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February 2008 Archives
February 29
Surf your music. Audio surfer is a new game that uses .mp3 files to create racetracks of musical goodness. If guitar hero and F-Zero had a love child, this would be it.
posted by JimmyJames at 6:58 PM PST - 48 comments
Kevin Ray Underwood found guilty
of first degree murder in the April 2006 killing of 10-year-old Jamie Rose Bolin. The jury only needed 20 minutes to decide on his guilt.
Previously on Metafilter, because he linked here. How could a seemingly
normal, albeit "single, bored and lonely", young man become a cannabalistic child rapist and murderer? Exhibits: The
blog he kept for almost four years up until the day
after the murder. A
collection of misc information about Underwood, including (near the bottom) the text of an online chat he had with a friend after killing Bolin. An
extremely disturbing transcript of his confession to the FBI.
Video footage of the trial. Deliberations will begin Monday as to whether or not he will be sentenced to death.
posted by banishedimmortal at 6:53 PM PST - 150 comments
Flash Friday Fun: Experience the thrills of amateur surgery as you play
Amateur Surgeon over at
Adult Swim . You'll be performing transplants with a chainsaw, suturing wounds with staples and shocking patients back to life with a car battery.
posted by PostIronyIsNotaMyth at 4:53 PM PST - 8 comments
I'm not into VU bootlegs really, but apparently this is a big deal. It's the ONLY available live stuff from 1967 and has only become available in literally the last two days. Recorded just after the release of The Velvet Underground And Nico and featuring the debut performance of Sister Ray (19 mins long) and the *previously unheard* song I'm Not A Young Man Any More. That's right, A NEW VELVET UNDERGROUND SONG. And it's fucking good too. This version of Sister Ray absolutely shreds and is what the Velvet Underground are all about.
posted by stinkycheese at 4:03 PM PST - 61 comments
Are Liberals and Conservatives Different Species?
Get this: Everyone in our sample was an American, a teenager, and belonged to the same major religious tradition of Protestantism. In these respects they were culturally uniform. But some belonged to conservative denominations such as Pentecostal and others to liberal denominations such as Episcopalian. As Ingrid combed through the
data, which involved tedious hours in front of the computer, the differences that began to emerge were astounding. It was as if these conservative and liberal religious youth were--different species. [via
3quarksdaily]
posted by sisquoc15 at 11:23 AM PST - 86 comments
The novel American Gods
by Neil Gaiman is being offered for free in its entirety at the Harper Collins website (only viewable using HarperCollins' BrowseInside system). It was put up in celebration of the seventh birthday of
Neil Gaiman's blog. Which is appropriate since Neil Gaiman
started his blog to chronicle the process of turning the text of American Gods into a physical book.
[via the man himself, natch]
posted by Kattullus at 10:25 AM PST - 25 comments
The sub-prime mortgage crisis is giving way in some places to crime ridden McMansion ghettos, perhaps the beginning of a
larger long term trend in demographics: "many low-density suburbs and McMansion subdivisions, including some that are lovely and affluent today, may become what inner cities became in the 1960s and ’70s—slums characterized by poverty, crime, and decay."
posted by stbalbach at 8:02 AM PST - 81 comments
In Mongolia, overtone singing (or hoomei, as it's known locally) is mainly a guy thing, but there are exceptions to the rule, for example, the
Hoomei Women's Group. More commonly though, women who want to sing do so in an exquisite, soaring style like
this and
this. Sometimes the men do the hoomei thing while the women do that
soaring thing. Then there are those lovely
choral arrangements. And then there are those rare moments when the YouTube poster's description of a clip just hits the nail square on the head, as with this one:
amazing.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 7:26 AM PST - 23 comments
February 28
And here we have a couple of YouTube productions, screensaverish animations of photos and lyrics to the original recordings:
Robert Petway - Catfish Blues and
Tommy McClennan - It's Hard To Be Lonesome. This is mostly about Petway and
Catfish Blues but you can't mention Petway without mentioning McClennan, as they ran together in their time and as both did versions of
Catfish, a song canonical in Delta Blues, recorded and performed by nearly everyone--
Muddy Waters - Rolling Stone, for example. Petway just happens to be the first person to record
Catfish, and quite possibly the person who wrote it and certainly. to my mind, at least, the person who nailed it... in the uptempo version at the very least.
posted by y2karl at 9:03 PM PST - 8 comments
Two Yale Law School graduates who allege they were subjected to a campaign of online
harassment file
suit against the
site's owner and two dozen
internet trolls for copyright infringement, defamation, and a variety of other tort and IP claims. In the latest developments, the website's owner was
dropped from the lawsuit, and another
defendant moved (seemingly pro se) to
quash a subpoena served originally on their ISP to reveal their identity.
posted by Law Talkin' Guy at 3:04 PM PST - 25 comments
1 in 99.1 American adults are now incarcerated according to a new Pew Center
study (pdf). Some interesting numbers from a
NYT article on the report: 1 in 36 Hispanic adults are incarcerated, 1 in 15 blacks, 1 in 9 black men aged 20-34, 1 in 355 white women aged 35-39. Some context from the
World Prison Population List (pdf).
posted by aerotive at 10:56 AM PST - 136 comments
What does it take before a song becomes a
pop standard? Does a recording by four different generations of performers count? When originally recorded, Rolf couldn't play digeridoo, so the instrument was simulated with eight bass fiddles. On release it made number 2 in the charts and was kept from the number one spot by Elvis Presley's Return To Sender.
posted by PeterMcDermott at 9:36 AM PST - 12 comments
Some say economics is changing so radically that
attention is of more value than money or material wealth. If that's true, then should Paris Hilton and Britney Spears be considered role models? Must we each
be stars in order to be a success, to get anything achieved, or to gain even the slightest traction?
posted by kmartino at 8:11 AM PST - 32 comments
Is John McCain eligible to become president of the U.S.?
He was born on a military base in the Panama Canal zone, which was not sovereign US territory. The
Constitution provides:
No person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty-five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States. Is McCain a natural born citizen?
posted by caddis at 8:00 AM PST - 217 comments
Master of the 'didge'
- after veins burst in his throat some years ago while he was playing the didgeridoo, doctors warned that continued playing would threaten his life. Admitted to hospital last week with bleeding on the brain, he died on Sunday from a brain haemorrhage. He was 40.
posted by tellurian at 7:42 AM PST - 18 comments
February 27
The revenue-neutral carbon tax: an idea whose time has come? The British Columbia government has just introduced a
carbon tax, starting at $10/tonne in July 2008 and rising to $30/tonne in 2012. All revenues from the tax (close to $2 billion over three years) will be returned to taxpayers in the form of income tax cuts, reducing income and corporate taxes to the lowest levels in Canada.
Details from the BC budget.
Globe and Mail.
posted by russilwvong at 10:36 PM PST - 27 comments
The ultimate in nerdy tattoos? "Jim Mielke's wireless blood-fueled display is a true merging of technology and body art. At the recent Greener Gadgets Design Competition, the engineer demonstrated a subcutaneously implanted touch-screen that operates as a cell phone display, with the potential for 3G video calls that are visible just underneath the skin."
posted by tugena13 at 12:08 PM PST - 63 comments
To The Best Of Our Knowledge
is one of the most wide-ranging and literate public radio shows in the US, a two-hour "radio salon" featuring leisurely exploration of weekly themes like
No Smoking,
Identity Crisis,
Weekend, and
The Mind, Music, and Math. Host
Jim Fleming approaches these big ideas through the works of authors - journalists of all stripes, memoirists, poets, fiction writers, essayists.
Five years' worth of shows are available on audio archives; you can also search the impressive list of
authors by name, or
subscribe to the podcast.
posted by Miko at 9:13 AM PST - 17 comments
The Battle of Gettysburg in Lego, done by 7th Graders:
Day 1;
Day 2;
Day 3.
[youtube links] Lots of blood and flying bodies. Complete with
Matrix references. Soundtrack by The Eagles, Queen, and Richard Strauss.
