super Bowl XLI. Manning has lost significant playing time due to a
serious neck injury and it is not clear if he will
return to the Colts next season, or
to football at all.
If he does decide to return to the gridiron to try and win another championship
(to catch up with his little brother on that score) there is no clear consensus on
what team he could possibly end up joining.
With that speculation in the mind of every NFL fan this offseason, artist
David Rappoccio has begun to visualize
what it might look like if Peyton joined your local team.
posted by furiousxgeorge at 9:07 PM - 14 comments Recent news about free online education.
1,
Khan Academy: Google's first employee, Craig Silverstein,
is leaving Google and joining Khan Academy.
[more inside]
posted by -jf- at 7:01 PM - 23 comments Yes,
this will make your cheeks hurt! (SLYTHABV)
[single link youtube husky and baby video]
posted by HuronBob at 6:20 PM - 33 comments Rachel Flowers plays some of rock's
toughest compositions on
keyboard. Oh, and
jazz and
classics too. Impressive, for an eighteen-year-old. Who
is blind.
posted by Doohickie at 5:50 PM - 9 comments
The New Scientist writes about the attempts of scientists to induce an artificial state of being in the zone (also referred to as "
flow") through electrical manipulation of the brain. As a bonus, they also include a forum link to
homemade attempts to achieve the same thing. [more inside]
posted by codacorolla at 4:31 PM - 28 comments
Hiya Freddie baby, give me a dozen...my life's blood, without bagels what is a day? Yah make it a dozen assorted. Dat's it, give me the garlic, the sesame, the onion, give me them all baby, that's it! They're still handmade eh?
Hot Bagels! Wait a second let me PAY yah! Here you are, kid. Thank you. Have a good day.
posted by timshel at 3:27 PM - 60 comments "In one corner of Manoj Bhargava’s office is a cemetery of sorts. It’s a Formica bookcase, its shelves lined with hundreds of garishly colored screw-top plastic bottles not much taller than shot glasses. Front and center is a Cadillac-red bottle of 5-Hour Energy, the two-ounce caffeine and vitamin elixir that purports to keep you alert without crashing. In eight years 5-Hour has gone from nowhere to $1 billion in retail sales. Truckers swear by it. So do the traders in Oliver Stone’s 2010 sequel to
Wall Street. So do hungover students.
It’s $3 a bottle, and it has made Bhargava a fortune."
posted by vidur at 3:26 PM - 44 comments Can't get enough horse_ebooks? Try
horse_ebookmarklet.
posted by functionequalsform at 2:16 PM - 38 comments There are more than a
few websites that take electronic products and document their disassembly. What makes
Mike Harrison's YouTube videos stand out is that while doing a teardown he attempts to identify the components and subsystems of a product and explain why a product was made the way it was made. From something as simple as a
CD stereo system to a
Jumbotron panel.
Mike's website has been discussed previously.
[more inside]
posted by toftflin at 12:10 PM - 9 comments What does a nebula sound like? "Astronomer Paul Francis from the Australian National University has used [recording from spectrographs] and converted them into sound by reducing their frequency 1.75 trillion times to make them audible, as the original frequencies are too high to be heard by the human ear."
His projects so far include
a comet,
quasar, and the
life of a sunlike star. His explanation of the "Celestial Orchestra" is worth
a listen.
posted by Made of Star Stuff at 10:49 AM - 18 comments
The Man Who Lived on his Bike is a 3 minute short by Canadian filmmaker Guillaume Blanchet, who spent 382 days riding his bicycle through the streets of Montreal in order to explore what life would be like if he actually lived on a bicycle.
posted by Obscure Reference at 10:28 AM - 10 comments
If people thought Apple's voice assistant Siri
was conservative, then
Iris, a similar feature for Android (which uses the search engine
ChaCha),
will blow their mind.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 10:08 AM - 80 comments "Viewer’s movement and expressions are
mimicked by an animal’s head which is overlaid on the viewer’s reflection."
