Despite the horror of the fire for the family, it sounds like Karen ended up doing OK. Those books were the first time I'd heard of CP (or Newfoundlands, for that matter). Having grown up in a very Irish Catholic family, it was fascinating seeing such a culturally similar family adapting to such a challenge (and to seeing Karen overcome so many challenges.)
posted to MetaFilter by ubersturm at 10:38 PM on October 1, 2008

Funny, grimmelm, most of the people I know who're stuck in 32 dislike it. Many of the rooms are unpleasant if you don't like working in a fishbowl, the structural problems have already been mentioned, and there're huge amounts of wasted space where normal furniture doesn't fit well. Plus, there's a big problem with the so-called "Student Street": if you put all of your large lecture halls right next to an open cafeteria, coffee shop, etc. and a large hallway full of booths, tables,... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by ubersturm at 9:00 AM on August 21, 2008

Actually, Mitheral, they remind me most of the collars in Octavia Butler's "Parable of the Sower" and "Parable of the Talents" - both in their execution and in their potential for abuse.
posted to MetaFilter by ubersturm at 8:37 AM on July 13, 2008

This isn't the first time Vatican astronomers have spoken out on the topic, or that Metafilter has discussed it. Ignoring the LOLXTIANS stuff (which is always especially frustrating when the basic facts are wrong - Catholics are pretty damn far from a literal sola scriptura understanding of the Bible), it seems fairly clear that the Church has been paying attention to scientific developments in the last few decades (perhaps particularly the discovery of other planetary... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by ubersturm at 7:21 AM on May 14, 2008

Vielen Dank!
posted to MetaFilter by ubersturm at 6:45 AM on May 8, 2008

I'm not sure there are, in fact, correct words for Hofmann's eulogy, so...

.
posted to MetaFilter by ubersturm at 6:20 PM on April 29, 2008

Now that BigDog can conquer the wilds of charming historical Waltham, we're almost ready to complete our long-awaited conquest of sub-Alpine Europe, I guess.
posted to MetaFilter by ubersturm at 12:02 PM on March 18, 2008

Awesome. I've been wondering for a while whether it's possible for women to do overtone singing/throat singing/etc. Glad to find out they can (and can do it well!)

I highly recommend Huun Huur Tu, by the way, if they put on a concert near you. Truly gorgeous Tuvan throat-singing.
posted to MetaFilter by ubersturm at 8:43 AM on February 29, 2008

I tend to think that SSRIs probably don't do much but allow the depression suffers and those around them sleep easier knowing they are being "proactive" in the problem.

Bullshit. SSRIs are not the answer for all people or all cases of depression. Having done a fair amount of research into the subject, both out of curiousity and out of an attempt to save my own skin, it's pretty damn clear that depression's a fun sort of multifactorial... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by ubersturm at 2:22 AM on February 26, 2008

Damn. Nice. I've still got the papers from some of my marker-and-paper animations, and yeah, I had somewhere around thousand pages of paper for an animation a little longer than a minute - and that was by no means perfectly smooth animation. But sketching stuff in sharpie's easier than cutting scenes out of cardstock, by far.
posted to MetaFilter by ubersturm at 2:31 PM on February 24, 2008

Maybe. Years ago in, what, 2001, I was following the A.I. game, which was huge and sprawling: certainly not a case of "as little content as possible". The game was far more interesting than the movie...
posted to MetaFilter by ubersturm at 5:14 AM on February 12, 2008

bitter-girl.com's got it right: Tremont hipster who thinks it's - oooh - edgy and scary to go down in the Flats. Those pictures are just general uban industrial photos, and most of the places featured look like they're still in operation. Don't get me wrong: if you want urban decay in Cleveland, you can certainly find it, but most of the real decay isn't within walking distance of chic restaurants and good music venues. But, you know, I bet there are bits of Euclid Ave. or St. Clair or heck,... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by ubersturm at 5:35 PM on February 7, 2008

When I first heard the Shaggs, I thought "Wow, this is like rock played by people who've only read about rock." As Joseph Gurl says, they were very good at what they did. A great anecdote: the sound engineer reported that while being recorded, occasionally they would all stop and one of them would apologize for making a mistake, and they'd ask to start again. He could never tell which one had made the mistake, or what it was...
posted to MetaFilter by ubersturm at 3:57 AM on January 21, 2008

Huh, fascinating. I've actually been to a small Christkindlmarkt set up in Akron, OH by its sister city, Chemnitz, which was part of the Erzgebirge region. They have a long tradition of gorgeous folk art, but I didn't know it had been harnessed by the DDR in that way.

