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March 2012 Archives
March 31
Deep vein thrombosis is generally a topic that comes up with regards to airline seating and other periods of prolonged immobility (
previously).
Anna Brown was a homeless woman and constantly on the move, so doctors in the emergency room thought that her complaints of leg pain were just drug-seeking behavior. Unfortunately, drug seeking is a
major problem in ERs in the United States.
[more inside]posted by gracedissolved at 8:13 PM PST - 60 comments
On March 11 United States Army Staff Sergeant Robert Bales allegedly murdered 17 Afghan civilians. A reporter from Australia's SBS is the first journalist to
interview survivors of the deadly Kandahar massacre.
(via)posted by AElfwine Evenstar at 8:12 PM PST - 66 comments
Before
hip-hop beefs, there were response records, also known as
answer songs, usually replies to well-known songs. There are a few key eras: blues and R&B recorded music in the 1930s through 1950s, including a number of responses to "
Work With Me, Annie" (1954), recorded by
Hank Ballard & the Midnighters, with answers including "
Annie had a Baby," and "
The Wallflower" by Etta James; and Big Mama Thornton's "
Hound Dog" (1953), with a quick response by
Louis Innis and Charlie Gore, made a mere week after the original was released, and
Rufus Thomas' "
Bear Cat" (1953),
Sun Records' first hit. Country, rock & roll, doo-wop and pop music picked up where the blues left off, with most activity in the 1950s to 60s. Two examples from this era are
"Are You Lonesome To-night" and "Who Put The Bomp," and responses to both. The most well known from the next decade was Lynyrd Skynyrd's "
Sweet Home Alabama" (1974), a response to Neil Young's "
Southern Man" (1970) and "
Alabama" (1972). Until the 2000s, no answer songs had charted as high as the original hits. That changed with
Frankee's "
F.U.R.B. (Fuck You Right Back)" (2004), a response to
Eamon's "
Fuck It (I Don't Want You Back)" (2003), which was the first answer song to reach number 1 in the UK. Six years later and across the pond, Katy Perry's "
California Gurls" was a response to "
Empire State of Mind" by Jay-Z. It was the first answer song to reach No. 1 in the Billboard Hot 100. More Responses inside.
[more inside]posted by filthy light thief at 3:04 PM PST - 53 comments
Language of the Land: Journeys into Literary America: The inspiration for this exhibition was the
Library of Congress's collection of literary maps--maps that acknowledge the contributions of authors to a specific state or region as well as those that depict the geographical locations in works of fiction or fantasy. Throughout the exhibition, these colorful and varied maps reflect the contributions of authors to specific states or regions and locate their imagined people and places. Through these maps, authors' words, images, and characters, Language of the Land presents a tapestry of the impressions that endure in our collective imagination of the American land and its culture.
[more inside]posted by Fizz at 7:43 AM PST - 4 comments
March 30
The Quietest Place on Planet Earth Measured at -9.4dB, this is the quietest place on earth. There is a standing bet that anyone lasting 45 minutes in the chamber, in the dark, earns a case of beer of their choice. No one has lasted more than a half hour.
posted by sanka at 6:40 PM PST - 130 comments
Bombshell investigation reveals vast majority of landmark cancer studies cannot be replicated. In a shocking discovery, C. Glenn Begley, former researcher at Amgen Inc, and a team working with him, has found that 47 out of 53 so called "landmark" basic studies on cancer -- a high proportion of them from university labs -- cannot be replicated, with grim consequences for producing new medicines in the future. These were papers in top journals, from reputable labs, which achieved landmark status with frequent citations. The consequences for cancer research are far-reaching.
[more inside]posted by VikingSword at 3:47 PM PST - 78 comments
Hundreds of musicians criss-cross the country daily on their way to the next gig. How do they deal with the boredom?
