Displaying post 1 to 50 of 50
from
mefi
Single Japanese Male. Rather than yammering in Meta about what "best of the web" means, let's have an object-lesson in astonishing obscure excellence. Introducing every last one of you to the
Virtual Wilbye Consort.
posted to MetaFilter by jfuller
at 3:53 PM on August 4, 2007
(19 comments)
I love my friends...My friends love me...We're just as friendly...As friends can be...And just because...We really care...
Whatever we get, we share.
posted to MetaFilter by jfuller
at 7:00 PM on June 29, 2007
(24 comments)
December 2006: carbon credit market to crash-land? One problem, most of the countries submitted emissions plans that allocated permits for more than is currently being emitted--in other words, instead of reductions, they proposed increases. Collectively, EU countries have allocated permits allowing emissions 15 percent higher than actual emissions. February 2007: Splat. The collapse in the price of a tonne of carbon dating back to May last year when it emerged that most countries in the scheme had set their carbon caps far too high, resulting in fewer firms than expected having to buy credits and causing the price of a tonne of carbon to plummet from over €30 to less than €10. SPLAT!:
A year ago, CO2 was changing hands in the ETS at 30 euros (33 dollars) a tonne, triple that at the market's launch in January 2005. Today, a tonne of CO2 can be bought for little more than one euro. I'm a good greenie, I'm buying enough credits to offset my coal-fired barbie and my Bradley Shopping Vehicle for the rest of eternity. That should cost me about fiddy cents. (Buy yours
here.)
posted to MetaFilter by jfuller
at 8:11 PM on February 27, 2007
(18 comments)
Are Africans Black? The population of African immigrants in the United States is rapidly growing. Since 1990, about 50,000 Africans have come to the United States annually, more than in any of the peak years of the international slave trade, which was abolished in 1807. They add to the steady influx of black immigrants from other continents and the Caribbean, and those who have been in the United States for generations but who don't racially and culturally define themselves as African American. These blacks feel cramped by the narrowness of American racial politics, in which "blackness" has not just defined one's skin color but has served as a code word for African American.
Maybe Not. After all, Obama's mother is of white U.S. stock. His father is a black Kenyan. Other than color, Obama did not - does not - share a heritage with the majority of black Americans, who are descendants of plantation slaves.... when black Americans refer to Obama as "one of us," I do not know what they are talking about. In his new book, "The Audacity of Hope," Obama makes it clear that, while he has experienced some light versions of typical racial stereotypes, he cannot claim those problems as his own - nor has he lived the life of a black American.
posted to MetaFilter by jfuller
at 7:59 AM on February 18, 2007
(161 comments)
Charlie Darwin joins the fray. Yes,
The formation of vegetable mould, through the action of worms, with observations on their habits is there.
posted to MetaFilter by jfuller
at 6:12 PM on October 18, 2006
(19 comments)
Peak oil? Yesterday's news. Global warming? You won't live to see it. Today's end-of-the-world-as-you-know-it message is mad cow disease
in the human blood supply.
posted to MetaFilter by jfuller
at 5:57 AM on March 27, 2006
(68 comments)
From
Foreign Policy,
Patriarchy's Big Comeback. Maybe you didn't believe it had been away. But
Societies that are today the most secular and the most generous with their underfunded welfare states will be the most prone to religious revivals and a rebirth of the patriarchal family. The absolute population of Europe and Japan may fall dramatically, but the remaining population will, by a process similar to survival of the fittest, be adapted to a new environment in which no one can rely on government to replace the family, and in which a patriarchal God commands family members to suppress their individualism and submit to father.
posted to MetaFilter by jfuller
at 4:23 PM on March 2, 2006
(58 comments)
De Villepin: The French riots
didn't happen. Riots? What riots? There were no riots. (Jean Baudrillard: "That's right, Dominique, you're
getting the idea.)
posted to MetaFilter by jfuller
at 5:21 PM on November 30, 2005
(49 comments)
Tejas to Sony BMG: "
Reach for th' sky, varmint. Now turn around reeeeal slow. And keep them hands where ah can see 'em."