[via]
posted by marxchivist at 6:02 AM PST - 23 comments
February 26
"The most brutal, ugly, degenerate, vicious form of expression it has been my displeasure to hear," Frank Sinatra wrote of rock 'n' roll during the time of Elvis Presley. But Frank wasn't stupid... he knew his relevance was fading and if you can't beat 'em, you have to join 'em. So in
1960, Elvis Presley was welcomed home from his two year
military tour by the
Frank Sinatra Timex Show "Welcome Home Elvis" special. Later Sinatra said,
"I'm just a singer. Elvis was the embodiment of the whole American culture."
posted by miss lynnster at 9:43 PM PST - 17 comments
The Myth of the Surge:
"Hoping to turn enemies into allies, U.S. forces are arming Iraqis who fought with the insurgents. But it's already starting to backfire. A report from the front lines of the new Iraq."
[Via Devoter.]
posted by homunculus at 4:05 PM PST - 45 comments
Garfield minus Garfield: "Who would have guessed that when you remove Garfield from the Garfield comic strips, the result is an even better comic about schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life?"
posted by SpacemanStix at 1:36 PM PST - 127 comments
Mazes and complexity
Like mazes? Check out these computer generated mazes that might play tricks with your visual cortex. Each is available as a downloadable PDF that will take, um... at least a minute to solve.
posted by daHIFI at 10:24 AM PST - 14 comments
Many business owners have struggled with crime in their communities and the impact that can have on their business- but when the police have their hands full, sometimes your complaints just fall through the cracks. One Atlanta bar owner has taken matters into his own hands by
building a crime-fighting vigilante robot.
posted by baphomet at 9:45 AM PST - 70 comments
In the March issue of
Maxim magazine, music critic David Peisner gave the
Black Crowes' upcoming release
Warpaint two and a half stars out of five, remarking:
"...they sound pretty much like they always have: boozy, competent, and in slavish debt to the Stones, the Allmans, and the Faces."
Nothing remarkable, right? Except
he had never heard the album.
posted by rocket88 at 9:21 AM PST - 103 comments
February 25
A Resume Experiment. In which career blog
JibberJobber responds to a request for resume help by assembling a team of hiring managers and professional resume writers to review the document:
Part 1
: Introduction |
Part 2: First Impressions/Reactions |
Part 3: Formatting the Resume |
Part 4: Content is King |
Part 5: Wrap Up
posted by lalex at 9:55 PM PST - 37 comments
Canal Zone Images
is a collection of stories and images about the Panama Canal Zone. Did you know that the construction workers were paid in
gold and silver ('spiggoty' dollars)?
"Paper money was not used on the pay car at all. In the first place, there was always a danger of its blowing away, and in the second place paper money in the hands of negro workmen soon assumed a most unsanitary condition."
posted by tellurian at 7:02 PM PST - 12 comments
Anglo-Finnish artist
Sanna Annukka's vibrant, flat design work (especially her
Icons series) got me curious about her, well, iconography.
She mentioned
The Kalevala previously, the Finnish national epic poem (
in Finnish here), a tale of creation and heroism that arguably spurred the Finns to independence from the Russians.
Like so much else epic and awesome, it spawned a '70s prog band, with
three albums.
posted by klangklangston at 3:03 PM PST - 23 comments
Building a landmark.
Nearly 135 years after first rolling up Clay Street, San Francisco's famous cable cars are still using an elegant, yet antiquated
system of understreet cables and two types of unpowered cars to move delighted tourists and patient locals across the city every day. But most riders don't realize that five specialized craftsmen in a shop in an industrial part of town make up the the last cable car factory in the world, still building
cars by hand, from plans reverse-engineered from a car disassembled in 1982. [
via]
posted by toxic at 12:05 PM PST - 13 comments
Pardon my French: after (allegedly)
showing up drunk at the G8 (
Mefi),
walking out from 60 minutes, and
almost getting in a fight with angry fishermen (
translation), French President Sarkozy, while visiting the Paris International Agricultural Show, snaps at a man who refused to shake his hand "
Casse-toi pauvre con".
But what exactly
does this
mean in
English? He hasn't (yet) slapped a kid,
unlike his presidential rival Bayrou, but he's still not in the same league as De Gaulle, who answered to a heckler shouting "Mort aux cons!" ("Death to the idiots!") the sublime "
Vaste programme, en effet" ("Tall order, indeed").
posted by elgilito at 10:36 AM PST - 57 comments
There seems to be
a lot of bleeping going on lately. But now it's time, with the help of our friend Count von
Count Bleep (
wikipedia), to
bleep the number of times you can have a laugh with the
bleeping bleeps.
Start here and then go on:
1,
2,
3,
4,
5;
And more
bleeping fun with Ernie, Bert, Oscar, and the Cookie Monster:
1,
2,
3,
4.
posted by omegar at 8:41 AM PST - 20 comments
The Times Machine allows easy browsing of every edition from 70 years (1851-1922) worth of New York Times in the original format. Very cool.
posted by peacay at 6:01 AM PST - 44 comments
February 24
The International Institute of Social History was founded in 1935. It is one of the world's largest documentary and research institutions in the field of social history. From their collections:
Secret Societies: Documents and illustrations of Freemasons, Jesuits, Illuminati, Carbonari, Burschenschaften and other putative secret societies and clandestine organizations.
posted by nickyskye at 5:51 PM PST - 11 comments
Sushi Science and Hamburger Science:
I had always regarded science as universal and believed there are no differences in science at all between countries. But I was wrong. People with different cultures think in different ways, and therefore their science also may well be different. In this essay, I will describe differences I have observed between Western science and Eastern science. Let me start with a parable......
posted by Rumple at 10:13 AM PST - 46 comments
February 23
Frrvrr
uses cutting-edge technology to identify topics you might be interested in based on your browsing history, public records, health records, email activity, legal filings, and web profiles.
posted by dhammond at 11:32 PM PST - 19 comments
Frozen Dead Guy Days.
Thousands of waving spectators line the streets of Nederland, Colo. (pop. 1,394), as a parade filled with skeletons, helmeted Vikings, pompadoured Elvises and antique hearses makes its way down First Street to mark the beginning of Frozen Dead Guy Days—a celebration that’s part Mardi Gras, part county fair, and all tongue-in-cheek. The
2008 celebration will be held March 7-9.
posted by amyms at 10:23 PM PST - 9 comments
NOT the JFK shooting but Robert Kenedy's
One link,yes,but information worth thinking about.
If this is true, then what does it tell us about other information the govt processes?
[...]The official record states that senator Robert F Kennedy, like his brother before him, was killed by a crazed lone gunman. But the assassination of a man who seemed to embody so much hope for a bitterly divided country embroiled in an unpopular war still troubles this nation.
posted by Postroad at 4:50 PM PST - 60 comments
Regarding the 'Creole Beethoven'
Wardell Quezergue, composer, arranger, big band leader, master of Second Line funk, who brought us Earl King's
Trick Bag, the Dixie Cups'
Iko Iko and
Chapel of Love, King FLoyd's
Groove Me, Baby, Jean Knight's
Mr. Big Stuff to name but a few--not to mention
A Creole Mass--and who, later in life, survived
Katrina, to become, among other things of late, according to Home of the Groove's
Quezergue Onstage and Behind The Scenes, a street performer in the French Quarter. His is a name that ought not be forgotten.
posted by y2karl at 9:10 AM PST - 5 comments
February 22
You know how the exomorphs in
Alien had a second jaw that reached out and bit you
while they were biting you with their regular jaws? Moray eels have that. Just thought you should know.
posted by agentofselection at 7:22 PM PST - 80 comments
In 1962, in a mission-run girls' boarding school in Kashasha, Tanzania, a student started laughing uncontrollably. Her laughter spread throughout the school, and the girls grew violent when teachers tried to calm them. Administration closed the school, sent some girls home, and the "
epidemic of laughing and crying" spread to villages up and down the Bukoba district.
posted by lauranesson at 10:28 AM PST - 30 comments
Oscar Night In Hollywood
"If we can huckster a President into the White House, why cannot we huckster the agonized Miss Joan Crawford or the hard and beautiful Miss Olivia de Havilland into possession of one of those golden statuettes which express the motion picture industry's frantic desire to kiss itself on the back of its neck?"