This wayposted by kenaldo at 2:28 PM PST - 65 comments
Will Self: Walking is political A century ago, 90% of Londoners' journeys under six miles were made on foot. Now we are alienated from the physical reality of our cities. Will Self on the importance of walking in the fight against corporate controlposted by fearfulsymmetry at 10:29 AM PST - 55 comments
From blimps to bugs, an explosion in aerial drones is transforming the way America fights and thinks about its wars. Predator drones, the Cessna-sized workhorses that have dominated unmanned flight since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, are by now a brand name, known and feared around the world. But far less known is the sheer size, variety and audaciousness of a rapidly expanding drone universe, along with the dilemmas that come with it.(via) [more inside]posted by AElfwine Evenstar at 9:07 AM PST - 66 comments
"We figured they’d cheat; they were Hezbollah, after all. But none of us—a team of four Western journalists—thought we’d be dodging military-grade flash bangs when we initiated this 'friendly' paintball match." Paintballing With Hezbollah.
posted by HumanComplex at 8:32 AM PST - 53 comments
March 29
Amazing Paper Sculptures. Brooklyn based artist
Lauren Clay "creates these three-dimensional sculptures out of papier-mâché and painted cut paper (among many other things) that go far beyond the limits of paper’s two-dimensionality."
posted by sweetkid at 6:24 PM PST - 5 comments
"NASA is one of the few institutions I know that can inspire five-year-olds. It sure inspired me, and with this endeavor, maybe we can inspire a few more youth to invent and explore." An undersea expendition funded by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos
has discovered the spent
rocket engines used to power
Apollo 11.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 2:17 PM PST - 59 comments
I was a member of a fraternity that asked pledges, in order to become a brother, to: swim in a kiddie pool of vomit, urine, fecal matter, semen and rotten food products; eat omelets made of vomit; chug cups of vinegar, which in one case caused a pledge to vomit blood; drink beer poured down fellow pledges' ass cracks... among other abuses.
A
sobering look into the world of Dartmouth College's fraternities.
Single page view.posted by Rumple at 11:56 AM PST - 232 comments
The Enduring Consequences of Unemployment. It is perhaps no surprise that "....workers who lost jobs during the recession of the early 1980s were making 20 percent less than their peers two decades later." Or that unemployment is also bad for your health.... "lA worker laid off at age 40 could expect to die at least a year sooner than his peers." What frames the issue starkly though is that unemployed people gradually lost the ability to read.
[more inside]posted by storybored at 10:54 AM PST - 83 comments
"I get up every morning at 5, go for a half-hour walk in the desert, come home and have a cup of coffee, sit down at the desk and ask myself what I would say if I were him, and what I would do if I were her. I think curiosity is actually a moral virtue. I think a person who is curious is slightly more moral than one who is not curious, because sometimes he enters into the skin of another. I think a curious person is even a better lover than one who is not curious. Even my political approach to the Palestinian question, for example, sprang from curiosity. I am not a Middle East expert or a historian or a strategist. I simply asked myself, at a very young age, what it would be like if I were one of them. So, that’s what I do − get up in the morning and ask myself: What if?" - Israeli writer
Amos Oz reflects on his life, on Israel, on writing, and discusses his newest work [more inside]posted by beisny at 9:15 AM PST - 4 comments
The
results of the
2012 Washington Post Peeps Diorama Contest are in. The winner:
Occupeep DC. Runners up:
Peepius Maximus,
What People Think Peeps Are (based on the popular
meme),
The Black Peep (based off of DC's
Black Cat music venue), and
Just Peeped (based off of the
2011 British Royal Wedding). In addition to the
finalists, check out
Peeps in Washington,
Political Peeps, the
full gallery of submissions that the Post received this year, and the winners from
2011,
2010,
2009,
2008, and
2007. (
Peepiously,
peepiouslier,
peepiousliest)
posted by schmod at 8:03 AM PST - 19 comments
Dutch astronaut and physician
André Kuipers brought his camera aboard the International Space Station and took some photos in his spare time, the results are breathtaking.
[more inside]posted by quin at 8:00 AM PST - 36 comments
25 years ago today, the professional wrestling boom sparked by the Captain Lou Albano/Cyndi Lauper "Rock 'n' Wrestling Connection" reached its zenith with
WrestleMania III - whose attendance record of 93,173 for a live indoor "sporting" event in North America stood until 2010. The match between "Macho Man" Randy Savage and Ricky "The Dragon" Steamboat is prized by aficionados as one of the greatest in wrestling history.
