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November 2007 Archives
November 30
John Updike writes about bizarre dinosaurs
for National Geographic. "How weird might a human body look to them? That thin and featherless skin, that dish-flat face, that flaccid erectitude, those feeble, clawless five digits at the end of each limb, that ghastly utter lack of a tail—ugh. Whatever did this creature do to earn its place in the sun, a well-armored, nicely specialized dino might ask. " Besides the Updike essay there's a
image gallery, an
interview with John Updike
[audio starts automatically], a dino
IQ test, an
audio critique of the way dinosaurs have been depicted in the latter half of the 20th Century
[audio starts automatically], a closer look at
the odder features of some of the stranger dinosaurs, an examination of the
nigersaurus (
images) as well as dinosaur
wallpapers and
jigsaw puzzles.
[via MeFi's Own ed]
posted by Kattullus at 8:54 PM PST - 26 comments
Austin Gutwein first became aware of the devastating impact of HIV/AIDS
from a pen pal in Africa.“‘My
pen pal [2006 video - 2:48]*...was the first one to open my eyes to the world outside of my own backyard,’ Austin says. One of the harsh realities that struck a chord with Austin was the fact that many kids become orphaned as a result of a parent contracting HIV. ‘I started to think about what it would be like if I lost my parents,’ says Austin. ‘I just felt called to help.’...On
World AIDS Day [
December 1] 2004, at age 10, Austin shot 2,057 free throws to represent the number of children who would be orphaned because of AIDS during that school day....Austin approached individuals in his community to sponsor his endeavor. That year [he] raised $3,000, which he gave to
World Vision to be used to help eight orphans in Africa.” Three years later his non-profit,
Hoops of Hope,
raised $100,000 [2007 video - 2:32] which was used to build a residential school in Zambia for those orphaned -- and many infected -- by HIV/AIDS. Next year's goal -- to build a hospital.
posted by ericb at 6:42 PM PST - 18 comments
Evel is gone from the world
Robert Craig "Evel" Knievel, Jr. (October 17, 1938 - November 30, 2007) was a motorcycle daredevil who has been a household name since the late 1960s, and arguably the most iconic motorbike stuntman of all time.
Evel Knievel's highly publicized motorcycle jumps, including his attempt to jump over the
Snake River Canyon, claim four of the top 20 most-watched Wide World of Sports events of all time. He enjoyed a lengthy career in this extreme sport despite suffering a series of major injuries during stunts.
posted by Tommy Gnosis at 1:48 PM PST - 116 comments
HowItSucks.com
rates products based on recent reviews from other users. The rating system is simple: the longer the red bar, the more it sucks. Just in time for Xmas. Also, comes free of charge with
blog, which also sucks.
posted by psmealey at 12:28 PM PST - 14 comments
Remember
NSFNet? If you had an email account in the U.S. before 1995, chances are most of your mail passed through an NSFNet node. The folks who ran it are
having a reunion.
posted by ardgedee at 10:27 AM PST - 4 comments
thesixtyone. "If Guitar Hero is about shredding, thesixtyone is about scouting. Musicians upload music and listeners decide which songs go on the homepage." Social networking crossed with musical trend spotting.
posted by PostIronyIsNotaMyth at 12:55 AM PST - 19 comments
November 29
Rails of War
is a terrific flash game, where you equip a train with ever-increasing combinations of weapons and guide it through various missions. It is a representative of the growing number of Defense-style flash strategy games started by
Tower Defense and friends, which we discussed before. Now you can try
Age of War, where you try to destroy an opponents base through five distinct eras;
Invasion Tactical Defense where you must manage a nuclear missile plant and its anti-aircraft defenses; the inevitable and
previously mentioned zombie defense games;
StarCraft FA5, where you are the Zerg defending your base; and the lovely and abstract
Red. These is a particularly addictive class of games, so be warned...
posted by blahblahblah at 10:53 PM PST - 19 comments
Skateboard Kings
is a 1978 BBC documentary about the
Dogtown skateboarding scene in late 70's Venice Beach and Santa Monica. Featuring a lot of footage of the skaters' daily life as well as an exploration of the business side of skateboarding, the documentary is a time capsule of late 70's Southern California. For more about Dogtown go to
z-boys.com.
[previously on MetaFilter]
posted by Kattullus at 7:36 PM PST - 10 comments
Here is an incredibly detailed history of Glasgow in pictures. The
site map is probably the best place to start.
posted by winna at 5:49 PM PST - 9 comments
Before instant messaging, before chat groups, before IRC... there was
Diversi-Dial. As the eighties became the nineties, the internet grew, and DDial died. Or did it? More than 20 years later--still at 300 baud and on an original Apple ][e--
DDial lives on!
posted by not_on_display at 12:43 PM PST - 38 comments
Lost in the Static
Lost in the Static is a simple little game that uses some surprising aspects of the human perceptual system to create a visible world out of animating static.
Please note that this display is not suitable for everyone! Some people find they get headaches or nausea, or their eyes get "all woggly". If you do not find the experience pleasant, stop playing!
Downloadable .exe. Hello Waxy!
posted by boo_radley at 11:45 AM PST - 34 comments
"Hello, and welcome to
Mainly For Men (
part 1,
part 2). And, as the title implies, this is a programme, fellas, just for you." Yes, everything the BBC thought the red-blooded male back in the late 1960s would be interested in (ie women, cars and shark fishing). The result was so hideous it was never broadcast until a TV Hell themed night many years later. Possibly NSFW... some brief nudity ('artistic', naturally) and mild swearing. And rampant mind-blowing sexism.
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 10:05 AM PST - 85 comments
"A detective does his job in the only possible way. He follows the requirements of the law to the letter -- or close enough so as not to jeopardize his case. Just as carefully, he ignores that law's spirit and intent. He becomes a salesman, a huckster as thieving and silver-tongued as any man who ever moved used cars or aluminum siding -- more so, in fact, when you consider that he's
selling long prison terms to customers who have no genuine need for the product."
posted by dhammond at 12:06 AM PST - 95 comments
November 28
John Ashcroft
stands up to prove waterboarding isn't torture, by offering to lie down for his own waterboarding. Well, that is, he offers he'd do it if it were necessary,
and if he could survive the torture. Is that a brave offer,
an admission that US has resulted in deaths, or both?
Daniel Levin, one of Ashcroft's subordinates at the Department of Justice, went further, actually undergoing waterboarding himself.
He survived it -- but his career didn't, after he he concluded torture was "abhorrent".
posted by orthogonality at 7:09 PM PST - 43 comments
In 2008,
China will fail to ride the Olympics wave and improve its worldwide image,
the US will vote mainly on
health (barring a terrorist attack or a recession),
usher in a period of pragmatic caution and toast to it
over a nice Merlot, the
culture wars will go global,
Israel may decide that it must act alone against Iran,
African gangs will prosper,
UK politics will be re-established as a spectator sport,
we will finally quit oil - and want yet more of it,
the potato will make a comeback,
an island will be moved for the sake of the Euro,
we will rush to give for free what others charge for,
U will HAV CASH,
robots will explore the seas of Earth,
which is round, by the way,
pigs will fly, and we will
like totally love it (
don't we?).
The Economist: The World in 2008.
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane at 5:46 PM PST - 33 comments
Chromatron 1, 2, 3 and 4
just became freeware. In these little standalone puzzle games for PC and Mac, you align splitters, benders, and mirrors to direct colored laserbeams into like-colored targets. Enjoyably difficult, and an example of great game design.
posted by ikkyu2 at 5:28 PM PST - 20 comments
Operation PLIERS.
