Nice to see a government program that serves a useful purpose and works as planned. Let's hope the FDIC can keep on top of things and keep this from getting worse.
posted to MetaFilter by Brian James at 6:46 PM on July 11, 2008

The jug isn't a bad design, I admire how it is better in every way for the milk producers (cows excepted), transporters, and retailers. The thing that bugs me is that consumers are bearing the real costs of the poorer aspects of the design, namely wasted product (milk they spill), and time (to clean up spilled milk, cry, etc.).

You're correct, it isn't a bad design, it's a frigging dreadful design. How can you say it's not a bad design when in the... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Brian James at 5:12 PM on June 30, 2008

I'll buy the DVD, if they promise I'll be able to watch it for more than 60 seconds before a quick and inexplicable death.
posted to MetaFilter by Brian James at 12:28 PM on June 22, 2008

The blogger Last Psychiatrist had an interesting insight into the fellow who refused to administer the shocks. Apparently his reason for refusing is often misunderstood:

Here's why he refused:

...[the professor] insisted that I continue [giving shocks.] I refused, offered to give him back the five dollars, and told him that I believed the experiment to be really about how far I would go, that the learner was... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Brian James at 5:10 PM on June 19, 2008

Has anyone commenting in this thread grown up in an inner-city high-crime area?
posted to MetaFilter by Brian James at 10:55 AM on June 19, 2008

Just another lazy NYC writer trying to come up with a buzzword & "hot trend" to pay rent this month. Like "metrosexual," "bromance," "man date," and "frenemies." Don't waste your time.
posted to MetaFilter by Brian James at 1:25 PM on March 31, 2008

Towards the end of Don Quixote:

"Alas," answered Sancho, sobbing, "dear sir, do not die; but take my counsel, and live many years; for the greatest madness a man can commit in this life is to suffer himself to die, without anybody's killing him, or being brought to his end by any other hand than that of melancholy. Be not lazy, sir, but get out of bed, and let us be going to the field, dressed like shepherds, as we agreed to do: and who knows,... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Brian James at 7:56 AM on March 13, 2008

This works out to a death rate of 21 per 100,000. For comparison, the death rate in childbirth in the US is 17 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births.

More dangerous than many other occupations? Sure. Among the most dangerous jobs? Nope.


This is a perfect sample of missing the entire point of the debate. This statistic proves nothing by itself on the need for officers to defend themselves. What we need to know... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Brian James at 4:25 PM on December 13, 2007

In case facts matter to anybody, regardless of what the State Department officiam may have said, only AUSAs (assistant US attorneys) have the authority to bind the federal government to an immunity agreement. No one else--not the cops, the FBI, or some random State Department official--can. They may have offered to do so, which could have been done out of investigative sneakiness or just incompetence.

So, not to defend Richard J Griffin, but... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Brian James at 5:16 PM on October 30, 2007

I once created a logo for a Cabinet-level agency, and I can tell you this kind of design stuff is the province of interns and other low-level personnel. And, any attempt at novelty or creativity will get picked apart and committeed to death, so there's a tendency to put together something quick, simple, and easily understandable. Don't look to the federal government for feats of brilliant graphic design.
posted to MetaFilter by Brian James at 2:25 PM on October 24, 2007

Wasn't the Government also doing exercises on 9/11?

.
posted to MetaFilter by Brian James at 3:01 PM on October 10, 2007

I demand that China be closed immediately, and that all its prisoners receive their day in court.
posted to MetaFilter by Brian James at 10:28 PM on May 3, 2007

One my faves is the American Radiator Building. Makes me smile every time I see it, rising just off Bryant Park. Done by the same guy who would go on to do Rockefeller Center.
posted to MetaFilter by Brian James at 3:41 PM on May 3, 2007

Any other mirrors? I don't think Devilducky is going to last much longer...
posted to MetaFilter by Brian James at 12:43 PM on April 18, 2007

Come on, you expect us to believe that came from Iran?! Why isn't the stencil in farsi, like the other one? and the date, i believe they have a different calendar. and just look at that font! it doesn't look military, it looks like Arial.

The shells had serial numbers in English in order to comply with international standards for arms, the officials said.
posted to MetaFilter by Brian James at 10:56 PM on February 12, 2007

Whenever I see any discussion of Salmonella or the risks of food poisoning, there's never any talk about the likelihood that it will occur. People think "presence of bacteria in raw chicken = gross, health hazard, run for the hills, go vegetarian."