The Atlantic reprints an indispensible Raymond Chandler article from 1948.
posted by Skot at 9:41 AM PST - 11 comments
Tennesse and Georgia's war over water
There are about five million residents in north Georgia affected by the drought. The phrase "if its brown flush it down, if its yellow let it mellow" has become part of the local jargon in an attempt to encourage water conservation.
posted by meeshell at 8:44 AM PST - 34 comments
Word Into Image: Writers on Screenwriting {youtube}William Goldman (
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid) (
1 2 3)
Robert Towne (
Chinatown) (
1 2 3)
Carl Foreman (
High Noon) (
1 2 3)
Neil Simon (
The Odd Couple) (
1 2 3)
Paul Mazursky (
An Unmarried Woman) (
1 2 3)
Eleanor Perry (
The Swimmer) (
1 2 3)
posted by dobbs at 7:48 AM PST - 9 comments
Rick Cook, the author of the 5 novels in the "Wizard's Bane" series of computer-infused light fantasy from the early 90s (
the first two are available, free, and legally, courtesy of the Baen Books Free Library) was in the middle of writing a sixth in Spring 2000, when he underwent emergency heart surgery. The result of that, and the meds that followed — he says in his blog — is that he has the sixth book (
The Wizard Recapitalized) about 90% complete, but can't finish it, and
he wants to know if he should release it anyway. Not all that much
posted by baylink at 7:41 AM PST - 22 comments
Grid16
for your Flash Friday consideration. Turn up the sound, tune your game reflexes to maximum, and enjoy a wide variety of games at the same time!
posted by DreamerFi at 4:58 AM PST - 34 comments
New Jersey is drowning
, or rather it would if the the future as predicted by David Spratty & Philip Sutton in
climate code red comes true. Philip Sutton said in
an interview that "within five years the Arctic ice in the summertime will be all gone.". With all the ice melting, the waterlevels rise - will your house be under water?
posted by dabitch at 1:57 AM PST - 66 comments
February 21
Affairs of the Lips. "We kiss furtively, lasciviously, gently, shyly, hungrily and exuberantly. We kiss in broad daylight and in the dead of night. We give ceremonial kisses, affectionate kisses, Hollywood air kisses, kisses of death and, at least in fairytales, pecks that revive princesses." But,
why do we kiss?
posted by amyms at 7:34 PM PST - 40 comments
Kid Bailey was a Mississippi Delta bluesman blessed with the kind of slightly gravel-tinged voice that emanates authority. His recording career was a very short one, however, consisting of
precisely one day, and yielding
precisely two songs. Very little is known about Bailey himself, and the identity of the 2nd accompanying guitarist on his only known recording remains a mystery, though there has been some
some speculation. I've been doing a little speculating myself, regarding some of Bailey's lyrics, and any of you blues linguists who might want to help fill in the blanks, please see the [more inside].
posted by flapjax at midnite at 5:34 PM PST - 16 comments
The Synchronicity Project
Since 2005, Japanese art director Jun Tsuzuki has been running a project he calls Synchronicity, where he asks people all over the world to take a picture of what they are doing at a pre-determined moment in time. [
via]
posted by dhruva at 5:19 PM PST - 9 comments
Borders and Lulu.com have teamed up to create
Border's Lifestyle, a new service allowing anyone to design and publish their own book and have it distributed through Borders stores, even including your own book tour and in-store readings. Is it, according to Ben Vershbow of
if:book, "bringing vanity publishing to a whole new level of fantasy role-playing,"
1 or a real innovation in book distribution, bypassing the professional gatekeepers?
posted by stbalbach at 3:43 PM PST - 35 comments
Like
hockey fights ? Like the movie
Slapshot? Want to see the
real Chiefs?
Les Chiefs is a
documentary on the toughest team in the Quebec Semi-Pro Hockey League. There can be 10 fights in a single period. Goalies fight. Coaches fight. Some fans fight in the stands with the players who live just yards away, in a ramshackle apartment in the stadium (formerly a ramshackle storage closet).
Other fans lovingly craft belts in the belief that hockey is a religion and The Chiefs are its avatars. And
players players question, even as they sign up for underground boxing matches and run up 100 to 1 penalty minute to goal ratios, whether they’re hockey players or
circus side shows. (some links may be NSFW for violence)
posted by Smedleyman at 2:31 PM PST - 31 comments
Soukous Radio is an online radio station that plays/streams this energizing, joyous, African fusion music, known for its bright guitar sound and rumba/salsa beat. The name, Soukous, is derived from the French word secouer, to shake. A popular, recent Soukous video by two Ivory Coast singers, DJ Eloh and DJ Mix,
The Bobaraba (which means “big bottom” in the local Djoula language), celebrates booty shaking.
posted by nickyskye at 11:40 AM PST - 25 comments
A video
has been posted showing the shooting down of satellite USA193 high over the Pacific!
posted by 6am at 9:34 AM PST - 54 comments
Iceland, Norway, New Zealand and Costa Rica
and four cities in other countries have made the pledge to aim for being carbon neutral. New Zealand and Costa Rica had earlier decleared this ambitious goal, but now Iceland and Norway have joined in. Way to go!
Of the 192 nations on this planet, there are now only 188 to go.
posted by nucleus at 9:13 AM PST - 20 comments
During the Philippine-American War at the turn of the 20th century, American soldiers used a torture method called "
the water cure" to extract information from Filipino fighters.
[via brijit]
posted by AceRock at 8:10 AM PST - 26 comments
Are people reading less? Government survey says:
yes. Declines in how much and how well people read “are adversely affecting this country's culture, economy, and civic life as well as our children's educational achievement.” Also the cause of poor
test scores.
Steve Jobs agrees: Kindle DOA because nobody reads books anymore.
WaPo says 1 in 4 persons read no books in 2006. And children didn't keep reading after they got through Harry Potter,
either.
So literacy's in a long slow decline.
But wait.
posted by cogneuro at 7:13 AM PST - 122 comments
February 20
Flirting with the Forbidden,
for centuries, Romans and French have enjoyed the pleasures of a unique songbird. Once caught,
this tiny bunting is kept in a small cage, where its eyes are poked out. It is then force fed oats, millet, and figs until it's plumped up to four times its size. It is subsequently drowned alive in cognac, roasted at high heat, then served as an
exquisite - and illegal - meal. Traditionally the diner enjoys this delicacy - approximately the size of a human thumb -
underneath an embroidered napkin. The head is bitten off, the entire body eaten in one crunchy bite. Said to embody the "
soul of France," it was, reportedly, the
last meal of Francois Mitterrand. Writer Michael Paterniti
recreates the experience of dining on
l'ortolan, superbly told in an episode of "This American Life."
posted by Dr. Zira at 7:04 PM PST - 141 comments
The [Leonard Schrader] Collection consists of 8,462 vintage lobby-cards and 5,000 related items - many the sole surviving traces of long-lost silent films - acquired by late screenwriter/filmmaker Leonard Schrader over the course of 27 years.
posted by Armitage Shanks at 4:16 PM PST - 4 comments
In an information age, telecommunications such as the Internet and the telephone bind people across space by eviscerating the constraints of distance. To reveal the relationships that New Yorkers have with the rest of the world,
New York Talk Exchange asks: How does the city of New York
connect to other cities?
posted by pwally at 3:55 PM PST - 10 comments
Poet, playwright, novelist, mural painter, experimentalist, illustrator; a “fat, spectacled, balding, increasingly old Glasgow pedestrian”; and perhaps “the greatest Scottish novelist since Sir Walter Scott,”
Alasdair Gray has a new book out.
posted by jbickers at 2:40 PM PST - 20 comments
Five myths about torture
In a Washington Post column,
Darius Rejali, author of Torture and Democracy, explains why five beliefs about torture are wrong. In
a Harper's interview, he answers six questions. "Yes, torture does migrate, and there are some good examples of it both in American and French history. The basic idea here is that soldiers who get ahead torturing come back and take jobs as policemen, and private security, and they get ahead doing the same things they did in the army. And so torture comes home. Everyone knows waterboarding, but no one remembers that it was American soldiers coming back from the Philippines that introduced it to police in the early twentieth century."
posted by Kirth Gerson at 10:37 AM PST - 54 comments
Apparently, the new black is... really, really black. "Researchers in New York reported this month that they have created a paper-thin material that absorbs 99.955 percent of the light that hits it, making it by far the darkest substance ever made -- about 30 times as dark as the government's current standard for blackest black." But what possible benefit to society could come from this blacker than black substance? Why,
invisibility cloaks, of course!
posted by willie11 at 9:05 AM PST - 53 comments
Magical dragon-faeries? Flaxen-hair'd elflords? Dank scary dungeons, reminiscent of Grandpa's basement? Kids' stuff. Whether you're a Camwhore, Emo Kid, or Troll,
Forumwarz everything relevant about the Internet (i.e., Forums and IM) distilled down to a browser-based RPG. Buy warez from shady Russian dealers, upgrade your hacking/whining skills, pwn total strangers by crashing their web sites, and join or fight a shadowy government conspiracy. You have nothing to lose but your dignity.
posted by CrunchyFrog at 8:42 AM PST - 47 comments
Wheel of branding, turn turn turn, tell us what resonates with our target demographic. Lego… anime… pokémon!
