Hey, I'm interested in this too, and I was googling just now and found a short excerpt of the woman who made the suit talking about it, from the NYT. I hope it helps.

Suit for Talking Heads Film Was Architectural Project

''Why a Big Suit?'' is one of several questions printed on the cover of the soundtrack album for the new Talking Heads film, ''Stop Making Sense.'' More to the point, How a Big Suit? The outfit is one in which David Byrne,... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Arturus at 3:19 PM on May 27, 2008

The Golden Age of Cellphone Technology (ringtones, baby)

Absolutely not, especially if you're in america. Elsewhere it isn't as bad. But, in america, we are at the worst in terms of cellphone technology, not the best. Our technology is generations behind what the rest of the world is using (two out of four major service providers still use CDMA, honestly?), service providers cripple the phones they sell, what features are available... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Arturus at 12:44 PM on October 12, 2007

Eat it?
posted to Ask Metafilter by Arturus at 8:06 PM on September 28, 2007

Neither of us feel like we could "do" polyamory [...] I do not want to just have anonymous hook-ups anyway, I want to try real dating.

Poly is not anonymous hook-ups. This is very nearly categorical. I know of almost no people within the poly community who would define anonymous hookups as a poly activity. The Ethical Slut is certainly not the end all and be all of poly relationships, but it's good enough.

That said,... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Arturus at 8:00 PM on September 28, 2007

Uptalk: not just for valley girls.

And quotative like is short for "said something like", more or less.

That said, these things are not what johnny7 is asking about, which are instead space filling words and phrases, something which is not limited in any way, shape, or form to any particular group or subculture. Some people stop it, some people change to different space fillers, but there's no timeline for these things. If it's specific... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Arturus at 11:56 PM on September 19, 2007

It doesn't sound like you actually need it anymore, but I thought I'd mention how these things go at my school (small, laid-back, physically isolated from surrounding bodies of people). Wireless routers are against the rules, but IT doesn't really care about them, as long as they're properly configured and don't start trying to assign IP addresses upstream, which tends to knock out about half the dorm's access to the internet. If you've got a router which starts doing that, they're usually just... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Arturus at 8:48 AM on September 2, 2007

MVGroup for documentaries.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Arturus at 11:35 AM on August 29, 2007

heeeraldo: I'm not thinking of buying anything myself actually, but I have a friend who may be getting a new laptop and is thinking of making the switch.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Arturus at 7:37 PM on August 22, 2007

I know a small plurality of gay men, and only a few of them attract large numbers of female friends. Your idea may work, but it relies on finding an even more specific type of person than I think you intended, and even if you manage that there's still the fact that the whole thing is vaguely creepy. It may be easier if you set your goal as "find a friend with lots of straight female friends" without putting in the gay or male part. It's a broader group, and less exploitive seeming.... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Arturus at 9:26 PM on August 2, 2007

I never got very far into the pc way of doing things, and upon switching to the mac, got very deep into the mac way. These are the things I appreciate the most:

1. Finder's column view mode. Navigating my filesystem with keystrokes? Yes please.
2. A real command line. It's been a learning curve, but since getting into it, I feel completely crippled whenever I'm on a windows machine.
3. A clean, and compete, filesystem. Some hidden things, but... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Arturus at 9:37 PM on July 24, 2007

for some odd reason you can get water all the way in there

It's not that odd, it's the vapor in your breath condensing out in the tubes as it goes through them and cools.

We exhale a lot of water.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Arturus at 9:05 PM on July 22, 2007

Liquid War, is a ridiculously fun and simple strategy game, and it runs on anything. Bots available, but really not needed. 1v1 is a good enough game.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Arturus at 9:02 AM on July 18, 2007

The number of seconds in a year is approximately pi times ten to the seventh, to within 0.5% accuracy.

The inertial constant of a rotating solid sphere is 2/5.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Arturus at 5:08 PM on July 17, 2007

if it's a BSD, there's a chance you'll have fetch installed. Worth a quick check, unless you're just working with a seriously stripped down server.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Arturus at 9:46 PM on July 11, 2007

Anyone who has ever been around an infant knows that they do not need to be taught to cry when they're hungry or to suckle.

As a three month premie baby, I was born not knowing how to suckle. While 'taught' is probably not entirely accurate given the likely impossibility of teaching anything at that age, it seems at least somewhat true to say that I needed to be taught to suckle.

That said, and so I actually... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Arturus at 8:57 PM on July 11, 2007

As someone with a number of attractions to completely unobtainable people right now, I sympathize.

That said, for me, the only viable strategy is distance. I'm of a type where physical and emotional proximity is a very strong factor in attraction to people. When I look at relationships where I've gone from some form of attraction to good, romantically neutral, friends, there's a space where we didn't have as much contact for a while.

After... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Arturus at 6:30 PM on July 10, 2007

another OS X user, and flickr is painful to use. I've constantly wondered how it managed to become such a fixture of the social internet.

Just rang ping, got these results:
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 96.369/97.875/100.152/1.020 ms

~23 hops to yahoo.