How many individual bacteria actually wind up on the meat? How many survive the cooking process? How many individual bacteria have to be ingested to cause illness? How long will these bacteria survive on exposed... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Brian James at 11:52 AM on January 9, 2007

Can anyone provide a translation of the stuff that the entire group seems to chant about 1:00 in?
posted to MetaFilter by Brian James at 5:48 PM on December 30, 2006

What is this, Slashdot? "Impossibly Obscure Scientific Discovery Announced"
posted to MetaFilter by Brian James at 10:38 AM on November 28, 2006

Well, this thread has aged to the point where my original intent is irrelevant now, but what the hey.

Thank you to The Salaryman and suedehead, who got the point I was trying to make. I tried to condense my post into as few lines as possible so as not to hog the front page, but it looks like I failed at making my point clear in limited space.

I love Borat. I find the movie and the sketches hilariously funny. But what moved me to post was that... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Brian James at 2:59 PM on November 16, 2006

I have to say, I've been watching CNN since the FPP on this report came up, and the CNN coverage is remarkably non-hysterical.

I'm sure this will change in the coming days as we get into analyzing the response and "what this means" and so on, but they have done a good job of sticking to the facts. Just wanted to say that, because everyone rips into the media when they do something wrong, I think they've handled this well so far.
posted to MetaFilter by Brian James at 1:02 PM on October 11, 2006

No.
posted to MetaFilter by Brian James at 11:49 PM on October 7, 2006

Reminds me of something I wondered about the other day. What's next with TV after HDTV? Are they even working on something yet?
posted to MetaFilter by Brian James at 11:00 PM on September 24, 2006

OK, really stupid question for the video guys in this thread...

What makes this camera so revolutionary is that drastically lowers the price for acquisition, which is still by far the most expensive part of HD production.

Are we using HD to refer to any really high-resolution video capture method? And this camera has accomplished some new height in this area? Or are we referring to HD as in the HDTV standard? Because if... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Brian James at 12:16 AM on September 25, 2006

I'm not a huge fan of Clinton, but he seriously kicks some ass in this interview. Nice to see a president that can form a sentence, not to mention a cogent train of thought.
posted to MetaFilter by Brian James at 1:35 PM on September 24, 2006

I'm surprised amberglow didn't post this first. Maybe he's on vacation.
posted to MetaFilter by Brian James at 6:35 PM on September 23, 2006

I'm going to make amends for my earlier near-derail by posting a substantive comment to which subsequent commenters can flame way, so here goes. I've got comments for both sides of this debate.

First, I don't think this provides any grist for those who opposed the war at the outset. It's one thing to have opposed the war because you oppose war in general, or because you didn't see the connection to al-Qaeda, because you think Bush is a warmonger, or whatever.... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Brian James at 9:17 PM on September 23, 2006

Nothing to see here. This is not a final judgement on anything, just a motion to dismiss, a bit of pre-trial maneuvering to get the case thrown out early on.

All it means is that the judge will decide the issue at trial, which hasn't even started yet. It's a bit premature for all of the spooky "unprecedented" and "expansive" and "far-reaching implications" type language the left likes to use whenever parsing a national security case.... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Brian James at 11:40 AM on August 10, 2006

FYI, the source inside Al-Qaeda that tipped off the Americans was killed in a shootout with Saudi authorities.

Suskind quotes a CIA operative as questioning whether it was an accident that the Saudis had killed the kingpin who could expose a cell planning a chemical weapons attack inside the U.S. "The Saudis just shrugged," the source tells Suskind. "They said their people got a little overzealous."
posted to MetaFilter by Brian James at 2:33 PM on June 17, 2006

There's a docu-ganda movie out now (here in NYC anyway) about this called American Blackout. I really would like to see a mainstream-media outlet do a piece on this to distinguish the partisan hysteria from legitimate voting malfeasance.
posted to MetaFilter by Brian James at 1:15 PM on June 1, 2006

Not exactly a wiki, but the Model Penal Code has been a successful, collaborative effort at putting together statutory recommendations for states to enact as-is or consult in making their own statutes.
posted to MetaFilter by Brian James at 12:33 PM on May 5, 2006

They're smoking pot. On private property. Without permission, and over the express disapproval of the property owner.

Even in Amsterdam, that's not cool.
posted to MetaFilter by Brian James at 12:52 AM on April 29, 2006

This is cool, but why is Google doing this? What angle is Google working here?

In the past, we've seen Google provide information services--email, search, IM, WiFi--so that it can serve ads more closely tailored to your interests.