An internal CIA memorandum has been obtained by Venezuelan counterintelligence from the US Embassy in Caracas that reveals a plan to destabilize Venezuela during the
upcoming constitutional referendum. The plan, titled "OPERATION PLIERS" was authored by CIA Officer Michael Middleton Steere and was addressed to CIA Director General Michael Hayden in Washington. The full text of the memo will be released soon for verification purposes.
Many previously.
posted by scalefree at 5:27 PM PST - 42 comments
So, whatcha readin? The
John Ashcroft Alberto Gonzales Michael Mukasey Book Club wants to discuss your latest reads.
Amazon thinks it's none of their business. So does your
librarian. While it may seem that your reading list is safe, fact is you're actually just one National Security Letter or subpoena away from full disclosure. Want to change that? One step in the right direction would be to contact your Senator about getting
S.2088 out of Committee and on to the floor. Oh, and tell them to vote for it. And then to override the veto.
posted by Toekneesan at 5:20 PM PST - 19 comments
First post, deep breath, here goes nuffin.
Judith Bingham is a multitalented British born classical singer, composer and musician. Driving home in the dark on Halloween listening to Radio Three (I'll let someone else out there explain Radio Three to our overseas cousins), I was particularly taken by her atmospheric choral setting of
'Ghost towns of the American West' a poem by
Vesta Pierce Crawford, a Mormon Utah poet associated with the University.
Despite delving much further into Mormon websites than I would usually care to venture I have not been able to find the text of the poem, if anyone out there can give a hand I'd be grateful.
Judith Bingham also wrote an opera based on the life of
Errol Flynn! Now that I would like to see.
posted by surfdad at 10:46 AM PST - 10 comments
Make your own attack ad.
The Democratic party is uploading all its "tracker" videos of the top Republican candidates out on the campaign trail, for use by anyone for anything. "The party hopes that thousands of eyes might find something the mainstream media has missed, or that a new way of juxtaposing the video with something else will be revealing about the candidates," says
the NYT. Gimmick or political sea change?
posted by CunningLinguist at 7:46 AM PST - 60 comments
If you see an unattended bag
in New York this holiday shopping season, you better just leave it alone. If you pick it up and don't immediately report it, it could net you a class E felony. The NYPD is planting the bags themselves and
this isn't the first time. Operation Lucky Bag first started in 2006, but now they're intentionally loading the bags with credit cards to increase the crime (or non-crime) from a misdemeanor to a felony.
posted by yeti at 7:39 AM PST - 111 comments
Walking the Dog
"All photos in this gallery were taken within a radius of about
3 miles of our home in the North Pennines Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, mostly one handed while hanging on to an impatient dog with the other hand."
posted by adamvasco at 7:15 AM PST - 20 comments
Charlie The Unicorn:
16 million hits, not ever on MeFi as far as I can tell, and UNICORNS! Don't we all LOVE THEM SO MUCH?!
(Where's the interrobang when you really need it?)
posted by exlotuseater at 3:27 AM PST - 54 comments
November 27
A recent
post on Russian animation reminded me of the "Lift" series of short animations, created by the
Pilot studio
[link in Russian]. There are, count 'em,
1,
2,
3,
4,
5 installments. Knowledge of Russian not required to watch.
posted by Krrrlson at 7:34 PM PST - 4 comments
He was called "the Telemaster", "the Humbler", and " the greatest unknown guitarist in the world".
Danny Gatton, revered by guitarists great and small, never achieved popular acclaim. His refusal to stick to any particular genre of music, and his reluctance to travel had much to do with that. But to those of us lucky enough to enjoy the Washington, DC music scene of the eighties and nineties got to see arguably the most
talented electric guitar player this country has produced.
posted by Benny Andajetz at 4:26 PM PST - 26 comments
NYC's Museum of Modern Art hosts a
Georges Seurat exhibition that focuses on sketchbooks kept by the master of
pointillisme. Page through each sketchbook, which is not possible to do at the actual exhibition. Also featured are photos of conservation efforts, including microscopic views of Seurat's technique, and a discussion of his subject matter.
Requires Flash, pages may load slowly. Different sections of site not directly linkable because of Flash format-- sorry!
posted by Rykey at 3:19 PM PST - 9 comments
Darwin's Surprise.
"There may be no biological process more complicated than the relationships that viruses have with their hosts. Could it be that their persistence made it possible for humans to thrive?"
[Via Disinformation.]
posted by homunculus at 11:22 AM PST - 63 comments
Either yesterday was April 1 in Sweden, or northern officials have just given the go ahead to build a 6.5 million dollar, handicapped accessible
moose. There's even a
walkthrough video.
posted by tkolar at 8:43 AM PST - 27 comments
Cerra Perdida (Lost Wax):
What's better than free sculpture in the street? In Barcelona an artist is "losing" sculptures around town for every month of the year.
posted by jxn at 7:53 AM PST - 7 comments
End of Empire
: A collaboration of all areas of geopolitics affecting countries of the world in relation to the 'Empire' of the United States of America, and the 'sub-Empires', such as the United Kingdom, Europe, Australia and any other country which seeks to exploit poorer nations and their people in the quest for domination.
posted by adamvasco at 6:15 AM PST - 11 comments
November 26
A window to the world
by car or train. Passingby: Videos uploaded to Youtube, showing various parts of the world, from the vantage point of someone just passing by. (Flash, video, youtube link)
posted by zabuni at 9:26 PM PST - 7 comments
The Bugle
is a topical comedic podcast by The Daily Show's John Oliver and fellow comedian Andy Saltzman. They style it an Audio Newspaper for a Visual World. Each weekly episode is about half an hour long.
posted by Kattullus at 8:23 PM PST - 13 comments
"
NATURMOBIL is about to pioneer in the state-of-the-art, first ever advertising promotion by means of traveling around the world with the vehicle that is nature-friendly that preserves the welfare of the beings and the environment. NATURMOBIL will soon to be the byword in every household globally." If Fleethorse, LLC meets their modest goals, the world's first advertising-funded
horse-powered car will be followed by horse-powered
buses and taxis.
posted by ardgedee at 6:34 PM PST - 10 comments
The media begins to awaken.
Recently, Tom Curley, the President and CEO of Associated Press lashed out at the absurd conditions surrounding the detention of
Bilal Hussein.
After being detained for over 18 months, the US Military has finally decided to charge him, but nobody can say for what, or when, or why, or what evidence might be brought forth. Strangely, Mr. Curley writes this without a hint of the irony present in being caught in the net of lies, deception and constructed memory hole that the media has participated in the creation of. Playing patsy comes back to bite. AP hosts
a timeline of articles.
posted by petrilli at 6:19 PM PST - 13 comments
This cheesy 1979 promo film
from the group,
Blackjack, offers a glimpse into the hard rock past of balladeer Michael Bolton, which also includes a co-writing credit for a
Top 40 hit by Kiss. Similarly, Bill Joel disavows the days when he
posed in medieval armor next to slabs of raw beef on the cover of the self-titled album by Joel's heavy metal duo,
Attila, although
Julian Cope is a fan of the album and its Deep Purplish vibes (check out
Holy Moses and
Wonder Woman). To round out the trifecta, we have Tori Amos who got marketed as the metal-chick frontwoman of
Y Kant Tori Read (check out the video for
The Big Picture). On the other hand, metalheads have the opposite problem of hiding their pop past. Examples include the industrial metal band Ministry's early days as a
new wave synth act and Tommy Iommi's brief tenure as a
member of Jethro Tull before becoming lead guitarist of Black Sabbath. Meanwhile,
Bon Scott, the late lead singer of AC/DC, is probably spinning in his grave over the YouTube footage of him as an
Australian teen idol and a
bearded hippie with a recorder.
posted by jonp72 at 4:21 PM PST - 70 comments
Alain Robbe-Grillet's
La Belle Captive, Andrzej Zulawski's 'comedy,'
My Nights Are Better Than Your Days, Carl Theodor Dreyer's
Vampyr, Kiyoshi Kurosawa's
Seance, Masahiro Shinoda's
Pale Flower, Seijun Suzuki's
Tattooed Life and
Kanto Wanderer, Lucio Fulci's
House by the Cemetery, Kinji Fukasaku's
Blackmail is my Life,
If You Were Young: Rage and
Legend of the Eight Samurai, five films by
Takashi Miike, the entire
Ring series, thirteen(!)