Though I have to say, it's more properly "Christkindlmarkt", or various other Süddeutsche variations thereof. The name literally means "Christ Child Market." In Northern German... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by ubersturm at 6:15 PM on January 11, 2008

(Er, the end of my first paragraph got b0rked. Missing was the key qualification that even prior to the heavy marketing as "folk art", they had a long tradition of woodworking and an identifiable style that really could qualify as, well, folk art. Sigh. Sometime I'll learn how to preview.)

I'm actually rather curious about an almost throwaway statement in the article - "After 1933 the new national socialist government... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by ubersturm at 6:45 PM on January 11, 2008

I...
I...
Wow. I'm glad I'm not the guy holding up the PCR machine though; last time we moved things around in the lab, ours were fairly heavy.

(I do have to say: more spontaneous expressions of science geekery, like the classic Protein Synthesis: An Epic on the Cellular Level, are, in fact, much more awesome.)... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by ubersturm at 6:25 PM on January 11, 2008

maryh - no, no, that's St. Anthony. Though I've always preferred St. Jude (patron saint of lost causes.)
posted to MetaFilter by ubersturm at 1:39 AM on November 19, 2007

schroedinger - yeah, something about the faces (the eyes and lips, specifically) made me certain he was the guy who did the Desire story in Endless Nights. Good to see I can still recognize my comic book artists...
posted to MetaFilter by ubersturm at 4:10 PM on October 31, 2007

A wild turkey lives near the Kendall Square Marriott? Why have I never seen it?! I feel gypped!
posted to MetaFilter by ubersturm at 12:45 AM on October 25, 2007

ZachsMind - no, no, Cedar Point really is as good as all that. I grew up going there every summer (sometimes multiple times in a summer!) and man, it really is the best amusement park in the nation, particularly if you love coasters. Sadly, I still haven't been on the Top Thrill Dragster: I keep managing to get there on days when there are high winds, coming off the lake. This August, I was about four people away from boarding when the wind really started kicking up... and the cars were... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by ubersturm at 1:43 AM on October 22, 2007

Also on the avant-garde side is Keiji Haino's "21st Century Hard-y Guide-y Man," although he may also have done some hurdy gurdy while playing with Fushitsusha. The instrument also shows up (unsurprisingly) in Mittelaltermusik - stuff like Corvus Corax. Some modern folk-rock features the instrument as well, including the Swedish group Garmarna or the Finnish Hedningarna.

If I weren't already busy with electric fiddle, I'd be lusting after a hurdy gurdy myself.... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by ubersturm at 12:34 PM on August 19, 2007

eutastic - she explains in the comments to one of the sections that she doesn't do shading/crosshatching in her comics. So the cartoons aren't particularly supposed to be Caucasian; they're just the way she draws everyone.
posted to MetaFilter by ubersturm at 5:14 PM on August 3, 2007

.
posted to MetaFilter by ubersturm at 11:08 AM on July 30, 2007

Edgewise: As I've said before here, it's not that we're not willing to admit that "men and women may have some innate behavioral and cognitive differences, just as we have physical ones." Rather, because of the fact that there are non-innate differences, differences caused by culture and society, we think it's currently damn near impossible to tell what purportedly biological differences are real. Gender programming begins very, very early - think about the first question people ask... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by ubersturm at 1:19 AM on May 19, 2007

Edgewise: Sorry, the JSTOR articles might not be visible unless you're at an institution with subscriptions - forgot about that. The key's to look at the conclusions - for example, in the last one [the masculine/feminine woman one], they said that in the end, what they saw was discrimination on the basis of gender, not traits [supporting all the other similar studies where resumes with identical info but male/female names were evaluated.] It's important to remember that we're just talking... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by ubersturm at 10:35 AM on May 19, 2007

gesamtkunstwerk: unlike protestant versions of Christianity, Catholicism has never particularly espoused the whole sola scriptura thing. The words, interpretations, & ideas of theologians, popes, etc. can be taken into account. Limbo wasn't the best of ideas, perhaps, but it was originally conceived as an attempt to deal with stuff that the Bible didn't really address, namely what happened to people who died (or, for that matter, die) without having heard of Jesus or... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by ubersturm at 9:15 PM on April 20, 2007

That is... gorgeous. Wow. And oddly enough, I've seen a mural of the image on the page after the title page, and wondered where it came from. Now I know. I wish that I could justify buying the "cheap" Italian edition...
posted to MetaFilter by ubersturm at 6:10 PM on March 20, 2007

brain cloud: it can be very hard for a local frat or sorority to stick up for themselves against the national org. For example, I know quite a few people who were members of a certain frat at my undergraduate institution. Now, they were awesome guys, flamboyantly geeky, loved to build stuff, had an inexplicable love for the color purple, had no problems with gay brothers, etc. They wanted to go co-ed, in fact, and in many ways would've been happier if they could've dissociated from the... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by ubersturm at 6:37 PM on February 25, 2007