The rest of the necktie party is forming up over here. Popcorn?
posted to MetaFilter by jfuller
at 3:16 PM on November 22, 2005
(31 comments)
Red State/Blue state France.
Les résultats département par département. Remarkable that the U.S. isn't the only country that's split down the geographic middle. No translation, but the picture speaks for itself.
posted to MetaFilter by jfuller
at 7:38 AM on May 30, 2005
(22 comments)
It's exactly one week to
The Referendum. Will there be a Europe this year or won't there? The European Union was more France's project than anyone else's; if the French suddenly say Non there's going to be lots of polyglot arm-waving and excitement.
The media are all a-twitter, all the
European ministers are breathing heavily,
Libération, in the person of Jean Baudrillard, sees state fascism approaching
(but then Libération always sees fascism approaching, it's their gig.) My magic 8 ball points to
Oui. Oh wait, it changed its mind, now it says "reply hazy, ask again later."
posted to MetaFilter by jfuller
at 10:22 AM on May 22, 2005
(30 comments)
Turkey Rhubarb in the Low Countries. Since there's nothing interesting going on here in the US right now, let's enjoy a moment of EU fun. (y2-length post inside).
posted to MetaFilter by jfuller
at 8:08 AM on October 3, 2004
(27 comments)
Breeders are winning. "Conservative, religiously minded Americans are putting far more of their genes into the future than their liberal, secular counterparts." (WaPo link,
bugmenot says try fedup@mailinator.com and
fedup if you don't care to register. Definition of genetic fitness
here.)
posted to MetaFilter by jfuller
at 10:04 AM on September 6, 2004
(77 comments)
The world's
ten worst dictators -- this year anyway. Saddam, who was No. 3 Worst last year, has dropped off the list. Charles Taylor of Liberia (No. 4), also out of power and gone. Moammar Gadhafi (previously No. 8) and Belarus' Alexander Lukashenko (No. 10) also miss the new A list not because, according to the compilers, "they have improved but because other dictators have gotten worse."
posted to MetaFilter by jfuller
at 3:54 AM on September 1, 2004
(20 comments)
Should Gaelic be an official EU language? As a happy member of the
SCA I promise to revise all my past snarkiness and negative thinking about the EU if this happens. I will
read (ploddingly and with a dictionary) all those speeches by Chirac and Schroder--as soon as they're translated into Gaelic. If
Maltese can be an EU language of diplomacy, why not Gaelic? While the world around us rages, we'll return to the Middle Ages.
(From crookedtimber)
posted to MetaFilter by jfuller
at 4:22 PM on June 25, 2004
(27 comments)
Friday Quicktime fluff. For all my good buddies from the "Trucker Fags in Denial" thread, below.
This is why God gave us butts.
posted to MetaFilter by jfuller
at 5:29 PM on January 23, 2004
(13 comments)
Don't do browser sniffing.
To properly view our site, you must be using a standards-compliant web browser. Your current browser is:
(...nothing...)
Over 97% of our audience now uses a standards-compliant web browser, however you appear not to be using one. We want to help you fix this situation and improve your experience on reuters.co.uk and the rest of the internet.
I'm using Mozilla 1.5 but my user agent string is set to report Netscape 4.75 running on Windows 95.
posted to MetaFilter by jfuller
at 7:35 AM on November 17, 2003
(45 comments)
Buddhists go badass. "Rathana, an official with a powerful Buddhist group, dismisses Sri Lanka's peace process and urges renewed military action against Tamil Tiger separatists." Let me anticipate mefi's notorious
left bunch of bananas and attribute it to
this.