posted by griphus at 9:26 AM - 20 comments It's not news that
Noam Chomsky's views on foreign policy are controversial. Paul Bogdanor's
The Chomsky Hoax collects links to articles critiquing those views, including the
Top 200 Chomsky Lies (pdf) and economist J. Bradford Delong's
My Very, Very Allergic Reaction to Noam Chomsky. Other prominent critiques include
Noam Chomsky: A Critical Review (by MeFi's own
Russil Wvong), George Shadriou's
Dissecting Chomsky and Anti-Americanism, and David Horowitz's series of articles on Chomsky in Frontpage Magazine (
Part I,
Part II,
response to rebuttals).
posted by shivohum at 9:09 AM - 195 comments Please be advised that the FBI’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) release regarding (STEVEN PAUL JOBS)
is now available.
posted by Ad hominem at 8:28 AM - 49 comments “The words of the 1611 King James Bible ring out today in books, poems, popular songs, speeches, and sermons. But who translated it, and what made this particular translation so influential? Inspired by the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible,
Manifold Greatness tells the story of one of the most widely read books in the English language, through online content, exhibitions, and more.” Previously on Metafilter:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7.
posted by found missing at 8:07 AM - 7 comments How the zebra came by his stripes. "Why zebras evolved their characteristic black-and-white stripes has been the subject of decades of debate among scientists.
Now researchers from Hungary and Sweden claim to have solved the mystery."
posted by estherhaza at 7:22 AM - 33 comments
In 1962, the Mansfield (Ohio) Police Department stationed officers armed with a movie camera behind a two-way mirror in a public restroom known for its "cruisy" atmosphere. With the help of the footage shot, dozens of men were arrested, prosecuted, and convicted on
sodomy charges, which at the time carried mandatory minimum sentences of a year in prison. In 2007, the original surveillance footage was obtained by filmmaker
William E.
Jones. He's screened the unedited 56 minute film as
Tearoom at festivals and museums the world over, providing a clandestine look at the scrutiny small-town Midwestern gay men faced in the 1960's. [
warning:
explicit,
NSFW material lies beyond most links]
[more inside]
posted by item at 6:51 AM - 78 comments Louis Virtel is an editor over at
AfterElton.com and an avid
twitterer. For the last few months he has been making an hilarious web series called Verbal Vogueing in which he rants about celebrities and pop culture. Still ongoing, there are currently ten installments; here is episode one:
"The Immaculate Conniption".(NSFW audio)
[more inside]
posted by aldurtregi at 5:36 AM - 1 comment The
Laberinto of Andrea Ghisi is a 17th-century magic trick in book form. Pick an image from the 60 arrayed in front of you, and tell the magician only which quadrant it appears in. Repeat the process twice on different pages, and he can tell you what image you chose. You can see the trick performed at around 2:20
in this video,
play a simulation, or see the book
digitized in its entirety.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 5:05 AM - 13 comments "I learnt this song in Grimsby over in England about 1987. It was during the Thatcher era. There was all kinds of things happening, over in England. But I'll say one thing about Thatcher, some fantastic songs were written during her reign."
Christy Moore -- Ballad of an Ordinary Man (SYLT)
posted by Mister Bijou at 3:54 AM - 30 comments February 8
Normally, when you buy stolen goods, you don't legally own them. The person they were stolen from still does. Unless: Until 1995, if you bought them in
Bermondsey Market, London, between the hours of sunrise and sunset, they would then belong to you, even if
clearly stolen.
posted by Zarkonnen at 10:43 PM - 31 comments The Clock is a film that is also a clock. It runs for 24 consecutive hours, and is made of thousands of samples, some lasting only seconds, others minutes, from hundreds of films and videos. All of it edited into a seamless whole by video artist Christian Marclay. When it is shown, it is synchronized to the real time, so if it's 2:15 on a clock shown on-screen, it's 2:15 in real time. Harrison Ford is in it. So is John Cusack, Humphrey Bogart, Michelle Pfeiffer, Lon Chaney, Roger Moore(and all the other James Bonds), John Cleese, Peter Sellers, Orson Welles, the Beatles, Jody Foster, Gregory Peck, Nicole Kidman, Nick Cage and a few hundred others. You'll see The Simpsons and The Office. You'll see The Avengers. You'll see stuff you have no clue about.