Windows Vista Sensei spends his time "traveling from place to place in a quest to help the underprivileged global citizens… With his sense of clarity he possesses the things that legends are made of." If that marketing copy isn't compelling enough, there's a
game, a
conference, a
web comic and a series of "webcasts" you can complete to earn the "311t3"
Source Fource figures. Collect them all!
[Compare][Contrast]
posted by Rictic at 4:41 AM PST - 28 comments
February 19
Dean Kamen's Artificial "Luke" Arm
- Segway inventor reinvents the prosthetic arm: "I've been able to do stuff with this that I haven't, seriously haven't, done in 26 years... uh, pick up a banana, peel a banana and eat it without it squishening... I can't wait to get one of these in a real environment, a home environment, and actually my wife can't either. She's going, oh yeah, I got lots of stuff for you to do."
posted by kliuless at 8:51 PM PST - 59 comments
Having worked as a philosophy teacher in a Scottish primary school and a domestic and child abuse worker with Scottish Women's Aid, perhaps it comes as little surprise that
Karine Polwart's music often dwells on the darker side of life.
posted by aihal at 5:09 PM PST - 9 comments
The Wager:
"I'll bet you that video games will never become a significant form of cultural discourse the way that novels and film have. I'll bet you that fifty years from now they'll be just as mature and well-respected as comic books are today," posits game designer Steve Gaynor.
Responses and rebuttals.
posted by Pastabagel at 12:46 PM PST - 140 comments
What Would Jesus Drink? -- “A rabbi, a priest and a minister walk into a bar.
The bartender looks at them and says, ‘What is this, a joke?’
In one Pennsylvania bar, it's no laughing matter.
On the last Friday of every month, teams of chaplains...set up camp in the
Market Cross Pub in Carlisle, Penn. for a few hours to lend a sympathetic, non-judgmental ear to patrons looking for someone to listen to their tales of woe.”
posted by ericb at 8:36 AM PST - 42 comments
"My name is Captain Doug MacNair, I coordinate the media embedding program from a desk here in Ottawa... I have embedded more than 250 journalists in our program, and no embed has given me more personal satisfaction than yours... Thanks for being
handy with a pencil and a piece of paper. Thanks for
writing so well about the things that are hard to draw. Thanks for leaving your family to do an important job. I know how that feels and it’s never easy. Most of all Richard, thanks for risking your life while you do all those things."
Q&A with Richard Johnson.
Via.
posted by The Loch Ness Monster at 5:45 AM PST - 14 comments
Before Alex Steinweiss invented the album cover in 1938, at the age of 23, all albums came in plain brown wrappers. Steinweiss's idea to create a package that had something visual on the outside to lure the consumer was a huge success. A
tribute show for the 90-year-old Steinweiss will be held at the Robert Berman Gallery in Santa Monica, California, until February 23, 2008. More about Steinweiss
here and
here.
First link via.
posted by amyms at 12:18 AM PST - 13 comments
February 18
I think that the main reason for the practical intelligence and the political good sense of the Americans is their long experience with juries in civil cases. I do not know whether a jury is useful to the litigants, but I am sure it is very good for those who have to decide the case. I regard it as one of the most effective means of popular education at society’s disposal.
Dissent offers commentaries on jury duty from
Alexis de Toqueville,
Joanne Barkan,
Paul Berman,
Susan Cheever,
Nicolaus Mills,
Maxine Phillips,
Ruth Rosen,
Jim Sleeper,
Michael Walzer, and
Darryl Lorrenzo Wellington.
posted by anotherpanacea at 3:28 PM PST - 8 comments
On Saturday, March 29, 2008, at 8 pm in each time zone cities around the world will go dark: Sydney will follow Melbourne, Brisbane and Canberra; In the Philippines, in Manila the lights will go out; Bangkok in Thailand; Tel Aviv in Israel; Suva in Fiji; Copenhagen in Denmark; In North America, Atlanta followed by Chicago, Toronto, Phoenix and San Francisco will be black. It’s
Earth Hour.
posted by HVAC Guerilla at 3:14 PM PST - 36 comments
A Day in the Life of Richard Devylder
[wmv, 11.5 minutes long, subtitled]
Richard Devylder, deputy director at the California Department of Rehabilitation, was born without arms or legs. The video shows how technology enables him to navigate through his daily life, everything from work, doctor's visit, eating to swimming.
posted by Kattullus at 1:09 PM PST - 8 comments
Solar cell directly splits water for hydrogen.
Thomas E. Mallouk and W. Justin Youngblood, postdoctoral fellow in chemistry, together with collaborators at Arizona State University, developed a catalyst system that, combined with a dye, can mimic the electron transfer and water oxidation processes that occur in plants during photosynthesis. They reported the results of their experiments at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science today in Boston.
posted by ZenMasterThis at 8:48 AM PST - 48 comments
These identity thieves don't want your money. They want your quirky sense of humor and your cool taste in music.
Among the 125 million people in the U.S. who visit online dating and social-networking sites are a growing number of dullards who steal personal profiles, life philosophies, even signature poems.
Dude u like copied my whole myspace, posts one aggrieved victim.
posted by subgear at 7:42 AM PST - 38 comments
"What is the sound of color? We asked that question of 5 musicians. We assigned each musician a different color. They wrote 5 tracks. We gave the colors and tracks that inspired them to 5 directors."
The Sound of Color contains the songs and videos that were created. The site and free downloads are only available through March 15.
(Via Carolina Vigna-Marú)
posted by madamjujujive at 4:29 AM PST - 23 comments
A world-class comedian, Victor Borge could please a crowd with his
Phonetic Punctuation or
Inflationary Language bits. But he was also a brilliant pianist, as showcased when he
improvised an impressive encore to a piece he had only heard and never played before, much to his apparent delight. Still better was when he'd merge the two passions, like in
Page-Turner or
The Minute Waltz. He entertained for more than 75 years, performing up to 60 shows even at 90 years old. He died peacefully in 2000, just two days after performing a concert in Denmark, on the blue
here, before dots were all the rage.
posted by disillusioned at 2:39 AM PST - 29 comments
February 17
The Dictionary of Coming to Terms with the Past (
Wörterbuch der 'Vergangenheitsbewältigung') examines over 1,000 German words that have Nazi connotations, such as
Endlösung (Final Solution) and
Selektion, It is featured in a
review by der Spiegel. Such loaded words still constitute a minefield for Germans today, as the Archbishop of Cologne
discovered last year in a situation
analogized to Senator Biden's use of the term "articulate" when referring to Senator Obama.
posted by Rumple at 9:59 PM PST - 49 comments
Kosovo is technically part of Serbia, but it's been governed by the U.N. since 1999, after NATO militarily intervened to stop Slobodan Milosevic's brutal suppression and expulsion of ethnic Albanian separatists. Now that it has declared its independence (with US support), the elephant in the room remains:
Independent Kosovo? Why Not Vermont? "Why is statehood OK for some people but frowned on for others?" There is no internationally accepted standard for independence. "This is the great hole in democratic theory."
posted by stbalbach at 1:58 PM PST - 83 comments
Over 2000 classic short stories
from
American Literature as well as an option to sign up for a
short story of the day rss feed. Among the authors on offer are Kate Chopin, Saki, O. Henry, Louisa May Alcott, Ambrose Bierce, H. P. Lovecraft, Jack London, James Joyce, Willa Cather, Guy de Maupassant, Charles Dickens, Herman Hesse, Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Franz Kafka, Honoré de Balzac, Edith Warton, P. G. Wodehouse, Virginia Woolf, Langston Hughes, Leo Tolstoy, Aldous Huxley, Roald Dahl, Henry James, Katherine Mansfield and I could keep going for a while. The point is, there's over 2000 short stories in there.
posted by Kattullus at 9:32 AM PST - 31 comments
Where did Lily Allen get her music from?