But this trend doesn't follow as applied to Google Earth and SketchUp. Are they just perks to rope people into Google's products? Earn brand loyalty?
posted to MetaFilter by Brian James at 11:20 AM on April 27, 2006

Part of me wants to say this isn't much of a FPP...

but on the other hand...wow...I'll be back in 8-10 minutes.
posted to MetaFilter by Brian James at 2:08 PM on April 20, 2006

Transcript Here.
posted to MetaFilter by Brian James at 1:39 AM on April 14, 2006

I got a kick out of reading that even Al Gore is open to some, ahem, creative measures:

The first time I proposed a snatch, in 1993, the White House Counsel, Lloyd Cutler, demanded a meeting with the President to explain how it violated international law. Clinton had seemed to be siding with Cutler until Al Gore belatedly joined the meeting, having just flown overnight from South Africa. Clinton recapped the arguments on both sides for Gore: Lloyd says this.... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Brian James at 1:46 PM on April 7, 2006

So, umm...for FireFox...how would one go about wiping all this information? Delete the folder in Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox?
posted to MetaFilter by Brian James at 8:38 AM on March 23, 2006

but the interface is kludgey and it crashes often

This is just another way of saying Your Favorite Program Sucks
posted to MetaFilter by Brian James at 8:51 AM on March 23, 2006

Haven't personalized content-aggregation tools such as this one been the Next Big Thing for the last, like, 15 years?
posted to MetaFilter by Brian James at 7:44 AM on March 16, 2006

I like long hair on the ladies, but beyond a certain point it's like "all right, we get it, you have long hair. stop."
posted to MetaFilter by Brian James at 8:08 PM on March 9, 2006

Once you accept federal funds you become a wholly-owned subsidiary of the federal government. In other words, p0wn3d by Bush.

No, you just have to provide the government the same access as you would anyone else. If you don't like that, don't take the money.
posted to MetaFilter by Brian James at 8:39 AM on March 7, 2006

Great post.

I took a class with a professor who got his PhD in parasitology. The class reacted to his stories much the same as MeFi is: Disgusted, but we can't turn away.

I've got two creepy parasite stories:
In one, back in the 1910's or 1920's, some parasitologist was roaming around the Congo looking for specimens. It was a very new field of study then, and the Congo of course hadn't been thoroughly explored. This parasitologist... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Brian James at 11:57 PM on March 4, 2006

Thanks for posting this...this is one of those things that I wanted to know, but it never occurred to me that someone might have put all this information in one place. (Kind of a slogan for the Internet)
posted to MetaFilter by Brian James at 2:03 AM on February 27, 2006

Anything called the "Guerrilla News Network" can't be wrong.
posted to MetaFilter by Brian James at 11:26 PM on February 17, 2006

Well, there's a big difference between tactical airstrikes (which I could see happening) and an "occupation" of Iran.

I realize the FPP link says the US won't occupy Iran, but then goes on in the next sentence to say the US wants to occupy Iran's oil fields. I don't have the war plans in front of me, but I'd bet that, particularly after the Iraq-Iran war, Iran's oil fields along the border with Iraq are the most heavily fortified zone in the country.... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Brian James at 1:53 AM on February 18, 2006

The Secret Service has always been able to do this, and was doing it before Bush came to office.

This prompts the question of why is this even in the Patriot act? Most likely they want to put, in the form of legislation, PDD-62, which puts the USSS in charge of Special National Security Events, such as the Super Bowl, Olympics, or whatever the President decides is such an event, like Jenna Bush's sorority initiation, etc. But PDD-62 was signed by... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Brian James at 7:55 AM on January 25, 2006

Who does that song? I might put it on my running mix.
posted to MetaFilter by Brian James at 9:19 PM on December 30, 2005

This has been known for a while...Straight Dope did a piece on it.

It was more of an excercise in military planning than it was a contingency plan.

Although, if we did invade Canada, maybe we can recapture a land connection to the Northwest Angle! The Northwest Anglians deserve better!
posted to MetaFilter by Brian James at 2:46 PM on December 30, 2005

Bear in mind that the issue here is tapping communications passing through the U.S., by way of switching stations. If you make a call on a satellite phone from Canada to Afghanistan, and it happens to run through a ground station or switch in the U.S., then the NSA is certainly going to try to listen in. Is that a "domestic" communication?
posted to MetaFilter by Brian James at 10:31 PM on December 23, 2005

odinsdream, your conclusion is most likely correct but not supported by the article. Based on this article, it's not at all clear that domestic outbound comms (ie, a call from a person known to be in the U.S. to a person known to be outside) are involved. I'm reading the same article you are and I just don't see it. I don't doubt it happened, but it's not there.

Even so, that's not the point of this story--you're thinking of a few days ago. Here, the issue is the... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Brian James at 11:32 PM on December 23, 2005

A terrible story, but well-told. Kudos to the Times.
posted to MetaFilter by Brian James at 12:36 AM on December 19, 2005