Zatoichi sequels, and
500+ other movies, streaming, online, free and legal. (Some links, NSFW)
posted by broodle at 2:15 PM PST - 19 comments
New Beef Eco-Report:
Pound-for-Pound, Beef Produced with Grains and Growth Hormones Produces 40% Less Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Saves Two-Thirds More Land for Nature Compared to Organic Grass-Fed Beef.
"Environmentally conscious consumers who have been told that grass-raised beef is more environmentally sensitive and sustainable should rethink their beef purchases in light of our findings," says lead author Alex Avery, author of
The Truth About Organic Foods.
posted by parmanparman at 11:27 AM PST - 68 comments
"If the emergence of techno and the proliferation of its related genres thrust DJs and producers into the spotlight, it also spawned artists who, like Kraftwerk before them, chose to remain anonymous and distant. The Scottish duo Boards of Canada (Marcus Eoin and Michael Sandison) is a case in point, an even more enigmatic presence on the UK's electronic music landscape than Aphex Twin and Autechre. Eoin and Sandison have consistently minimized their role in the commercial side of music-making and have avoided its attendant lifestyle: They've shunned city life for the rural seclusion of their Hexagon Sun studio and its local collective of artists. They claim to record primarily for themselves and their friends. They have reportedly amassed an enormous archive of unreleased music dating back to the early '80s (numerous apocryphal BoC tracks make the rounds). They seldom give interviews or perform live."
posted by bigmusic at 9:11 AM PST - 70 comments
Lucky Soul's 'Lips Are Unhappy'
isn't the likliest of contenders for the UK's coveted Christmas number one, but this is the track (from a shortlist) selected by listeners of Last.fm to receive Last.fm's backing. Profits go to charity, as is the norm for Xmas No. 1 entries.
posted by nthdegx at 8:55 AM PST - 13 comments
Beginning with Slow Food in 1986,
the idea of rejecting the "
cult of speed" has gradually spread from a focus on food into other fields. In his book
In Praise of Slow,
Carl Honore explores the spread of the worldwide
Slow movement, urging greater attention to all aspects of daily life, human relationships, and the quality of experience. Meanwhile, on the web, witness the spread of Slow. Slow down your stuff with
Slow Home,
Slow Travel,
Slow Fashion,
Slow Art,
Slow Craft,
Slow Design. Relax with some
Slow Reading; check out a
Slow Read from a
Slow Library. Plan for
Slow Cities governed by
Slow Leadership. Use
Slow Schooling,
Slow Research, and the
Slow University to explore
Slow Science and
Slow Math. Bank with
Slow Money [PDF]. Explore the world with
Slow Travel, using
Slow Fuel for
Slow Transportation. What's the rush? Come on. Take it easy.
posted by Miko at 7:42 AM PST - 60 comments
DrugPolicyCases.com
- Yakov Spektor, a New York-based attorney, combed through two decades of US Supreme Court opinions "to discern certain trends in the Court's treatment of various issues" related to the War on Drugs. The collection of opinions are organized by
case,
author and
topic.
posted by daksya at 6:04 AM PST - 8 comments
November 25
Ulysses -
An
Irish guy (in West Virginia) reads
Ulysses and posts it to the web in 20 parts. It's a work best appreciated when read aloud and here is someone who has read it aloud just for you. (ultra-condensed version
here )
posted by caddis at 7:44 PM PST - 21 comments
"Okay, I work for GameStop, and in one of the local stores, someone returned Spanish for Everyone claiming it was exceedingly stereotypical."
And it turns out it kinda was. It's a game for the Nintendo DS, where the framework involves an accidentally stolen DS which is taken by a kid whose father is in a limo, being chased by the police, going back across the border to Ensenada. Luckily, the kid's aunt (who apparently doesn't recognize him other than vaguely) is here to give him a ride as far as Tijuana, leaving him stranded in the middle of a foreign country where he doesn't speak the language! Fun, and it gets worse from there! Here's
The Intro,
Level 2's cut scene,
level 3's cut scene and
the ending, featuring a whole mess of cars, "fireworks" and, ahm, drug running? Of course, this'd just be a pile of YouTube links if it weren't for
The lead designer of the game popping in to share his 2 cents on it.
[via]
posted by Rev. Syung Myung Me at 5:27 PM PST - 45 comments
The Last Iceberg
suffers, as many photography sites do, from a mildly irritating flash interface; but if you can get over that fact, you'll see some genuinely amazing polar photography of isolated icebergs & ice shelves.
posted by jonson at 5:01 PM PST - 17 comments
On public access TV in Seattle a preacher named Bruce Howard
rambled each week for twenty five minutes about
love and hope. He would then abruptly burst into song (
some covers, some
original) and lavish affection onto his
pug,
BUSTER LOVE! We watched at first to mock, and then grew to genuinely like him. But sometime between then and now he seems to have
gone mad (last two links nsfw-ish).
posted by jiiota at 5:31 AM PST - 72 comments
Collectors of
78rpm records are a breed unto themselves. Obsessively scouring the flea markets of the world in search of
sonic treasures from yesteryear, they are a big part of the reason we can today enjoy so much wonderful old music. One such collector who's bringing some of his finds to the internets, sharing with us his scratchy old audio ghosts from eras long gone, is
Johnny Bitterman. Currently up on his audio player is
You Gonna Look Like a Monkey When You Get Old, along with 3 other tunes for your listening/downloading pleasure. You'll also find there a fabulous gallery of photographs featuring lovely old labels from many of his discs.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 4:21 AM PST - 22 comments
What Makes Us Moral and
The Morality Quiz.
It's war time, and you're hiding in a basement with a group of other people. Enemy soldiers are approaching outside and will be drawn to any sound. If you're found, you'll all be killed immediately. A baby hiding with you starts to cry loudly and cannot be stopped. Smothering it to death is the only way to silence it, saving the lives of everyone in the room. Assume that the parents of the baby are unknown and not present and there will be no penalty for killing the child. Could you be the one who smothered it if no one else would?
posted by amyms at 1:02 AM PST - 147 comments
November 24
Fast Eddie Felsen's
time has passed. Pool hustlers once traveled the U.S., a nomadic undercover elite who made their living by allowing local players to feel in control - until real money was at stake. Now,
they are no more. The best players became famous on an ill-fated televised
tournament series. They are too recognizable to hustle the locals. “Real hustling — driving to a pool room in another state, walking in, setting the trap, busting the local guy and then heading to a new town — is different. That’s what ain’t there any more.”
posted by Kirth Gerson at 4:16 PM PST - 29 comments
"This is the story of when I re-wrote the Lotus Notes Formula Engine....
So here was I was, offered this position that I clearly wasn't qualified for. I had no experience with language runtimes or compilers, I knew very little about C and didn't know anything about C++, I had never dealt with platform byte ordering and packing and all the other issues associated with writing something for eight different operating systems, I had never even used proper version control. But none of that mattered to me. It seemed to me like an amazing opportunity and I would be doing exactly the kind of stuff I enjoy most..."
posted by grumblebee at 10:00 AM PST - 64 comments
Does
Denial Make The World Go 'Round?