posted to MetaFilter by jfuller
at 2:20 PM on November 14, 2003
(27 comments)
SCOTUS supports state medical-weed laws "The Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected a Justice Department effort to punish doctors in Washington and other states for recommending marijuana or even discussing the drug's benefits with their patients." (from google news)
posted to MetaFilter by jfuller
at 7:03 AM on October 15, 2003
(7 comments)
Chickens Prefer Beautiful Humans. Suggests that human preferences arise from general properties of nervous systems, rather than from face-specific adaptations, in other words sorry fuglies, it's
not socially constructed. N.b this research received a 2003
Ig Nobel Prize.
posted to MetaFilter by jfuller
at 11:09 AM on October 3, 2003
(21 comments)
Well, I said, if they're going to insist on putting all those functions -- phone, camera, personal organizer, hand-held computer, TV remote, garage door opener, phaser -- on a single device then
I want 'em on my Gameboy.
posted to MetaFilter by jfuller
at 8:10 AM on August 20, 2003
(7 comments)
All the economy needs is love. "Japan is suffering from deflation and I think there are a lot of people who want to be helped," said one businessman, who had already been hugged twice. Excuse me, fuller has to go camp out in the Sailor Mercury hug line now.
posted to MetaFilter by jfuller
at 4:27 PM on June 4, 2003
(14 comments)
Matisse|Picasso, head to head. Pablo just couldn't be sure he's number one as long as Henri was alive and working. And he's right to look over his shoulder. I
admire Pablo, and even
like some of his canvases, but for my money Henri is the greatest painter since the renaissance, with
Vincent at no. two and Pablo in third. It's nice to see some other folks starting to give Henri his props. (P.S. here's the
introduction to the show. Here's the
slide show. Here's a review from slate with
another slide show with a somewhat different and larger selection of the images.)
posted to MetaFilter by jfuller
at 8:20 AM on February 19, 2003
(19 comments)
Bunches and bunches of lost/stolen Beatles tapes recovered by cops. The fab 4 were My Era but I'm no particular fan of 'em, prefering the
Byrds for hippie-dippie flashback, the
Beach Boys for that let's-fire-up-the-Lincoln-SUV-and-burn-rubber mood, the post-Brian-fries-his-brain Beach Boys
again for acid nostalgia and (fuller tips hat to the Dark Side) little Frankie
Zappa, of whom I bought
Freak Out as a $1.98 loss leader in 1966 and everything since, up through and including
Läther . Nevertheless, this looks like it might be fun.
posted to MetaFilter by jfuller
at 6:52 PM on January 11, 2003
(28 comments)
China.
Abandons Communism. Gets
AIDS. May be about to
lose its shirt. While everybody on the pink side of Ebenezer Scrooge is pissing and moaning about the state of America, here's one American who thinks the state of the Middle Kingdom is at least equally interesting (as in ancient Chinese curse, "May you live in interesting times.")
posted to MetaFilter by jfuller
at 9:16 AM on November 12, 2002
(11 comments)
The most sensible take I've seen on Enron and Bush.
Once all the fuss has died down—Congress is currently planning ten separate inquiries—two good things will probably have come out of the Enron mess. Companies will no longer be allowed to use their pension programs to treat their employees as an especially loyal and malleable class of shareholder; instead, pension funds will have to be diversified. And accounting firms will no longer be allowed to act as paid consultants to the companies they audit, as Arthur Andersen did with Enron. New Yorker link, no registration required.
posted to MetaFilter by jfuller
at 5:07 PM on January 23, 2002
(9 comments)
India, Pakistan and the Bomb. Scientific American says "The Indian subcontinent is the most likely place in the world for a nuclear war." How soon?
posted to MetaFilter by jfuller
at 10:31 AM on November 15, 2001
(12 comments)
Reparations.