Her own head? Her producer's heads? Her co-writers' heads? No. Lily 'borrowed' liberally from old reggae and ska tracks and even soft porn soundtracks. The
music like dirt blog (a find in itself) outlines every sample and influence in
'Alright, Still', and the result is much more interesting than the album itself. Music like dirt provides some brilliant links to classic reggae, ska, calypso, jazz.....
posted by Summer at 7:31 AM PST - 36 comments
February 16
Another weekend sitting alone in your apartment? Thinking of sending that two thousand word cry for help to anonymous Ask Metafilter? Maybe you should take a look at the advice at
Succeed Socially first.
posted by TimTypeZed at 10:04 PM PST - 63 comments
PMOG stands for Passively Multiplayer Online Game.
Players play without playing; clicking around the internet turns into experience points and currency. Players can bomb each other, wage war over web sites, and lead other users on web missions. Ordinary web sites become caches for items and currency. PMOG fuses an MMO into our WWW.
posted by arcticwoman at 4:01 PM PST - 25 comments
Last summer, the Missoula MT city council deadlocked on the question of whether city folk should be allowed to keep "
urban chickens". (Missoula, pop. 57,000 is what passes for urban in Big Sky Country.) Reporter Ann Medley made a
wonderful video essay on the issue for
New West.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 10:19 AM PST - 24 comments
Frozen Grand Central.
A little bit of Saturday fun. The folks at Improv Everywhere are at it again. This time they freeze over two hundred people in Grand Central station.
(via GoodSh** NSFW)
posted by caddis at 7:56 AM PST - 22 comments
The Anonymity Experiment. Is it possible to hide in plain sight?
Privacy-minded people have long warned of a world in which an individual’s every action leaves a trace, in which corporations and governments can peer at will into your life with a few keystrokes on a computer. Now one of the people in charge of information-gathering for the U.S. government says, essentially, that such a world has arrived.
posted by amyms at 12:14 AM PST - 44 comments
February 15
At the beginning of the Twentieth Century, "International Chess" was the only widely known chess variant in the West. It had its problems. People
tried to
solve them. Of course, they could just play
xiangqi instead. There's also
janggi,
Makruk, and the granddaddy of them all,
chaturanga. Perhaps the most refined game in the family, however, is Japanese Chess--
shogi.
posted by sonic meat machine at 10:29 PM PST - 9 comments
"'Obama is all talk' is all talk."
Matt Burton, creator of
Readable Laws and other projects aimed at opening up government and the political process to the masses, has chimed in on the issue of the "substance" behind the rhetoric of the various candidates. He notes how in articles such as
this people attack Barack Obama for his fine oratory but lack of details. He then digs in and asks, Who really
is being specific about their stances on the issues?
Barack or
Hillary?
posted by chasing at 9:33 PM PST - 101 comments
"In a
test of the American Dream, Adam Shepard started life from scratch with the clothes on his back and twenty-five dollars. Ten months later, he had an apartment, a car, and a small savings."
Introduction to the book which arose from his "journey", which was inspired by
Barbara Ehrenreich.
posted by Rumple at 2:13 PM PST - 243 comments
Back in May, an Egyptian professor found
a loophole to allow an unmarried female to be alone in the presence of a man. All she has to do is breastfeed him 5 times.
Rad? is a technical term from Islamic jurisprudence meaning "the suckling which produces the legal impediment to marriage of foster-kinship". Now the good people over at
Haase & Martin have come up with
their own way to get under that burka.
posted by gman at 12:14 PM PST - 55 comments
For more than 50 years, it was believed that the first recording
Allen Ginsberg made of
Howl was in Berkeley in March 1956. Now, an earlier recording – made on Valentine's Day 1956 at Reed College, Portland, Oregon – has been
found. Reed have made it – along with seven other poems Ginsberg read the same night – available
here.
(Click on "Allen Ginsberg reads ..." for drop down menu; apologies for crappy quicktime interface.)
posted by Len at 12:11 PM PST - 27 comments
Suicide bombers in Valhalla
"Sverige fights back! I'll see the heroes in Valhalla, inshallah."
Where can you find an eclectic mix of Fascists, Libertarian Socialists, Trotskyists, National Anarchists, DPRK apologists, Dixie lovers, Christian Reconstructionists and Islamists all in one place?
posted by symbioid at 8:46 AM PST - 20 comments
A mindbending logic puzzle.
A thousand people on the island, 900 brown-eyed and 100 blue-eyed; anyone who learns their own eye color must kill themself the next day; a visitor mentions that there is a blue-eyed person on the island; what happens? Nothing, you say, because they already know that? Wrong. Further details at the Terry Tao post linked above, but don't scroll down below the boxed description unless you want hints and/or spoilers.
posted by languagehat at 7:47 AM PST - 390 comments
A Visual Guide To Recycling Plastics.
Most recycling programs only accept plastics #1 and #2, so being able to quickly identify them can be a time saver when sorting your recycling. In the future, we should be able to recycle plastics #3 through #7 — but for now these outcasts must be banished to the landfill (that’s too bad, because a lot of stuff is made from plastic #5).
posted by amyms at 12:00 AM PST - 24 comments
February 14
A Global Map of Human Impacts to Marine Ecosystems
"What happens in the vast stretches of the world's oceans - both wondrous and worrisome - has too often been out of sight, out of mind. The goal of the research presented here is to estimate and visualize, for the first time, the global impact humans are having on the ocean's ecosystems."
posted by dhruva at 5:15 PM PST - 20 comments
The Day of Purity
is a day when youth can make a public demonstration of their commitment to remain secularly pure, in mind and actions. ... When you stand up for sexual pruity you send a message to parents, churches, communities, legislators, and the media that you want a better world. Be politically incorrect! Sponsored by
Liberty Counsel. (
via)
posted by mrgrimm at 2:31 PM PST - 68 comments
Spartacus Roosevelt Hour Podcast
is a weekly hour of obscure noise, glitchy electropop, fake nostalgia, bastardized exotica, tweaky lounge, creepy ambient and musical non-sequiturs. Also, it features an Alabaman with a Skype account named Spartacus Roosevelt.
posted by panoptican at 2:23 PM PST - 8 comments
iReport.com
-
"a brand new beta site for uncensored, user-powered news. CNN built the tools, you take it from there. All the stories here are user-generated and instant: CNN does not vet or verify their authenticity or accuracy before they post. The ones with the "On CNN" stamp have been vetted and used in CNN news coverage."
posted by blue_beetle at 11:43 AM PST - 27 comments
Fancast is a new site currently in beta, that tries to combine TV listings, IMDB type information, and aggregate full length episodes of TV shows from places like
CBS and
Hulu. It is also designed to allow you to connect you with shows and movies from iTunes, Netflix, and more. It is owned by
Comcast but anyone can use it.
via
posted by bove at 10:03 AM PST - 32 comments
The Secret Museum of Mankind
::
"Published in 1935, the Secret Museum is a mystery book. It has no author or credits, no copyright, no date, no page numbers, no index ... The tone of the commentary is dated, and uniformly racist in the extreme, often hilariously so. It reads like the patter of a carnival sideshow barker, from a time when the world was divided between "modern" Europeans and "savages" ... Presented here is the Secret Museum in its entirety, all 564 pages scanned and transcribed-- nothing is omitted or censored ... Treat it as entertainment instead of education (don't take it seriously and don't believe a word it says!), adjust for the blatant racial bias of the time, and enjoy."
posted by anastasiav at 7:41 AM PST - 67 comments
When it comes to home theaters, I thought I'd seen it all. But nothing's come close to this. First, I'm going to try to describe the sheer magnitude of Jeremy Kipnis' theater. His Stewart Snowmatte laboratory-grade screen is the biggest I've ever seen in a home, and in the back of the theater, there's a Sony ultra-high-resolution (4,096-by-2,160) SRX-S110 digital projector. I'm looking everywhere, jotting down questions, and Kipnis sounds almost giddy talking about his theater's capabilities. He refers to his baby, the Kipnis Studio Standard (KSS), as "The Greatest Show on Earth." And from the looks of it, he may be right.