"In the modern vernacular, to say someone is 'in denial' is to deliver a savage combination punch: one shot to the belly for the cheating or drinking or bad behavior, and another slap to the head for the cowardly self-deception of pretending it's not a problem. Yet recent studies from fields as diverse as psychology and anthropology suggest that the ability to look the other way, while potentially destructive, is also critically important to forming and nourishing close relationships. The psychological tricks that people use to ignore a festering problem in their own households are the same ones that they need to live with everyday human dishonesty and betrayal, their own and others'. And it is these highly evolved abilities, research suggests, that provide the foundation for that most disarming of all human invitations, forgiveness."
posted by amyms at 12:53 AM PST - 12 comments
Australia Votes.
Polls have been predicting a
Labor win for the past few weeks, and it's beginning to look like it just might happen. But that's not the real sport.
posted by Neale at 12:45 AM PST - 78 comments
November 23
Household Hacker
offers a growing variety of bizarrely improbable or impossible "hacks" using household items. How many errors can you spot?
posted by loquacious at 7:19 PM PST - 35 comments
Saved By Jesus!
Incrediable story out of the Arizona desert. I just feel really bad for the kid in all this. And wonder how both sides of the immigration debate will handle this.
posted by ShawnString at 6:56 PM PST - 80 comments
In 1998, he pulled a woman from a burning car. When I first saw him I was going through multiple cycles at a red light in heavy traffic and
he was navigating a push lawnmower with no hands, or
arms. Via
con dios Marty Ravellette.
posted by Huplescat at 4:31 PM PST - 12 comments
I pledge to buy handmade this holiday season, and request that others do the same for me. Why? Better gifting experience, better ethics, better for the environment.
posted by divabat at 3:53 PM PST - 95 comments
Can you say that again? you gurgled it the first time...
...Or it's simply the language of the zombies
via, often full of groans. Since death rattle is a fairly difficult language to understand by word, it is common to understand through body language, and volume.
For example, a loud angry "Rahhr!" will usually mean "I'm going to kill you." A soft "Bhrr." with hands in front will usually mean "Please, don't hurt me, I didn't know she was your girlfriend."
But more commonly, over-used to describe movies or fading trends and
Russian Death metal...
Hear the Rattle!
...otherwise possibly boring FPP's on terminology.
posted by greenskpr at 10:22 AM PST - 12 comments
November 22
Trigger Happier
"Trigger Happy is a book about the aesthetics of videogames — what they share with cinema, the history of painting, or literature; and what makes them different, in terms of form, psychology and semiotics. It’s offered under a CC license, for a limited time only. I’m not sure how limited that time will be, so grab it while it’s hot."
[drm-free pdf]
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 1:36 AM PST - 14 comments
On Nov 22, 1968, exactly 39 years ago, on a reasonably clear, uneventful day, a new
JAL DC-8 descended toward the SFO airport. The landing was so well executed that no one was hurt when the pilot landed the plane
into the San Francisco Bay, several miles from the airport. What explanation did 15 year veteran pilot Captain Kohei Asoh give for his botched landing? It was so unusual (especially in this day and age), so refreshingly honest, that it came to be known as the
Asoh Defense. Amazingly, the plane was
recovered, refurbished, and was in service for another 35 years.
posted by eye of newt at 12:04 AM PST - 50 comments
November 21
Milo Radulovich, RIP
--thrown out of the Air Force during the Red Scares, he fought back--Radulovich's case (and the new medium of TV) showed millions the impact McCarthy was having and the absurd lengths he was going to. He himself wasn't ever accused of being a Communist himself tho:
posted by amberglow at 11:44 PM PST - 32 comments
Traveling a lot this weekend? Long drive, plane or train ride? You can use that transit time to listen to the Dalai Lama talk for more than four hours with neuroscientists and Buddhist scholars on the topic of craving, suffering and choice.
Part one.
Part two.
[iTunes links] If you're stuck at home, you can watch the
video. The video link has the full list of participants.
posted by Kattullus at 9:57 PM PST - 11 comments
Terminus.
"After inadvertently offending a strange entity that accosts him on his way to work, a 1970s businessman quickly finds himself in the midst of a bizarre predicament." 205.2 MB Quicktime available
here.
[Via Neatorama.]
posted by homunculus at 6:20 PM PST - 17 comments
Imagine a world without lightsabers—where, instead, every big Star Wars finale consists of a 10-minute slap fight. Thank the maker we’ll never have to witness such a spectacle, because magical and impossibly high-tech weapons are staples of nearly all of our favorite entertainments! ToyFare Magazine presents
the 50 Greatest Fictional Weapons of All Time.
posted by cmgonzalez at 6:17 PM PST - 59 comments
Discussion of the beauty and consequences of urban decay pops up here from time to time. In 1992
Lambert-St. Louis International Airport began its
expansion program. The airport's website has a
timeline and lots of
photos. Since the planning began, there has been a fair amount of controversy of
one form or
another surrounding the expansion. Despite all the shininess of their press releases, things are progressing very slowly. The people who have been impacted most, however, are the people who lived in the communities on top of which the expansion is happening. They have all been displaced.
posted by jeffamaphone at 3:56 PM PST - 11 comments
Park your carcass in front of the TV for the next six weeks.
Here is the upcoming broadcast schedule for every show that has even the tiniest connection to The Most Wonderful Time of the Year.
posted by Kibbutz at 3:22 PM PST - 31 comments
After recent
promising results demonstrating the ability to change mouse skin cells into stem cells, researchers have replicated this change in human skin cells in papers published in
Science and
Cell (access to full articles requires subscription) . The White House, somehow, is trying to take
credit for this. The potential of all this:
huge.
posted by switchsonic at 2:41 AM PST - 57 comments
November 20
Before 1969, the
city of Zap was best known as the punch line of a joke about three towns in North Dakota that sounded like Rice Krispies—
Zap,
Gackle, and
Mott. But when student body president
Charles "Chuck" Stroup at
North Dakota State University needed an alternative to Fort Lauderdale while stuck in North Dakota for spring break, he enlisted the help of some
student journalists at the
Spectrum newspaper to promote the
"Zip to Zap," an event that became the
only "official" riot in the history of North Dakota. The tiny coal mining town originally looked forward to the impromptu "Zip" festival, which had so much advance buzz that the
Wham-O toy company created a toy called
Zip Zap in honor of the imminent event. Unfortunately, after throngs of students descended on Zap, the only two bars in town quickly ran out of beer, and the
North Dakota National Guard was called into extinguish the bonfire, beer brawls, and riot that ensued. For more info about about how the "Zip to Zap" fit in context with the 1960s zeitgeist, look
here,
here, and
here.
posted by jonp72 at 7:38 PM PST - 10 comments
HR 1955
: The Internet has aided in facilitating violent radicalization, ideologically based violence, and the homegrown terrorism process in the United States by
providing access to broad and constant streams of terrorist-related propaganda to United States citizens.
While the United States must continue its
vigilant efforts to combat international terrorism, it must also strengthen efforts to combat the threat posed by homegrown terrorists based and
operating within the United States.
posted by Huplescat at 4:34 PM PST - 45 comments
Sofa Portraits.
Colin Pantall takes photographs, primarily of his daughter watching television.
Lush imagery, sidelong comment, surprising intimacy.
posted by klangklangston at 4:30 PM PST - 51 comments
Offal Good
is a blog dedicated to helping you get more dining experience out of your animal. Most people stop at the skeletal muscle cuts, but there's a world of tripey goodness, not to mention snouts, feet, etc. Videos, recipes, photogalleries & more.
posted by jonson at 4:24 PM PST - 24 comments
Ever wanted your own personal tank? Then the
Rip Saw UGV might be just what you've been looking for.
posted by quin at 12:46 PM PST - 29 comments
Why He Went Nuclear.