Hallucigenia was my favorite animal as a little kid. Burgess Shale beasties are so cool! Thanks for the links.
posted to MetaFilter by ubersturm at 5:30 PM on February 25, 2007

Too bad for those of us stuck in situations like blasdelf's - most labs I've worked in have a lovely array of legacy computers. Currently, I need floppies/Zip disks to get my data off most of 'em, since they don't have CD-R/RW drives or in some cases USB ports...
posted to MetaFilter by ubersturm at 8:44 AM on February 4, 2007

Miko: there are a lot of hidden costs. You either live near a store that provides a lot of food options, including a very good variety of veggies, or you have a car and can afford the gas to drive to Whole Foods & stock up on veggies & fresh stuff. You probably have a kitchen, fully stocked with stove, oven, fridge, etc., meaning that you can prepare your own, healthier food and store leftovers or ingredients. You're in no danger of losing your electricity or water or of getting... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by ubersturm at 1:20 PM on January 28, 2007

It's as if all the white kids suddenly realized they could never hope to look or be as cool as the inner city kids and so they decided they'd ruin the game for everybody. This total rejection of style and individuality, the reduction of clothes to costume...

Yeah, 'cause God knows, the only way one can possibly be "cool" is to dress like/be an inner city kid. Speaking of, show me any style or fashion followed by... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by ubersturm at 6:30 AM on January 24, 2007

pyramid termite: sure, I've met boring people in odd clothes too. But, then, I've also met very interesting people who looked weird [in various ways], and very dull people who looked totally normal. I've got a radical idea here, kids: maybe clothes don't automatically define someone's personality, one way or the other. Maybe a dull person will be dull, no matter what they wear, while an interesting person will be interesting [again, no matter what they wear]. Probably the contrasts stand... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by ubersturm at 11:26 AM on January 24, 2007

gurple: actually, plants do not, themselves, fix nitrogen. Nitrogen fixation goes on in bacteria. Some of these bacteria are specifically associated with crops (e.g., legumes host bacteria that fix nitrogen in their root nodules), but most plants don't have these bacteria and depend on nutrients that are in the soil.

Corn, like most plants, doesn't have nitrogen-fixing bacteria associated with it. A hundred years ago, farmers would have rotated crops in order to... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by ubersturm at 2:38 PM on January 23, 2007

Horace Rumpole, have you tried Hollywood Express [not the same thing as the national chain, Hollywood Video]? They're all Cambridge/Somerville, but the stores are easily T-accessible [Central, Porter, and Davis Squares on the Red Line]. I haven't been to Austin, so I can't directly compare them with Vulcan, but I watch a fair amount of foreign/obscure stuff, and Hollywood Express has generally been able to fulfill my cinematic cravings...... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by ubersturm at 9:22 PM on January 11, 2007

I Foody, it's pretty well-accepted that bias plays a role in the hiring disparity between genders. There's a good paper that I can't seem to find right now, wherein identical apps were sent to psychology depts. under male or female names, for tenure-track and non-tenure-track positions. Applications submitted under female names were judged far more harshly [by both men and women.] Similar studies tend to confirm the existence of bias, although the amount of bias observed... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by ubersturm at 9:23 AM on January 10, 2007

Heh, I was taking pictures at this steel mill in Cleveland a week or two ago, although now it's Mittal and not ISG. Got a similar shot, actually, albeit one in color. As a kid [and heck, today too] I loved seeing the flaming smokestacks in the evening... I hope someday to actually get to go inside one of these places.
posted to MetaFilter by ubersturm at 5:30 PM on January 7, 2007

Ow, the images make me think of experiments gone bad...
posted to MetaFilter by ubersturm at 9:38 AM on December 18, 2006

Interestingly, there's a fair amount of research going on regarding the development of less energy-intensive catalytic processes for the production of nitrogen products from N2. The Haber-Bosch process, which uses an iron catalyst, has some pretty extreme requirements: 450-650C and 200-300 atm. This consumes near 1% of the world’s energy. Dimitry Yandulov and Richard Schrock recently came up with a method using a molybdenum catalyst that's ~66% efficient and works at 1atm and room temperature.... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by ubersturm at 7:38 AM on November 21, 2006