I should hope so, it cost six million dollars.
posted by the_very_hungry_caterpillar at 6:44 AM PST - 120 comments
Lupercalia
is a festival that probably pre-dates Rome, and which later became known as St. Valentine's day. It had everything; sacrifice, cake, nudity, spanking and a love lottery. What do we get? A card. If we are lucky. But,
who was Valentine? Did
Chaucer make the whole thing up?
posted by asok at 3:57 AM PST - 27 comments
Doctors successfully removed a two-inch nail from a man's genitals yesterday.
Doctors pulled the nail out of his urethra on their first attempt and later said the man could have died if the object had not been spotted on X-ray. The man had admitted himself to SMC on Sunday night with extreme abdominal pain and was unable to speak.
The man told doctors the last thing he remembered was having something sprayed in his face and being fondled by one of his assailants before he blacked out.
posted by Henry C. Mabuse at 3:07 AM PST - 56 comments
Seventy four years ago,
something happened off La Jolla Shores, California, that changed the world of ocean recreation forever. An invitation-only group of watermen, the
Bottom Scratchers became the
founding fathers of free diving. Although the club would eventually grow to only 20 members, the men did everything they could to grow the sport and teach others how to spear fish, keep a good spear gun or get lobsters and abalone on breath-held dives.
posted by miss lynnster at 12:20 AM PST - 9 comments
February 13
Easily the most hotly-anticipated game for the Wii (if not ever),
Super Smash Bros. Brawl has topped 1 million sales in its first two weeks in Japan (U.S. release date is next month [3/9]). Featuring the addition of celebrated video game characters such as
Sonic the Hedgehog and
Solid Snake to its bloated cast, as well as the ability to
record fights,
design levels, single-player storylines penned by
Kazushige Nojima (Final Fantasy VII), and the first SSB game to feature online play, it's no wonder the game has delivered on the hype and become only the 7th game in acclaimed magazine Famitsu's storied history to receive a
perfect 40/40 score. Watch the
Japanese intro, spoil the game for yourself by checking out all
leaked in-game secrets, or simply learn more about all the details that went into the game with
this chat with the head game developer. Finally, if you're hardcore enough to hang with the
big boys, head on over to the
Smash Boards and find yourself a tournament to participate in.
posted by Christ, what an asshole at 4:22 PM PST - 39 comments
Oamos
is a "metasearch engine" that generates a sprawling cornucopia of sound, text and images based on your query.
posted by dhammond at 4:20 PM PST - 14 comments
Are you an
affected provincial ?
"Affected Provincialism can take many forms, but personally I prefer borrowing heavily from the combined qualities of the naturalist, philomath, dandy and aesthete. Independence, liberality, optimism, playfulness, curiosity, lightness, and generosity are integral to Affected Provincialism; it's modeled loosely on the idea of the eighteenth-century gentleman amateur, as wrongly imagined by a twenty-first-century twit."
via
posted by vronsky at 3:15 PM PST - 54 comments
Welcome to the BIL Conference
Wish you could go to TED but don't have the money? Try BIL! As described on their site "an open, self-organizing, emergent, and anarchic science and technology conference. Nobody is in charge. If you want to come, just show up." With a number of talks in various categories, the most notable being
Aubrey De Gray. The conference takes place in Monterey, CA on March 1st and 2nd.
posted by LoopyG at 12:50 PM PST - 11 comments
Harvie Krumpet:
Part 1,
part 2,
part 3.
Good stuff for a cold February wednesday.
(youtube. s'been mentioned in passing here before, but here's the thing itself)
posted by es_de_bah at 10:45 AM PST - 11 comments
Hungry for some retro and slightly offbeat music? Visit
Thrift Store DJ (owned and operated by Metafilter member
Otis) and download or listen to streams of albums from many different genres such as Bossa Nova, Caribbean, Exotica, Flamenco, General Fruitiness, Greek, Hawaiian, Latin, Mambo, and Polka.
Via (in a roundabout way)
posted by cog_nate at 9:29 AM PST - 14 comments
Michigan to build the country's first
Maglev public transportation system between Detroit and Ann Arbor.
The Interstate Traveler Hydrogen Super Highway will utilize solar and hydrogen power and TCP/IP for communications. The cars will carry people, cars (drive on/off) and cargo. Construction is set to begin this year.
posted by stbalbach at 7:40 AM PST - 73 comments
"Today there is no eggroll..."
As posted at
jewschool, your best source for hip heeb hype,
Asian restaurants across [Israel]detante went on a one-day spring roll strike on Tuesday in protest over government plans to rid kitchens of foreign chefs, and said sushi and noodles would be the next items off the menu.
posted by ericbop at 7:30 AM PST - 87 comments
February 12
British internet users
face ban for illegal downloads. A draft copy of a Green Paper produced by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport was leaked to
The Times newspaper which detailed how the government was considering introducing legislation that would require ISPs to take action against users who access pirated material.
posted by electricinca at 11:03 AM PST - 37 comments
Hamster Market Bubble in China.
Hamsters have become the
must-have pet in China since the
Year of the Rat began on
7 February. Hamster demand has tripled in recent weeks and some enterprising individuals might be buying them with the sole intention of holding them for a short period before flipping them for a profit. For my own part, I'm working with HSBC in trying to launch a market in hamster-backed short term notes.
posted by psmealey at 9:23 AM PST - 30 comments
Several prisoners held at Guantanamo
are charged, including Khalid
Sheikh Mohammed. According to this
soundbite, after their time in military court, they'll be able to appeal the decision in civilian court.
posted by ®@ at 4:47 AM PST - 77 comments
February 11
A look at the (likely terrible) CGI
Star Wars prequel hitting theaters this autumn.
The "Star Wars: The Clone Wars" movie is expected to run around 100 minutes and pick up between episode II and III. Anakin Skywalker is not yet Darth Vader. The story will then continue in 30-minute smallscreen installments.
posted by incomple at 11:40 PM PST - 106 comments
Acquitted of the murder of Francis Scott Key's son by the first successful pleading of temporarily insane?
Check. Civil War Union general?
Check. Medal of Honor winner?
Check. Amputated leg on display to the public?
Check. Lover to the deposed Queen of Spain?
Check. Ladies and Gentlemen, I introduce you to Major General, Foreign Minister, and Congressman
Daniel Edgar Sickles.
posted by Atreides at 6:46 PM PST - 18 comments
"We have the chance to accomplish two other things: to provide a model for what a truly sincere, forthright, and courageous Presidential candidate might look like, and to demonstrate how desperate America’s voters are to see one."
Jesus in 2008!
posted by not_on_display at 9:52 AM PST - 21 comments
Esalen: Where "California" Bubbled Up (one photo mildly NSFW) For many others in America and around the world, Esalen stands more vaguely for that metaphorical point where “East meets West” and is transformed into something uniquely and mystically American or New Agey. And for a great many others yet, Esalen is simply that notorious bagno-bordello where people had sex and got high throughout the 1960s and 1970s before coming home talking psychobabble and dangling crystals. In short, Esalen is in every way, even geologically, California at its most extreme. It is its caricature, as well as its noblest expression.
posted by jason's_planet at 9:48 AM PST - 14 comments
It's a year since the untimely
death of
Chris Lightfoot. He had a remarkable
combination of political commitment and technical expertise that led him to develop sites
such as
WriteToThem and
Pledgebank for the splendid political and social
software group,
MySociety.
His political writing brings a sharp and sarcastic wit to bear on such subjects as the
Iraq war, and
ID cards.
There are also some good
rants.
A sad loss to British society.
posted by crocomancer at 9:43 AM PST - 6 comments
February 10
One of the songs on the Golden Record included on the two Voyager spacecraft was
Flowing Water performed by Guan Pinghu on the guqin. The guqin, Confucius' favorite instrument, has been played in China for at least 3000 years. There's a lot of
guqin videos out there but the two players I listen to the most are
jts1702a and
Charlie Huang (who is the main contributer to Wikipedia's excellent
guqin article).
posted by Kattullus at 8:14 PM PST - 16 comments
"I'm going to kill myself in 90 days." A blogger calling herself "Jane" sets up a blog to chronicle her final 90 days, and is calling on the internet for suggestions on how to do it.