Before he was the infamous father of the "Islamic bomb," A.Q. Khan was just another midlevel scientist working at a research job in Amsterdam. Here, the story of how he betrayed his employer and set out to create a worldwide bazaar in lethal weapons.
posted by chunking express at 12:25 PM PST - 19 comments
Sex and the College Girl, by Norah Johnson
A view from an educated woman in the 1950s: "Two criticisms rise above the rest: people in college are promiscuous, for one thing, and, for another, they are getting married and having children too early. These are interesting observations because they contradict each other."
posted by shivohum at 12:21 PM PST - 24 comments
Lingro. Enter a website in the box to make all words on the page clickable. Available for English, Spanish, French, German, Italian and Polish.
posted by Lezzles at 1:28 AM PST - 15 comments
In
research that may one day help restore mobility to the paralyzed and amputees, Dr. Charles Higgins of the University of Arizona has created a
"robo-moth": a 6-inch tall wheeled robot guided by an electrode inserted into a single neuron responsible for vision stability during flight in the
hawk moth (aka the Tobacco hornworm).
posted by mayfly wake at 12:13 AM PST - 7 comments
November 19
Imaginary laptops,
as designed by 8-year-olds. I'd suggest printing them out so you can try them at home. The designs lack dotted lines to fold across, but I'm sure you can figure it out. Scroll down for the interview, which is as charming as the pictures.
posted by nobody at 12:35 PM PST - 70 comments
Trackulous - Track Anything.
There have to be ten dozen ways to
track your weight online. MeFi users track thteir social athletic accomplishments at
WeEndure and
Runner+. But what if we wanted to track (and graph) Javelinas Sighted, Cookies Tossed, Fights with Boyfriend, or any other user-defined numerical quantity over time? And what if we wanted to share our statistics with our friends? For that,
Trackulous - a simple, elegant, mobile-friendly web tool.
posted by ikkyu2 at 11:54 AM PST - 19 comments
China is famed for its many inventions: gunpowder, paper, printing; some even claim golf and football. Who knew that
the origins of hip-hop lie in the vast northern wastes of the Celestial Empire too?
posted by Abiezer at 4:42 AM PST - 18 comments
November 18
Among white Americans, the average IQ, as of a decade or so ago, was 103. Among Asian-Americans, it was 106. Among Jewish Americans, it was 113. Among Latino Americans, it was 89. Among African-Americans, it was 85.
Was Watson right?
posted by landis at 11:45 AM PST - 473 comments
James Fenton
writes in the Guardian that the entire "flat" collection of the
British Museum is going into a searchable online index. Currently there are about 265,000 objects in the database with about 100,00 images. The article says that high quality images, suitable for print reproduction, and free to academic users, are coming soon. The search page is
here.
posted by shothotbot at 3:32 AM PST - 12 comments
November 17
The website of ethnomusicologist Robert Garfias
is a treasure trove of mp3
sound recordings and short realplayer
film clips of traditional music from all over the world, including Japan, India, Mexico, Turkey, Albania, Okinawa, Spain, Burma, Alaska, Sudan, Venezuela, Spain and many more. Garfias'
field recordings are illustrated with his photographs.
posted by Kattullus at 11:26 PM PST - 14 comments
Like a YouTube for soldiers in the Middle East,
this site boasts lots of large explosions, night vision footage, dawn raids, night-time firefights, desert shootouts, and convoy ambushes. There is one film of a failed IED that is breathtaking. Astonishing movies, whether you're for or against the war.
posted by Sully at 9:49 PM PST - 35 comments
The American military finds new allies, but at what cost?
One afternoon, sitting with Captain Brooks in Thrasher’s rooftop gym, I asked if he felt that what he was doing in Iraq was appreciated by the people back home. “Oh, yeah,” he said. Turning to one of his N.C.O.s, who was seated nearby, smoking a cigar, he asked, “What do you think, Sergeant Cochran?”
Lowering his voice, Cochran replied, “When that bullet goes by my head, all the politics goes right out the window. My only thought is to get my men out of there alive.”
“Thanks for quoting ‘Black Hawk Down,’ Sergeant Cochran,” Brooks drawled. Turning back to me, he said, “When I went home the last time, we went skiing in Colorado. Everywhere we went, people thanked me. One man said, ‘I don’t support the war but I support the soldiers.’ I can accept that. We have a system that allows freedom of speech. Hell, I put on the uniform to defend that.”
posted by caddis at 5:57 PM PST - 34 comments
Nowadays, if you're of a mood to be all Web 2.0 about it, to-do lists have gone past
the paper and pen with web applications such as
Remember the Milk,
Hiveminder,
Toodledoo,
Todoist,
Ta-Da Lists,
do.Oh,
Nozbe,
Treedoolist,
Vitalist,
Web To Do,
SimpleGTD,
Sandy,
Tracks,
gootodo,
Zirrus,
OnMyList,
TaskToy,
Gubb,
Nutshell,
Joe's Goals,
Tedium,
MyTickerFile,
voo2do, and
30boxes — even
plain old text files have gotten spiffied up with
Unix shell scripts to generate graphs and
reports and projects.
posted by WCityMike at 12:17 PM PST - 25 comments
Popular Science has named
Nanosolar the
#1 innovative product of the year. Finally, cheap and ubiquitous solar power has arrived, “You’re talking about printing rolls of the stuff—printing it on the roofs of 18-wheeler trailers, printing it on garages, printing it wherever you want it,” The only problem is demand, so they're building
the world’s largest solar-panel manufacturing facility in San Jose. See 96 other innovations in PopSci's
Best of 2007.
posted by stbalbach at 11:53 AM PST - 25 comments
Even if Lou Reed had dropped out of music after the break-up of the Velvet Underground, his name would still be forever etched in the history of rock music. Yet his solo career, filled with eccentric detours and radio-ready rockers in equal measure, remains one of the most fascinating canons in all of rock music. Metal Machine Music, however, is a unique entity in itself, proudly pushing at the very boundaries of what pop music is capable of. Zeitkratzer’s performance not only makes the original album ripe for critical re-evaluation, but it’s a performance that stands on its own ground...
Why Does the Music Have to End?: An Interview with Lou Reed regarding how he came to play
Metal Machine Music live in 2002.
posted by y2karl at 10:53 AM PST - 47 comments
City of Sound
as it describes itself, is a blog about cities, design, architecture, media, music, etc. But calling it a blog really does it a disservice. City of Sound is a category-killer; amazingly dense, thoughtful, erudite, and compelling, it begins to catalog our urban identity. A bit of reminiscent of
Metropolis magazine, if it was edited by
Robert Rauschenberg. If you've not visited, do yourself a favor. It is a treasure trove.
posted by spacely_sprocket at 8:13 AM PST - 11 comments
Empty Cathedrals.