I'm glad it's not just me.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Arturus at 6:15 PM on July 10, 2007

if you're on os x or other system with a decent command line, try just using wget. Sometimes my browser gives me issues, and going through other routes gets around that.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Arturus at 6:06 PM on July 10, 2007

brujita: I suspect it's being used in the childfree community's sense of the word, rather than the queer community's.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Arturus at 11:03 PM on June 27, 2007

Bear in mind that the german 'z' is roughly english 'ts', it's rather close to 'ch', especially since english isn't used to 'ts' in places like that.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Arturus at 7:48 PM on June 13, 2007

On the note of understanding a dog's signals, I very much reccomend Stanley Coren's book, How to Speak Dog. Nothing about training in here, but it gives a detailed guide to understanding and interpreting dog behavior. It'll tell you exactly the sort of things to watch for if you're concerned about the dog snapping under pressure.

If you do end up getting a dog from a breeder, please don't neglect to get it spayed/neutered.

Aside from that, get... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Arturus at 8:48 AM on May 29, 2007

I'm going to nth the idea that if your answer isn't an unqualified yes, it should be a no. That said, only two of your listed concerns seem valid: the fertility one and the money, and the first of these isn't a reason not to try.

My personal feelings are that unless you're really hung up on the whole biological offspring thing, don't do it. You've got two kids already. You don't need a third. If you do want one, consider adoption. The world has enough kids as it is.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Arturus at 1:27 AM on May 23, 2007

Just because it's sitting right in front of me right now, I'm going to reccomend House of Leaves. It's a head-trip of a book, and it definitely counts as interesting, although perhaps not in the sense you were thinking. It's got several levels of narrative running concurently, and uses the physical structure of the text as a plot element. If you're interested in that sort of experimental writing, it's amazing.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Arturus at 10:06 PM on May 18, 2007

It's probably not the same for everyone, but this poem always gives me a beautiful sense of the cycles of life, of love and human society.

'anyone lived in a pretty how town' by ee cummings:

anyone lived in a pretty how town
(with up so floating many bells down)
spring summer autumn winter
he sang his didn't he danced his did

Women and men(both little and small)
cared for... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Arturus at 12:10 AM on May 15, 2007

Chinese is problematic due to the lack of a phonetic writing system, which is why they have horrible adult literacy rates. Japanese is much better as far as learning the writing system goes. Kanji are still logographic, but you can get by with katakana and hiragana for the most part. In chinese, if you know the word but not the symbol, you're stuck.

I took german myself, and am quite happy with that choice so far. As far as it's practicality goes, it's one of the major... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Arturus at 12:31 AM on May 8, 2007

adamrice:

Illiteracy Jumps in China, Despite 50-Year Campaign to Eradicate It

To quote Victor Mair, "With alphabetic literacy, one can forget how to spell a word properly but still get one's idea across by misspelling it. If one forgets a crucial character, like the TI4 of DA3 PEN1TI4 打喷嚏 ("sneeze"), which very few Chinese know how to write, you're stuck."

His full commentary. Don't belive all the... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Arturus at 12:09 AM on May 10, 2007

To offer an opposing viewpoint, it sounds like this other guy is willing to step up as the father of the child. Does the actual paternity of the child matter that much? It seems to me that if the following are true:

1. You didn't want a child in the first place
2. The child will have a father figure
3. The mother, having one father figure, isn't looking to press the issue elsewhere

then why bother with determining the... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Arturus at 9:27 PM on May 9, 2007

Regarding IronWolve's suggestion about a vasectomy: Given that you've stated you wanted children in the future, if you still do, don't get a vasectomy. This is a usually irreversible procedure, and storing your semen in a bank is: expensive, not gaurenteed to work, and requires artificial insemination when the time comes to actually create a child, which is a fairly invasive procedure you can't be certain your future partner will be willing to go along with.... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Arturus at 9:33 PM on May 9, 2007

My aunt's solution to this problem was to only let her cat out during the worst sort of weather: blizzards, thunderstorms, hail, etc. At all other times, the request was ignored.

The cat learns that outside isn't really a place it wants to go after all. They stopped asking fairly quickly.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Arturus at 12:50 AM on May 8, 2007

Mindless Self Indulgence
posted to Ask Metafilter by Arturus at 3:19 PM on April 16, 2007

There are two important rules for any open relationship:

1. Each person needs to know themselves. You need to know what your own expectations are, what you can and can't deal with, wether this is irrational or not. If you have an irrational issue and it's not addressed, this causes massive problems. This would be the double standard situation.

2. You need to be open about all this. The challenge and beauty with these sorts of relationships is... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Arturus at 11:40 AM on April 16, 2007

Wolfram is mostly an egotist, and not really a crackpot, although that depends on who you ask. The work is solid, but that doesn't mean it's true, and it's certainly not as unique as he acts like it is. Konrand Zuse was doing more or less the same thing in the 60s, when he wrote a book that's been translated as Calculating Space.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Arturus at 10:57 PM on April 15, 2007

Part of the problem is that the idea of "devolution" is nonsense. A bit of slime mold you step on is absolutely just as evolved as you or me, just evolved to fit a very different niche. If modern technology changes the environmental pressures we are subject to, that doesn't mean that evolution has stopped. It means that biologically, our niche has changed. If we become more dependent on our technology, that's evolution. If we become dumber (unlikely) that's evolution. (This is why... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Arturus at 10:44 PM on April 15, 2007

I'm another supporter of VHEMT, although not to the point of actual extinction. The issue I see is not that the world is getting worse. I fully believe that, were I to create a child, it would come to age in a positive future. I am a fervent optimist in this matter.

However, the act of having a child makes our present situation worse. The world is overpopulated, becoming more so, and middle class american children, moreso. The important issue is not... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Arturus at 9:18 PM on April 15, 2007