Disturbed blogger? Or another "viral campaign" for something soon to be revealed?
posted by revmitcz at 3:33 PM PST - 291 comments
This week I've been perseverating on Chuck Berry's great 1964 song "You Never Can Tell", so now you get to too! Unless you're over 50, you probably know it from the
Thurman/Travolta dance in
Pulp Fiction, but here are some other versions worthy of your attention:
posted by ubiquity at 1:47 PM PST - 14 comments
"Everyone laughs a little too hard for a little too long, not because we find these sentiments funny, but because we’re awkwardly acknowledging how unfunny they are. At their core, they pose one of the most complicated, painful, and pervasive dilemmas many single women are forced to grapple with nowadays: Is it better to be alone, or to settle?
My advice is this: Settle!"
posted by Horace Rumpole at 9:29 AM PST - 146 comments
Invasion of the Jellyfish
The
box jellyfish [AKA
Sea Wasp] is so packed with venom that the briefest of touches can bring agonising death within 180 seconds. And if comes under sustained attack it responds by sending its compatriots into a super-breeding frenzy in which millions of replacements are created. The really bad news is that the box jellyfish and another equally poisonous species, Irukandji, are on the move. Scientists are warning that their populations are exploding and will pose a monumental problem unless they are stopped.
First aid for stings.
posted by Kirth Gerson at 6:49 AM PST - 75 comments
February 9
Perepiteia.
Thane Heins, who named his invention after a Greek word meaning an action that "has the opposite effect to that intended," has perhaps created a...perpetual motion machine. His
20-year obsession has broken up his marriage and lost him custody of his two young daughters. Contraption stumps
MIT professor. Is it a
hysteresis brake? Or a scam. YOU decide.
posted by wallstreet1929 at 8:54 PM PST - 76 comments
The FBI Deputizes Business.
"Today, more than 23,000 representatives of private industry are working quietly with the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security. The members of this rapidly growing group, called
InfraGard, receive secret warnings of terrorist threats before the public does—and, at least on one occasion, before elected officials. In return, they provide information to the government, which alarms the
ACLU. But there may be more to it than that. One business executive, who showed me his InfraGard card, told me they have permission to 'shoot to kill' in the event of martial law."
posted by homunculus at 2:38 PM PST - 70 comments
The King of Kong, continued.
If you enjoyed "The King of Kong," check out the Onion AV Club's recent, impromptu, and insightful interview with Billy Mitchell. Also featured are responses by filmmakers Ed Cunningham and Seth Gordon.
posted by Monster_Zero at 1:35 PM PST - 49 comments
Carmen Reinhart of the University of Maryland and Kenneth Rogoff of Harvard University have compared the recent US subprime mortgage crisis with five downturns in industrialized economies in the past 30 years in their brief paper,
Is the 2007 U.S. Sub-Prime Financial Crisis So Different? (pdf). Their conclusion: “given the severity of most crisis indicators in the run-up to its 2007 financial crisis, the United States should consider itself quite fortunate if its downturn ends up being a relatively short and mild one.” Summarized, with some data and charts,
here.
Via.
posted by ibmcginty at 12:48 PM PST - 19 comments
February 8
I don’t understand the term “begs the question.” I know I use it incorrectly—or so I’ve been told—but I don’t know what I’m supposedly doing wrong. Can you explain? The Morning News'
The Non-Expert tackles "the phrase that nobody understands."
posted by amyms at 11:09 PM PST - 188 comments
The Aimee Mann Christmas Trilogy Parts
One,
Two, and
Three (YT links) featuring: Paul F. Tompkins, Jon Krasinski, Emily Procter, Patton Oswalt, Weird Al Yankovic, Bob Odenkirk, Fred Armisen, Ben Stiller, Will Ferrell.
posted by adrober at 4:18 PM PST - 26 comments
"
I'm on Setanta Sports" with José Mourinho. Fantastic. The Special One returns to the world of football with his very own talk show. Very good. More clips inside. Be champions!
posted by sellout at 3:02 PM PST - 12 comments
So,
good day, and welcome to the
Bob and
Doug McKenzie FPP.
How's it goin' eh? Like, I've got some
back bacon fryin' up on the Coleman, a dozen
donuts, a
two-four, and our topic today is stuff on the internet relating to
these two Canadian hoseheads. So, like, sit back, put a
toque on,
grab a beer, and enjoy!
posted by not_on_display at 10:17 AM PST - 67 comments
Philip M. Parker[1][2] has written and published over
85,000 books on Amazon in the past few years, although by his own count the total published is over 200,000. He is like a writing machine - in fact, he has created a machine that churns out an original book about every 20 minutes. A few sample titles:
posted by stbalbach at 10:11 AM PST - 46 comments
The Cabinet Office in the UK has published "Future Strategic Challenges for Britain" [
full pdf,
summary pdf,
website], a 180-page document which summarises current futures thinking in the UK Government, with a horizon of about 20 years. It includes predictions on big issues such as democratic participation, foreign affairs, climate change, family life and public services.
posted by athenian at 9:44 AM PST - 6 comments
Waging a tiny rebellion via shortwave radio.
"Missing the Internet's precision, what I think most recommends shortwave radio now is its offer of quest. It's in the hunting for something unknown that might not be there anyway, and if it is, may dissolve, sputtering, eaten by sunspots or zapped in static."
posted by ZenMasterThis at 9:21 AM PST - 30 comments
February 7
Villagers in the mountains of northern India and Pakistan have been
growing their own glaciers for centuries. They're small
domesticated glaciers, cultivated by hand, and they provide a reliable source of water for agriculture. Legend has it that they made glaciers to block mountain passes and keep the Mongol Hordes out! More detail in
New Scientist - subscription required, but you can probably see this
instruction sheet.
posted by moonmilk at 10:55 PM PST - 28 comments
StrangeUSA.com
-
"Consolidating the vast amount of 'Strange Stuff' out there into one easy to use place. Haunted buildings, places, urban legends, cemetaries, weird places, cool places, ghost towns, and anything else that's worth your time to visit."
posted by Burhanistan at 9:23 PM PST - 15 comments
As a photographer, you need to get close to your subject. But sometimes things get between you and your subject. Things such as state lines, restraining orders, and guard patrols that can keep you miles away from the people you want to shoot. What do you do at times like this?
Get a bigger lens.
posted by ardgedee at 7:20 PM PST - 47 comments
The
Joseph Curseen, Jr., and Thomas Morris, Jr., Processing and Distribution Center opened in December 2003 with little fanfare. Formerly the Brentwood (D.C.) Post Office, it was renamed by
House Resolution 3287 in honor of the two postal workers killed after two letters containing anthrax passed through on their way to Capitol Hill.
posted by Challahtronix at 6:04 PM PST - 7 comments
The Feel Tank.
"We are a feel tank, but this does not mean that we do not think. We are governed by
outrage that the desires and demands for a less
bad life and a better good life continue to go unrecognized."
posted by papakwanz at 12:32 PM PST - 25 comments
The Falling Sand Game
is an engrossing but hard-to-describe online toy/game that lets you create environments using falling streams of sand, water, oil, and salt by adding fire, plants, clay, and other substances. Inspired by
The Falling Sand Game are a number of variations, such as
PyroSand, featuring many kinds of explosives, and
Hell of Sand, with little people who you can torture. One of the most interesting versions is
The Powder Game, which lets you paint with superballs, adjust air pressure, and build
very satisfying volcanoes and gardens. For even more,
WxSand [downloadable .exe] is a Windows version with lots more options and many
interesting mods.