Tenement closes. Glasgow artist Frank McNab documents the communal entrances sans nostalgia or sentimentality. Gets it just so damn right! His 'Thoughts' and 'Projects' need a little more work however.
posted by Wrick at 5:07 AM PST - 11 comments
November 16
Attention most ladies and certain gentlemen: Do you think your man has been cheating on you? Well, there are
several ways to check up on him. But budding rap star
Riskay has
her own special method (warning: pretty much NSFW, and autoplay of a really wonderful song in the last link).
posted by Kibbutz at 10:06 PM PST - 35 comments
Stone Age Feminism? Among Neanderthals, hunting big beasts was women's work as well as men's, so it's a safe bet that female hunters got stomped, gored, and worse with appalling frequency. And a high casualty rate among fertile women - the vital "reproductive core" of a tiny population - could well have meant demographic disaster for a species already struggling to survive among monster bears, yellow-fanged hyenas, and cunning Homo sapien newcomers. Via.
posted by amyms at 6:29 PM PST - 74 comments
An arborist in a helicopter
Arborist Todd Irvine gets a ride in a news chopper, photographing and annotating Toronto’s tree canopy – still largely in place and vibrantly colourful due to winter’s late arrival.
posted by joeclark at 1:36 PM PST - 23 comments
All hail 70s-era Shatner! He began his career with some rather prestigious projects, appearing in
The Brothers Karamazov and
Judgment at Nuremberg, as well as some rather high profile appearance in
Twilight Zone and
Alfred Hitchcock Presents. But even then, there were hints of exploitation, such as 1961's
The Explosive Generation, in which Shatner played a teacher whose job is endangered when she speaks
candidly to kids about sex. And there was 1962's
The Intruder, a Roger Corman film from 1963 in which Shatner
played a carpetbagging racist inciting violence in a southern town. (
Clip.) And, of course, there was
Incubus from 1965,
a horror film in Esperanto. (
Clip.) But, after
Star Trek, at the start of the 70s, something went haywire.
posted by Astro Zombie at 1:09 PM PST - 63 comments
Freethought Multimedia
contains dozens of interviews, conversations and lectures on a variety of topics with/by several contemporary skeptics and freethinkers, including Michael Shermer, James Randi, Daniel Dennett, Steven Pinker and Richard Dawkins.
(There's a great links section at the bottom of the page, as well. Particularly good are the University Lectures section and the Lectures Archive.)
posted by cog_nate at 10:57 AM PST - 21 comments
Sometimes called "The Ed Wood of Animation", director Sam Singer had an interesting career. He was responsible for some of the
most godawful cartoons ever produced, and through his work on 1975's
Tubby the Tuba, was present at the birth of
Pixar.
posted by maryh at 9:50 AM PST - 43 comments
See For Yourself
- Purves Lab's optical illusions web page with empirical explanations of familiar and unfamiliar illusions.
posted by nthdegx at 3:32 AM PST - 6 comments
A case against "starring*" and "looking-glassing
LG" in philosophy: G. Strawson on intentionality and experience. In a very engaging and stimulating paper, Galen Strawson takes contemporary philosophy of mind to task on certain supposed terminological subreptions and conceptual reductions
(pdf). You, like
others, may of course not find G. Strawson's views
fully convincing. (G. Strawson previously on Metafilter
here and
here.)
posted by rudster at 12:41 AM PST - 12 comments
November 15
Exhibitionism can refer to a wide range of behaviours, ranging from fun with a willing partner, to a crime when done to the unsuspecting and unwilling. As a clinical matter
exhibitionism is a
sexual paraphilia in which a person (usually a man) obtains sexual pleasure from exposing his or her genitals to strangers, usually in a public place. Prevalence of the condition in the general population is not known, but
approximately 30% of sex offenders have exhibitionistic tendencies and it is one of the most common sex offences.
Some argue that for people with this paraphilia "it should be a possible to exist happily as an exhibitionist and still stay within the boundaries imposed by our legal systems." While often the belief is that they are harmless,
research is indicating that they may progress to more serious crimes.
Others note that "exhibitionism...is dangerous in that it can produce traumatic experiences within its victims."
posted by never used baby shoes at 10:01 PM PST - 34 comments
Rare Exports, Inc.
They deliver the impeccable, well-mannered, and extremely rare original Finnish Father Christmases to nearly 150 countries every Christmas. Exclusively.
[YouTube, NSFW.]
posted by homunculus at 8:45 PM PST - 15 comments
The Roma Journeys
- contemporary photographs of Roma life in Hungary, India, Greece, Romania, France, Russia, and
Finland by Joakim Eskildsen. For more photo essays and info on the Roma, see two superb prior posts by
plep and
taz.
posted by madamjujujive at 4:26 PM PST - 26 comments
Senator On-Line (‘SOL’) is a truly democratic party
which will allow everyone on the Australian Electoral roll who has access to the internet to vote on every Bill put to Parliament and have its Senators vote in accordance with a clear majority view. They will be running candidates for the upcoming federal Upper House (Senate) elections.
posted by finite at 1:19 PM PST - 28 comments
What would you think if at the next family gathering your uncle came up to you and said: "Shot, I got a great idea for a magazine. People are sick to death of reading authors responding to the news, reacting to ideas in the zietgiest. People want old writing. We will get a bunch of writing from the past (if its out of copyright, so much the better) group it by concept and sell it for $15 bucks an issue." Would you think its a good idea? What if your uncle was
Lewis Lapham? Welcome to
Lapham's Quarterly. Perhaps the only non-zombie related journal that "enlists the counsel of the dead."
posted by shothotbot at 11:51 AM PST - 14 comments
This
house at 770 Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn has been replicated around the world to odd architectural effect:
Montreal,
Sao Paulo,
New Jersey,
Buenos Aires,
Milan,
Tel Aviv, and
seven other locations. Why? Because it was
the home of the Lubavitcher Rebbe. This sort of geographic dislocation is not unique to 770 Eastern Parkway, however, as photographers Andrea Robbins and Max Becher show:
German buildings in Namibia, the
Old West in Almeria Spain, the last
French colony off Newfoundland, the
town in Washington that was transformed into Bavaria, and
others.
posted by blahblahblah at 7:00 AM PST - 28 comments
Having served as a troop transport in WWII, a luxury liner, and a sea cadet training vessel, the
Texas Clipper will come to her final resting place
tomorrow as part of an artificial reef in the Texas Gulf. During preparations for sinking, a long lost mural (
1 2 3 4) by
Saul Steinberg, best known for his
work at The New Yorker, was rediscovered hidden behind wallpaper and paint and saved from a watery grave.
posted by Orb at 5:15 AM PST - 4 comments
November 14
50 Ways to Take Notes.
Brian Benzinger (
previously) apparently often finds himself without paper and pencil, but with access to a computer. He's linked to dozens of places online where one can Get It Down (for free!), from public pages to note-taking software to voice recording.
posted by Rykey at 5:29 PM PST - 9 comments
CARMA, released
today, is a map/database that shows the carbon emissions of more than 50,000 power plants and 4,000 power companies in every country on Earth, showing not only the worst but the best. Find out how much CO2 comes from electricity plants in a particular city, county, congressional district, company, town, ZIP code, or an individual plant.
posted by stbalbach at 4:19 PM PST - 13 comments
With winter's cold touch around the corner, some of us may need a little something
to keep us busy by the fireside on those chill winter evenings. With the abundance and variety of craft
blogs to be found, everyone from the novice to the expert should be able to find
inspiration
(and
even great tutorials!) for a
fun and
cute project. Enjoy!
posted by honeyx at 3:26 PM PST - 11 comments
Jeff Lew, the lead animator on Matrix Reloaded, has after 4 long years of 14 hour days and 7 day work weeks finally completed his masterpiece:
Killer Bean Forever. This is a momumental follow-up to the
previous two short films, which were impressive projects on their own.
posted by ducksauce at 12:57 PM PST - 103 comments
The internet is killing the reporter,
or at least the investigative journalist. So says
David Leigh, the Guardian's esteemed dirty digger. But how right is he? Doesn't "the powerful global conversation", to quote the
Cluetrain Manifesto, give investigative journalism new hope. Rather than be centred around the reporter, can communities of interest unite to share and uncover the sort of information that was once the sole property of reporters like Mr Leigh?
posted by MrMerlot at 11:44 AM PST - 49 comments
Metafilter's many
cat lovers know that many kitties like birds. But bird aficionados aren't so fond of the cats.