Mister_A: I don't study nitrogenases, but there're a lot of possible explanations. For example, it's possible that overexpressing a nitrogenase gene using a plasmid might have unhealthy side-effects for the microorganism (that is, too much ammonia might eventually kill it, or too many cellular resources [ATP, particularly] would be used), and the amount of ammonia we could harvest before killing the cells might not be worth the effort. On the other hand, in organisms that naturally have... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by ubersturm at 7:06 AM on November 28, 2006

soundofsuburbia - they used to be booked as "the world's only Earth tribute band,"and yeah, their pedigree is pretty obvious, I think. Saw them play with Grief earlier this year, at one of the better shows I've been to this year. Of course, I don't judge shows by whether they "make my ass shake"...
posted to MetaFilter by ubersturm at 4:21 PM on November 19, 2006

Ugh. I had a science teacher in middle school who had several of these as pets. During parent-teacher things, she used to walk around with them crawling all over her clothing, although unlike the ones described here, they weren't leashed. Mesmerizingly disgusting. It was very hard to restrain myself from brushing the bastards off of her and dropping a book on them.
posted to MetaFilter by ubersturm at 12:14 PM on October 11, 2006

It may be worth noting that the rather epic [and apocalyptic] Current 93 song, "Hitler as Kalki (SDM)," whose lyrics comprised the "Hitler" link, was dedicated to the songwriter's father, who fought against the Nazis during WWII. Current 93 is, if anything, a Gnostic/mystic group; they're not neo-Nazi.

[But damn. Reading some of the stuff in the links - particularly the cat-book - makes me realize that Savitri Devi Mukherji was even more deranged... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by ubersturm at 9:45 PM on September 10, 2006

Best school lunches I had were when I was in elementary school and allowed to walk home for lunch. When I changed schools and had to actually eat school lunches, I was horrified. I ate less every year and eventually stopped eating them entirely - I'd get milk, which I was fairly sure they couldn't screw up, but that was it. I still have a horror of rectangular pizzas. [And ugh, one had to swaddle the grilled cheese sandwiches in napkins to soak up enough grease to make them at all edible.]
posted to MetaFilter by ubersturm at 6:10 PM on September 4, 2006

jfuller, if one were to put it in musical notation, I generally read it as two quarter notes followed by a triplet of quarter notes. "Sorrow's" and "springs" are more measured, and the emphasis in "sorrow's" is on the first syllable; each word in "are the same" goes by slightly faster, with emphasis on the "are."

Very disappointed by the version of "I Wake and Feel the Fell of Dark, Not Day." It's far too... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by ubersturm at 9:02 PM on August 21, 2006

snakey, PCR isn't a test. It's a technique to amplify fragments of DNA (that is, make a bunch of copies of the original fragments.) There are tests for HIV that utilize that technique, yes, but there's a difference between the tests and the technique. Furthermore, the fact that Mullis was involved in the development of PCR has nothing to do with whether or not he's competent and informed enough to judge HIV research [and the fact that other researchers use PCR doesn't mean... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by ubersturm at 2:29 AM on July 25, 2006

Man, my family couldn't really afford programs like CTY [or the equivalent at Northwestern, which was the university that ran the Midwest Talent Search.] Luckily there are others [RSI and Telluride being the biggest examples] that are free. And yeah, the fact that so many students got their first kiss or had their first relationship there wasn't lost on the counselors [or the students, for that matter.] The theory that RSI was designed as a eugenics program to breed more smart science geeks... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by ubersturm at 3:19 PM on July 21, 2006

You're definitely right, Smart Dalek. It's too bad that Kinski's dead, or they could've made a good sister-film to Aguirre and Cobra Verde out of this man's story. Though I suppose there's still time for a documentary, which are what Herzog's been doing a lot of anyway.
posted to MetaFilter by ubersturm at 4:58 PM on July 17, 2006

yoink, as I said earlier, I'm not the sort of person who believes that psychedelic drugs magically unlock some Secret Dimension of the Mind or Hidden Truth or whatnot. By profound I meant primarily "has a strong and lasting effect on the person who's tripping," where by lasting, I mean that their post-trip life is actually changed in some way. By valid, I meant that conclusions reached or ideas conceived with the aid of psychedelic drugs can be as correct or as important as ideas... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by ubersturm at 4:45 PM on July 11, 2006

daksya - disappointing, but not surprising. As I think I've said here before, we've got these classes of drugs that have incredibly interesting effects on the mind. You'd think that they [or new, more targetted drugs developed from them] would be a way to study the human mind and how it works. An opportunity, in other words, that'd be worthwhile even if they didn't have any particularly useful effects for the individual, though of course like many people, I think they can. Instead, all... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by ubersturm at 5:08 PM on July 11, 2006