[Games are Java applets and are incredibly addictive, especially The Powder Game]
posted by blahblahblah at 11:38 AM PST - 26 comments
Mixed With Love: The Musical World Of Walter Gibbons: "This tale begins with a skinny white DJ mixing between the breaks of obscure Motown records with the ambidextrous intensity of an octopus on speed. It closes with the same man, sick with Aids and all but blind, fumbling for gospel records as he spins up eternal hope in a fading dusk. In between, Walter Gibbons transformed the art of DJing and marked out the future co-ordinates of remixology."
posted by Len at 10:38 AM PST - 6 comments
In 1900 they were everywhere. Singing on street corners, in front of circus entrances, or just moving down the dusty roads of the South, playing anywhere a crowd might be cajoled into donating a dime to the cause. To survive they played any request--ballads, popular tunes, white hillbilly music, hymns, and the newly emerged blues. Songsters were the first folk musicians to be "professional" ...Most songsters faded into the past. A few waxed recordings, leaving a tempting glance into their world--and many questions. Such is the case with Richard "Rabbit" Brown, one of the most celebrated songsters and the only one from New Orleans to record.
Times ain't Like They Used To Be:
Richard "Rabbit" Brown, New Orleans Songster--so,
James Alley Blues is the song most everyone names as Brown's greatest and, now, you can play it online
here.
posted by y2karl at 5:30 AM PST - 17 comments
February 6
Founded in 1947 and surviving today both as a relic of the psychedelic 1960s and a continually groundbreaking troupe, the
Living Theatre found a national spotlight during the late 1960s and early 1970s as
a "nomadic touring ensemble" performing anarchist, sexually-liberated, audience-participatory, collectively-created, sometimes nude or semi-nude productions like
Paradise Now, the
Legacy of Cain, and
Frankenstein, under the direction of founders
Julian Beck and
Judith Malina. Beck died in 1985, but Malina, now 81, remains both
an inspiration and a leading actress (currently starring in the company's
Maudie and Jane).
posted by beagle at 6:35 PM PST - 3 comments
The
of Battlefields and Bibliophiles blog has a fun quiz. Check your knowledge of American Civil War battlefields by guessing which battleground is featured in
the Google Earth images. Answers
here.
posted by marxchivist at 9:43 AM PST - 5 comments
Skelewags
- drawings from a delightful Burtonish/Goreyesque world, including some skewed takes on Carroll's
Alice.
posted by Wolfdog at 5:48 AM PST - 13 comments
Oh, I say old chap--do you mind not going all "
immigrant" on me, and spitting all over the place? Thank you very
much.
(how Britain proposes to solve the problem of integrating its migrant population)
posted by hadjiboy at 3:01 AM PST - 109 comments
February 5
Head over to
Cheikha Rimitti's MySpace page and listen to the first tune up on her player (starts when you open the page), called
Saida. Whoa! Is that badass or
what? Well, there's 5 other tunes of hers there for your listening pleasure, covering a wide swath of stylistic territory within the Algerian music tradition she was such an important part of. Yet
another MySpace page pays tribute (with 4 more songs!) to this powerful singer, and you can also learn more about her at the
Cheikha Rimitti website, which is in French, but with links like "Musique" and "Vidéos", you shouldn't have too much trouble with it. There's an informative English-language video
biography of this "Mother of
Raï", not to mention this performance footage (with those fantastic flutes!) of
Saida.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 11:16 PM PST - 18 comments
Kiuchi Nobuo
- a Japanese airman in World War II, was captured and sent to a prison camp in the Ukraine. He tells his story with drawings.
posted by tellurian at 7:54 PM PST - 23 comments
Well, it seems that some British scientists have succeeded in creating a human embryo from
three parents. Oh, let the games begin...
posted by krash2fast at 6:21 PM PST - 34 comments
Much of the Middle East has been without reliable internet access recently due to the somewhat suspicious cutting of
four seperate underwater cables, in seperate locations, within a few days of each other. The problem has been alleviated by
re-routing of traffic until ships can reach the cables to repair them, a process which may take
several weeks. The problem was initially believed to be caused by anchors of passing ships, but that has since
been retracted and deals have already been signed by several companies for
new cables.
posted by Dillonlikescookies at 5:51 PM PST - 68 comments
The art of Lilly McElroy:
"The gestures that Lilly performs for the camera are simultaneously loving and cruel; they are an attempt to discuss the desire and difficulty involved in making a connection...These photographs, videos, and installations that she produces, while trying to interact, acknowledge the possibility of failure - that someone might not catch her, that a connection might not be made."
posted by Ira.metafilter at 1:17 PM PST - 11 comments
Livin' Large
- To hear the Lou Dobbses and Bill O'Reillys of the world--not to mention politicians ranging from Ron Paul to Hillary Clinton--the middle class of America (however you define that term) has never had it so tough. Between credit squeezes, out-of-control immigration, rising costs of education and health care and everything else, it's all darkness out there for those of us who are neither millionaires nor welfare cases, right? (A video presented by Drew Carey and reason.tv)
posted by blue_beetle at 1:02 PM PST - 120 comments
The Upside of the Downside
"I never imagined I’d find myself in the curious position of having so much more than my parents ever had, of having more, frankly, than I ever thought I would have—and yet simultaneously feeling like I’m falling behind, that I need to earn more, save more, invest more, acquire more. When did I begin to feel this anxiety of acquisition? How did I become such a jackass?"
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 11:29 AM PST - 138 comments
There is no word on whether IHOP has asked the Vatican to shift the timing of Lent.
As
mentioned previously, today is not only Super Tuesday, but also Fat Tuesday, otherwise known as Mardi Gras, Shrove Tuesday, or...
International Pancake Day. IHOP is not a happy camper that the biggest payday in its calendar (when it admittedly not only gives away free pancakes but raises money for charity in the process) has to compete with our pesky American democracy. As they say in their press release:
“Super Tuesday, set for February 5, 2008, encroaches upon the centuries-old celebration of Pancake Day, traditionally held the Tuesday preceding Lent to rid iceboxes of forbidden dairy products.”
So it decided to thumb its nose at the Catholics and declare next Tuesday "
National Pancake Day," even though it's during Lent, which defeats the entire purpose.
Except for those whose religion's highest priority is the consumption of free pancakes.
posted by ericbop at 7:04 AM PST - 77 comments
Starship Sofa
is a science fiction podcast with biweekly short fiction from known authors (David Brin, Bruce Sterling) and a more regular discussion on SciFi concepts and authors. Warning. podcast contains Geordie accents and the stories contain
terrible fake American accents.
posted by seanyboy at 12:51 AM PST - 8 comments
February 4
There is a small but very dedicated and enthusiastic group of people around the world making music with Nintendo Game Boys and other cheap electronic gadgetry. While many of them are consciously fitting their low-bit sonics into relatively straightforward and predictable dance-oriented forms, some others are taking a rather more whimsical and less predictable approach. One such favorite of mine is the utterly charming, Tokyo-based
henna dress. Then there's her alter ego,
beta dress. Then there's her 3rd alter ego,
CAMEBOY (of GGG) .
posted by flapjax at midnite at 10:38 PM PST - 21 comments
A little lost coming up to the
Presidential Primary?
The Electoral Compass is a brief set of questions that matches your choices with the candidate whose positions are the closest to yours.
Discover your position in the political landscape for the US presidential election 2008.
posted by nickyskye at 11:38 AM PST - 125 comments
Opening a restaurant is not an easy way to get rich, but for 36 year old Lovie Yancey, an African American woman living in Southern Califoria in 1947, the gamble paid off. As founder of the
Fatburger chain (warning - audio), Lovie is remembered as the creator of arguably the greatest hamburger in a nation obsessed with hamburgers.
Lovie passed away Jan 26, at 96 years of age, and even if you're not a fan of her burgers, take a moment in tribute to a remarkable woman.
posted by jonson at 11:24 AM PST - 34 comments
February 3
Remember
Super Mario Frustration? Kaizo Mario World is another of those super-hard Mario level hacks, this one of Super Mario World. Someone played through its first level 134 times, with save states, recording all his deaths, then digitally composited them into one trip through the level. The result was
Many-Worlds Mario. (For those interested, here's a
video of a tool-assisted perfect run of much of the game.
Here's the rest. Here's some more.)
posted by JHarris at 7:44 PM PST - 36 comments
What happens in the shadow, in the grey regions, also interests us – all that is elusive and fugitive, all that can be said in those beautiful half tones, or in whispers, in deep shade.
Here are some short films by Stephen and Timothy, the
Brothers Quay.
posted by Iridic at 3:18 PM PST - 13 comments