James Stevenson, founder of the Galveston, TX ornithological society, is accused of using a .22-caliber rifle to kill cats that he claims were stalking endangered birds. He admits to shooting the cats.
posted by bassjump at 10:49 AM PST - 127 comments
Consider
Aaron Thibeaux Walker--if anyone ever deserved the title
Godfather, King or Present at the Creation, it would be
T-Bone Walker. Without T-Bone, there would be no B.B. King, Albert King, no Clarence Gatemouth Brown, no Pee Wee Crayton, Johnny 'Guitar' Watson ad infinitum to every blues guitarist whoever bent a tube amplified string thereafter. For rock and blues, electric lead guitar begins with him--he invented the language and then wrote the book and style manual, too. And he wrote the
performance manual as well--dancing, doing splits, playing guitar behind his back while alternating betwen slow and smoky after hour blues and swinging combo and jazzy big band jumps. For examples of him at the height of his powers, give these Coralized mp3s--
Cold Cold Feeling and
Strollin' With Bones--a listen.
posted by y2karl at 1:38 AM PST - 8 comments
November 13
Owen Hatherley, has three blogs where he expounds on culture and architecture from an English Leftist perspective,
sit down man, you're a bloody tragedy,
The Measures Taken (which has longer essays than the previous blog) and the group film blog
kino fist. To give you an idea of the range of subjects he covers, here's a sampling of his blogposts:
Towards a Communist Couture? Sartorial Socialism from Huey P Newton to Honecker,
Zuckendes Fleischer (on pre-WWII American cartoons),
Industrial Island Machine - Vorticism and the absence of an English Avant-Garde,
Hurrah for the Black Box Recorder (on songwriter Luke Haines and The Daily Mail),
The Children’s Book as a Revolutionary Object (with a bunch of pictures from Soviet avant-garde children's books),
Architectural Drawings of the 1960s,
Art is a branch of Mathematics (Taylorism and Russian SF classic
We),
Brechtian Productivism in an age of Mechanical Stagnation and
Notes towards an attempted refutation of the 'Associational Fallacy' (on architecture). All of the blogs are heavily adorned with pretty pictures, some not safe for work.
posted by Kattullus at 9:38 PM PST - 7 comments
"Why don't you shut up."
Spanish King Juan Carlos on Saturday angrily told President Hugo Chavez to shut up as the Venezuelan leader was involved in a heated verbal exchange with the head of the Spanish government, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero. Youtube
video
posted by semmi at 5:58 PM PST - 60 comments
"The neighborhood of Bab al Sheik
dates from a time, more than a thousand years ago, when Baghdad ruled the Islamic world... Ten centuries later, Bab al Sheik is less grand, but still extraordinary: it has been spared the sectarian killing that has gutted other neighborhoods, and Sunnis, Shiites, Kurds and Christians live together here with unusual ease." A
NY Times story (by Sabrina Tavernise and Karim Hilmi) about interesting people in an interesting place. (
Print version for them as wants one.)
posted by languagehat at 4:04 PM PST - 15 comments
Unlike their antiquated, manually operated predecessors, the toilets can flush at the slightest movement, and emit a high-pitched whine that, to some ears, sounds like a cat being strangled.
News that's fit to print:
Childrens' fear of auto-flush toilets. (NYTimes)
posted by ericbop at 10:58 AM PST - 58 comments
Striking Out by James Surowiecki. "As TV writers hit the picket lines, Surowiecki discusses the motivations and consequences of labor strikes. Historically, he argues, strikes have rarely ended up benefiting workers; the deals reached are usually similar to offers on the table before workers walk out. So why strike? For one thing, he writes, striking may clarify how serious your employer is about his stated position. And strikes are often about fairness, rather than economics -- people tend to reject deals they view as unfair, even when doing so leaves them worse off. A cogent analysis offering some interesting, timely tidbits of economic theory." [
via]
posted by shotgunbooty at 9:28 AM PST - 12 comments
Remember when air travel was viewed as glamorous and exciting? Of course you don't. So check out this collection of vintage flight attendant photos:
Part 1,
Part 2,
Part 3
posted by brain_drain at 9:07 AM PST - 37 comments
"Imagine, if you will, a load of horseshit."
John Scalzi with everything you need to know about the $27 million
Creation Museum.
"In the first room of the Creation Museum tour there’s a display of two paleontologists unearthing a raptor skeleton. One of them, a rather avuncular fellow, explains that he and the other paleontologist are both doing the same work, but that they start off from different premises: He starts off from the Bible and the other fellow (who does not get to comment, naturally) starts off from “man’s reason,” and really, that’s the only difference between them: “different starting points, same facts,” is the mantra for the first portion of the museum."
Don't forget the
photo tour. [
previously]
posted by Mikey-San at 7:36 AM PST - 76 comments
"Marvel has put the power in the hands of the fans
by making thousands of comics—ranging from Golden Age classics to the most recent Marvel masterpieces—available online, including the first 100 issues of FANTASTIC FOUR and AMAZING SPIDER-MAN plus so much more." If Marvel's not your thing, you can always while away untold hours
here.
posted by jbickers at 7:25 AM PST - 36 comments
Reagan at Neshoba.
Some time ago, a
blog post was authored at Mahablog which suggested that movement politics can best be understood when their rhetoric is viewed as a series of metaphors, with an allegory made to a spectacular episode of Stark Trek: The Next Generation featuring Paul Winfield titled
"Darmok".
Picard and crew stumble across an alien race that speaks only in metaphor. The alien captain, frustrated by the failure to communicate, transports Picard to the surface of a planet, where they must learn to communicate or die. The alien captain does finally reach Picard, but dies as a result of his injuries battling an invisible predator.
By way of comparison, examine Candidate Ronald Reagan's speech at Neshoba [
audio, 57MB,
via,
additional context here]. Some pundits are claiming that it is
an example of the Southern Strategy codified as dog-whistle politics, whilst
others view it as an honest mistake, and others still find an
inconvenient long sequence of other "honest mistakes".
posted by rzklkng at 6:14 AM PST - 128 comments
November 12
Map Paintings
by
Paula Scher: “These are absolutely, one hundred percent inaccurate,” Paula Scher declares of her colossal map paintings. Then, after a pause: “But not on purpose.” Another pause: they’re actually “sort of right.” [
via]
posted by dhruva at 4:58 PM PST - 10 comments
HEMA
(Hollandse Eenheidsprijzen Maatschapij Amsterdam) is a quintessentially Dutch department store chain, specialised in selling unbranded no-nonsense goods at low prices. It is also known for its whimsical (
previously) advertising and strong corporate identity.
The art collective
Mediamatic decided to have a few multicultural laughs by launching
"El Hema", an Arabic/Muslim version of the Dutch classic.
posted by Skeptic at 2:38 PM PST - 13 comments
"I am on a near-daily treasure hunt of sorts. I scour our American past to help understand modern breastfeeding..." The
Black Breastfeeding Blog, with photographs and history.
posted by kmennie at 1:03 PM PST - 43 comments
It was the early 90s and the World Wildlife Federation was trying to save the rhino. They offered up
Saiga horn as an
alternative to rhino horns for use in Chinese apothecary shops, thinking that the millions-strong population of Saiga on the steppes of Central Asia would
buffer the demand for rhinos. The result is one of the most devastating
population crashes for a large mammal species in modern times. There is now a
fear that the Saiga will become
extinct in the next few years.
posted by hindmost at 10:09 AM PST - 42 comments
Think
the Osmond Brothers didn't rock?