Look into the videoscope! [more inside]posted by Trurl at 5:03 AM PST - 73 comments
In 1982 the manga, Akira (
previously) , began its run. It would ultimately spawn a film that would lead the way for the growth of the anime medium outside of Japan. An attempted Americanized remake (
previouslyer) was in production before being ultimately
canceled.
The manga’s creator, Katsuhiro Otomo, in the meantime, had taken a 20 year break from long-form manga. It was recently announced that this break was coming to an end and that Otomo would be working on a
new long-form shonen series.
posted by sendai sleep master at 12:35 AM PST - 30 comments
March 28
But shouldn't consumers have some context to evaluate what they are viewing? Shampoo bottles and Tuna cans assure us that animals were unharmed. Shouldn't we know if porn actors are subject to out-of-control STD rates, or are forced to do things against their will? At a minimum, a Porn housekeeping seal of approval would tell us by, and for whom, the porn was made. It might make you think twice before downloading that random YouPorn video or chatting with a "horny Russian slut" at LiveJasmin.
Erika Christakis
proposes a Fair Trade label for pornography.
posted by Cash4Lead at 9:43 PM PST - 48 comments
Earlier this year, Steve Martin penned a loving tribute to Earl Scruggs,
published in New Yorker. "Some nights he had the stars of North Carolina shooting from his fingertips. Before him, no one had ever played the banjo like he did. After him, everyone played the banjo like he did, or at least tried." A few minutes ago, Steve Martin offered a rare somber tweet: "Earl Scruggs, the most important banjo player who ever lived,
has passed on." One could do worse than spend some time
watching and listening to Earl Scruggs perform.
posted by spock at 5:19 PM PST - 103 comments
A potentially dangerous situation is developing off the coast of Scotland. An off-shore drilling platform is leaking substantial quantities of gas contaminated with hydrogen sulphide. Much as here, the comments thread is as interesting as the post at
The Oil Drum itself.
posted by indices at 4:26 PM PST - 67 comments
KEXP 90.3 FM is a Seattle, WA-based radio station, officially "a service of University of Washington," but it's more complex than that.
The first University of Washington radio station started broadcasting in 1952. Five decades,
a few station organizational shifts, plus three call letter and frequency changes later,
KEXP was (re)born in 2001. Along the way, the station spread the sound of 1990s Seattle indie rock, started
streaming "CD quality" MP3 audio of their broadcast in 2000, and they have an ever-growing collection of recordings of live in-station performances, including
over 2,000 videos on YouTube.
[more inside]posted by filthy light thief at 1:10 PM PST - 35 comments
WebGL, the 3D technology that's associated with HTML5, continues to make giant strides in diverse areas:
Exploration of human anatomy: Zygote Body, released yesterday, and BioDigital Human, the successors to Google Body (previously)
World Visualisation: WebGL Earth, Nokia's 3D Map of the entire earth (previously). WorldWeather and The WebGL Globe, a Google project that displays all kinds of data. Also: Where Does My Tweet Go?
Games: browser ports of Team Fortess 2, Quake 3 and Rage (a developer’s diary). SkidRacer, an entire game in WebGL. Mini Mass Effect (not yet playable, sadly).
Musicals: Lights.
Tools: 3Notes.js, a visual scene editor. Developer documentation. More resources. [more inside]posted by Bora Horza Gobuchul at 12:41 PM PST - 27 comments
Born in 1942, Colin Fulcher was better known – though not by much – as
Barney Bubbles, who worked prolifically from the 1960s until his suicide in 1983. A
graphic artist, designer, art and video director who preferred to remain behind the scenes (he only rarely signed his work, and when he did, often used obscure pseudonyms), Bubbles' revolutionary and innovative practice encompassed
record sleeves, band posters and videos for
Hawkwind (and their friend/collaborator
Michael Moorcock),
Nick Lowe,
Elvis Costello,
Ian Dury and the Blockheads (including their iconic
logo),
Billy Bragg,
The Specials and
Depeche Mode. A retrosective of his work,
Reasons To Be Cheerful, and its associated
blog has a comprehensive overview of Bubbles' diverse body of work. Designer and artist John Coulthart
offers up his
perspective; Creative Review
get behind his creative processes; a new Radio 4 documentary,
In Search of Barney Bubbles , covers his work and often troubled life.
posted by Len at 11:04 AM PST - 10 comments
No line of unlicensed Star Wars figures is as sought after as the Turkish line known as Uzay.