Here's what it feels like to watch all twenty four hours of it in one sitting. [more inside]
posted by storybored at 9:49 PM - 54 comments
You probably already know that mascots wearing
over-sized caricature foam heads of the four Mount Rushmore presidents race around the bases during home games for the Washington Nationals. You also probably know that
Teddy has never officially won a single race.
Did you know that if you are over 18, 5'7" to 6'6", can run from center field to home plate in 40 seconds, dig the costume, and are available for 35 home games in Washington, DC, that
you can become one of them?
[more inside]
posted by juliplease at 8:42 PM - 31 comments Railfans love it. Model Railroaders adore it. Economics people study it. The Tropicana Corporation runs between 10 and 12 30-to-50-car trains of it every week.
Behold, 5000 tons of Orange Juice on the move. [more inside]
posted by pjern at 8:40 PM - 30 comments Björk explains her interactive touch screen album to Stephen Colbert. The longtime boundary-pushing,
Icelandic musician (and ever-fascinating
fashionista) released
Biophilia in October. It is the first album created entirely
on touch screens and subsequently released as an album
for touch screens with interactive apps for each song. Her interview (and
performance in an inflatable dress) support her desire to
educate kids about science through the album and its apps.
Is this the future of music?
posted by achpea at 8:04 PM - 37 comments
Kristina Killgrove, a biological anthropologist, has started a series of blog posts titled
A Brief History of Bioarcheology.
Part 1: America
Part 2: Italy
posted by Cloud King at 7:54 PM - 4 comments
Fortune favors the bold. In 2005, then Facebook's president Sean Parker asked
David Choe, an LA-based graffiti artist, to paint the walls of his Palo Alto office. Choe - who had just finished a prison stint in Japan - says Facebook offered him stock options or $60,000 cash. For some reason, he chose stock options. Seven years later, that stock is said to be worth around $500 million.
[more inside]
posted by phaedon at 7:37 PM - 39 comments
Google is quietly launching a new program called
Screenwise aimed at collected more data from users than is possible from monitoring activity across Google-owned sites. The program comes in two flavors: a browser-based extension that will share with Google the sites you visit and how you use them, and a Cisco-made, Knowledge Networks-managed "black box" installed on your home network to measure Internet use. The first program pays users up to $25 in Amazon gift cards, the second pays $100 for signing up, and an additional $20 every month the device is installed up to a maximum of one year. To be eligible for the programs users must have a Google account, install and use Chrome, and be 13 or older. Ars Technica has
excerpts from leaked sign up process documents:
According to legal agreements displayed during signup, Google will share the aggregated data with third parties, including "academic institutions, advertisers, publishers, and programming networks." The agreement notes that the data collected will be personally identifiable, with some exceptions: https addresses and private browsing windows of people using the router will not be tracked. The browser extension, however, will track private or incognito browsing, though the data will not be personally identifiable. For all other collected data, Google will "attempt" to remove that identifiable info before sharing it—no guarantees, though.
[more inside]
posted by 2bucksplus at 6:05 PM - 84 comments Felix Salmon muses on why art prices keep rising. On the way, he discusses why some art becomes super-popular:
"Fine art has become the billionaire’s-club equivalent of a Louis Vuitton bag, slathered in logos. It’s not connoisseurship which drives values, so much as recognizability. Which in turn helps to explain why the most prolific artists (Picasso, Warhol, Hirst) are also the most expensive: the more of their work there is, the more exposed to it people become, the more they’ll recognize it, and therefore the more desirable it is."
posted by benbenson at 4:55 PM - 23 comments
"Risk" is a free podcast for storytelling junkies, hosted by Kevin Allison (formerly of
the State).
In episodes
229 and
230 (obviously NSFW), the host himself shares an unusual tale of being a gay man at a hetero "kink" camp.
posted by The ____ of Justice at 3:25 PM - 11 comments
Alan Turing, British
code-breaker during WWII, imminent
computer scientist, and
much else has been
denied a
posthumous pardon from the British government for his 1952 conviction on charges of
"Gross Indecency" because of his homosexuality.
[more inside]
posted by clavier at 3:09 PM - 89 comments
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