Think again.
"In spite of their squeaky clean image, the Osmonds had a soulful, sometimes raucous sound which was a precursor of the power pop of later years." Color my preconceived notions shattered.
posted by KevinSkomsvold at 7:04 AM PST - 89 comments
Zigzag Zombie.
As part of the recent
Dutch Design Week, students were instructed to produce an original typeset using thin, flat material (metal strips, tape, toilet paper, etc.) and then "pick one location, and create a large scale zigzag lettering and make passersby hallucinate."
posted by Terminal Verbosity at 6:56 AM PST - 15 comments
November 11
Claude François
was one of France's most successful popstars, a complete song-and-dance act who remained at the top of the charts for almost ten years before his career was tragically cut short when he tried to change a lightbulb while in the bath (youtube ahead).
posted by jacalata at 8:45 PM PST - 19 comments
"Trotsky lived on after Stalin, and to some extent is still alive today, not because young people want the world he wanted: a phantasm that not even he could define. What they want is
to be him."
posted by Firas at 8:21 PM PST - 75 comments
Win a free MRI machine:
An odd medical equipment distribution scheme, winanmri.com will give away a free MAGNETOM to the hospital that gets the most votes for their submitted video. (videos on right hand side).
posted by edgeways at 5:07 PM PST - 14 comments
In 1897, Elizabeth Smith Miller and her daughter Anne Fitzhugh Miller founded the Geneva Political Equality Club, an organization dedicated to fighting for women's suffrage in the United States. Between them, the two women kept
several scrapbooks documenting their efforts through 1911.
Via.
posted by Rykey at 2:44 PM PST - 7 comments
10 TED conference videos that may or may not be perspective changing…otherwise named,
The Ten Videos to Change How You View the World...The Myth of Violence - Steven Pinker, 10 Ways the World Could End - Stephen Petranek, New Insights on Poverty and Life Around the World - Hans Rosling, Toys That Make Worlds - Will Wright, Technology’s Long Tail - Chris Anderson, Why Are We Happy? Or Not? - Daniel Gilbert, Universe is Queerer Than We Can Suppose - Richard Dawkins, Sliced Bread - Seth Godin, Redefining the Dictionary - Erin McKean, What’s So Funny About the Web? - Ze Frank
posted by nickyskye at 2:42 PM PST - 25 comments
Nuclear Facility in South Africa attacked
by armed intruders. According to the Pretoria News, four armed men broke into the control room of the
Pelindaba Nuclear Research Center, shooting "a senior emergency officer" in the process. The government nuclear agency Necsa has told the paper that publishing the story would be a violation of the National Keypoints Act. The facility seems to be part of South Africa's nuclear weapons program.
posted by Kirth Gerson at 12:44 PM PST - 18 comments
Seymour Hersh speaks at third Annual Amnesty International Lecture at Trinity College, Dublin, Oct 24/2007. YouTube links
1,
2,
3,
4.
posted by dougzilla at 12:34 AM PST - 19 comments
November 10
Skip this one if you're sick of posts about Iraq or comment threads containing the word "Heckuva", but
what would happen if Mosul's "Saddam Dam" ("Sadd Saddam" in Arabic) collapsed?
it could lead to as many as 500,000 civilian deaths by drowning Mosul under 65 feet of water and parts of Baghdad under 15 feet
Good, because the US Army Corps of Engineers rates chances of collapse "
exceptionally high". Top that,
God.
posted by paul_smatatoes at 11:18 PM PST - 88 comments
Disney doesn't have a stranglehold on jazz and animation. Michal Levy has, using geometric shapes, created
animation to John Coltrane's Giant Steps.
posted by ashbury at 9:13 PM PST - 22 comments
Find that going to work is a drag, and nothing seems to make you want to go? Well how about being deciding to refuse to sit around at home and keeping working just because you're 'bored'. I reckon that is an unusual reason to work your life away. Especially if it happens to be your birthday.
Oh, and even more so if you just happen to be
100 years old.
posted by Brockles at 5:31 PM PST - 20 comments
Ninjatune podcasts
including Coldcut and Big Dada podcasts, a Ninjacast which delves into the record crates of various ninja artists, and of course a Solid Steel podcast with 60-odd mixes available.
posted by nthdegx at 3:13 AM PST - 16 comments
November 9
Foetus may, or may not be, a band that once consisted of two Brazilian statistics collectors, their penpal Frank Want, and temperamental singer Phillip Toss. As it stands today, Clint Ruin, aka Frank Want, aka J. G. Thirlwell is the driving force behind the band known as Foetus. Expounding on the underlying themes of "aesthetic terrorism" and "positive negativism," the name has gone through many deviations, but the concept remains the same.
posted by Zack_Replica at 9:50 PM PST - 36 comments
Jonah Lehrer is becoming one of the most interesting science writers around. The 26-year-old Rhodes scholar and former Le Bernardin cook just published his first book,
Proust Was a Neuroscientist [
first chapter excerpt - NYT], an investigation of the ways poets, novelists, and artists accurately modeled the brain and memory before science did. This week he
hilariously reenacted Escoffier's distillation of umami-rich veal stock [hit the audio link] with NPR's Robert Krulwich of Radio Lab. He also just published a very insightful
profile of Oliver Sacks in SEED (addressing the pioneering neurologist's own recent struggles with an eye ailment) and writes a wide-ranging
science blog. A new writer to watch.
posted by digaman at 12:16 PM PST - 46 comments
Your Rights As A Photographer:
As most of us are no doubt aware, the right to take photographs in the United States is being challenged more than ever--people are being stopped, harassed, and even intimidated into handing over their personal property simply because they were taking photographs of subjects that made other people uncomfortable. Recent examples have included photographing industrial plants,
bridges, buildings,
trains, and bus stations. Print and carry this pamphlet in your wallet, pocket, or camera bag to give you quick access to your rights and obligations concerning confrontations over photography.
[via]
posted by fandango_matt at 10:46 AM PST - 81 comments
November 8
GIRLdrive:
"On October 15, we set out on a road trip. We are interviewing and photographing young women across the country, asking them what they think and feel about feminism."
posted by Hypocrite_Lecteur at 8:45 PM PST - 39 comments
How to say "I love you"
"(42) Inappropriately, to a coworker who is already sleeping with another coworker. (43) With a heart filled with lies. (44) With a she puppet and a you puppet. (45) As she leaves for Spain with your much better-looking brother. (46) At Thanksgiving, to her twin sister, by accident."
posted by dhruva at 8:41 PM PST - 41 comments
The China Factor in Pakistani Politics
"Pakistan’s alliance with China, which supports Islamabad’s confrontation with India and underpins its hopes for economic growth in its populous heartland, is probably a lot more important to Islamabad than the dangerous, destabilizing, and thankless task of pursuing Islamic extremists on its remote and impoverished frontiers at Washington’s behest."
posted by Abiezer at 8:22 PM PST - 12 comments
Every day tens of millions of "captchas" are solved by humans, using undreds of thousands of man-hours of work. But what if those person hours could be used for something beneficial?
They can be.
(you may have noticed recaptcha being used on some notable sites)
posted by delmoi at 8:07 PM PST - 23 comments
In 1997,
Todd Phillips and
Andrew Gurland created a film documenting the savagely brutal hazing rituals that take place during Hell Week at U.S. college fraternities.
Frat House was completed and won the Grand Jury Prize for documentaries at 1998's Sundance Film Festival, an award that was later rescinded. HBO was slated to air it later that year, but pulled it for reasons that remain debatable to this day. It has never seen an official release.
Frat House (60 minutes, Google video, )
posted by item at 4:39 PM PST - 66 comments
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