ZIMBABWE announced new measures yesterday [10/12/01] to enable the Government to nationalise up to 90 per cent of all white-owned land at the stroke of a pen — a move expected to wipe out next year’s crops almost totally.
posted to MetaFilter by jfuller
at 8:13 AM on November 13, 2001
(16 comments)
Good reason to move. (Or not, as the case may be.) Lessee, if I make $45k per year and own a little house in Athens GA I'd have to make $67K in Atlanta, $89K in DC, $133K in SF, $150K in Manhattan. No wonder all my friends who
did move to Manhattan are all stark, staring bonkers now.
posted to MetaFilter by jfuller
at 1:04 PM on August 30, 2001
(32 comments)
Imminant death of net predicted. Good, the fad-followers can go on to whatever's next and the real geeks can take their Jolt back to their cubicles and go back to arguing about the One True Indentation Style.
posted to MetaFilter by jfuller
at 2:10 PM on July 26, 2001
(9 comments)
Take that, web-standards maniacs! "After Windows XP is launched in October, users will be directed to download a plug-in from Microsoft's Web site (www.microsoft.com) to make Java-based programs work. Without this step, 'any Web page that contains Java applications will not run -- it will be a dead page'" Put that in your "this page viewable in v5.0 browsers or later" crackpipe and smoke it. (Shamelessly swiped from that Other Site...)
posted to MetaFilter by jfuller
at 8:11 AM on July 18, 2001
(21 comments)
Question concerning the notion of the
social construction of reality. If enough people cease to believe in the Holocaust, or if enough of them have just never heard of it, as detailed in
another MeFi thread, does that mean it didn't happen?
If it only means "well, as far as those people are concerned it never happened" then that's a truism and hardly worth any hoo-hah. But does social constructivism, if I can call it that, go on to make the much stronger claim that if the millions cease to believe in it, or forget about it, then it reallyo-trulyo never happened?
posted to MetaFilter by jfuller
at 11:49 AM on July 12, 2001
(9 comments)
I am really, really,
really tired of the popups for the
Tiny Wireless Video Camera - the ad that always has a picture of a hot chick and trumpets "FITS ANYWHERE" (
in the girls' bathroom, wink nudge.)
If there are any browser coders listening, here's a feature I long for: an anti-bookmark list. Stumble on a page that pops up garbage like the above, add it to your anti-bookmarks list and it's locked out instantly and forever, no forgiveness, no rehabilitation, capital punishment for bad web pages. Yes, yes, I know about junkbuster and webwasherand hosts files. But at this late date crap lockout should be part of the browser the way kill files were (and are) part of newsreaders. Sic 'em, Fang.
posted to MetaFilter by jfuller
at 6:57 AM on July 11, 2001
(30 comments)
More hours in daycare makes bad kids.
"'If more time in all sorts of (child care) arrangements is predicting disconcerting outcomes, then if you want to reduce the probability of those outcomes, you reduce the time in care,' said Belsky. 'Extend parental leave and part-time work.' One of the lead scientists on the study with Belsky, [Sarah Friedman of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Developmen] said, 'The easy solution is to cut the number of hours but that may have implications for the family that may not be beneficial for the development of the children in terms of economics.'"
Or, to say that in English, if you want your kids to be cared for at home you have to short them on food, clothing and shelter.
posted to MetaFilter by jfuller
at 9:56 AM on April 19, 2001
(98 comments)
Best RIAA-vs-mp3 quote so far? Here's my candidate. I think it'll take five aces to beat it but don't hesitate to try!
As Eben Moglen, professor of law and legal history at Columbia University, puts it, "Is the RIAA and its friends doing some kind of technology surveillance? Yes. Is it going to work? No. It's really dumb. It's another serious mistake by an industry going out of business in the stupidest way, bumping its head on the steps on the way down, because the record industry was always a bunch of thugs and that's what they still are."
posted to MetaFilter by jfuller
at 1:44 PM on March 28, 2001
(24 comments)
The state of Florida has charged a teenage student with a felony violation of a
wiretapping law for taping her chemistry class lecture.
posted to MetaFilter by jfuller
at 11:15 AM on February 28, 2001
(32 comments)
Chicken or egg?
Life (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology) imitates
art (Satirewire.)
posted to MetaFilter by jfuller
at 9:18 AM on February 23, 2001
(1 comment)