STARS WAR UZAY set includes: Stormtroper, Imperial Stormtoper, Head Man, Chewbacca (Monkey Man), Artoo-Detoo, Imperial T E Fighter Pilot and See-Threep.
posted by timshel at 9:25 AM PST - 28 comments
The Duel - An amazing-stop motion Lego skirmish relying almost exclusively on practical effects.
posted by quin at 7:55 AM PST - 16 comments
Twenty-four years after the
original,
Maxis (sans
Wil Wright) is rebooting
SimCity. RPS'
preview states that, thanks to the bottom-up approach of the
Glassbox engine, each entity "...will be its own discrete software agent, running its own little simulation of its own little life." In their own
preview, IGN state that having animations reflect behind-the-scenes processes will "[give] the players tangible signals that they need to step in..." However, is there trouble in (simulated) paradise
already?
posted by griphus at 7:04 AM PST - 114 comments
Do you know
The Treniers? Back in the 40s and 50s, they straddled the lines between jump blues, swing, early rock'n'roll, jazz dance, hep jive and comedy.
They were a whole hella fun, and they happened to be the backing band for what must be the best dance performance
Jerry Lewis ever gave the world. That particular clip, BTW, from a Dean Martin/Jerry Lewis "Colgate Comedy Hour" in 1954, is purported to be the first rock'n'roll performance on national television, and it may well have been.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 2:53 AM PST - 14 comments
March 27
"Hilton Kramer, whose clear, incisive style and combative temperament made him one of the most influential critics of his era, both at
The New York Times, where he was the chief art critic for almost a decade, and at The New Criterion, which he edited from its founding in 1982, died early Tuesday in Harpswell, Me. He was 84."
[more inside]posted by anewnadir at 11:35 PM PST - 14 comments
The Winter Of The Beard [1h47m] is a documentary which chronicles the lives of nine men across six months.
Each was provided a video camera and weekly interview questions to document his own experience. The resulting 600 hours of intimate footage revealed a group of men traversing the same rite of passage from disparate vantage points. Throughout the process, the men told stories from their pasts, shared likes and dislikes, and confessed personal fears and aspirations. They laughed and cried, hid and came alive behind their beards. The tireless taping captured bad days and good ones, and it is in this framework that the individual stories stand out and the beards fade into the background. From a son dealing with his father's descent into Alzheimer's, to financial and marital struggles, to the birth of a child, THE WINTER OF THE BEARD [trailer, 2m58s] reveals the trials and tribulations of what it means to drastically alter one's appearance and otherwise go on living life. [more inside]posted by hippybear at 9:47 PM PST - 30 comments
Most of us reading on the blue lived through at least a portion of it. Forty-plus years of tension between the world's two superpowers and their allies. That's right: The Cold War.
Then, they
made a documentary. Aired on CNN in 1998, and never released on DVD,
the 24 episode, 20 hour series features tons of archival footage, along with many interviews with individuals directly involved at some of the highest levels.
You might not be able to see it on DVD, but you can watch the full series on Youtube, starting with
Part 1: Comrades (1917-1945).posted by symbioid at 6:36 PM PST - 78 comments
"At Roc the Mic, Stargate carries on a glorious and disappearing New York tradition that stretches back to the Brill Building days of the late fifties and early sixties, when songwriting teams such as Gerry Goffin and Carole King, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, and Ellie Greenwich and Jeff Barry cranked out hits for the top pop acts of the day; and further back still, to the nineteen-tens and twenties, when the Broadway-to-Sixth Avenue reach of West Twenty-eighth Street, known as Tin Pan Alley, for the sound of pianos coming from the upper floors, was the center of the music-publishing industry. With their managers, Blacksmith and Danny D., orchestrating demand, Stargate has become one of the very few writer-producers whom labels approach when they absolutely must have a hit single, or a “bullet,” as Hermansen calls it, to market an album with." The New Yorker - The hitmakers behind Rihannaposted by beisny at 1:09 PM PST - 31 comments
The Media Map: Who's Reading What And Where: [Forbes] We worked with Bitly and its data on millions of Web clicks to find the most influential media outlets in the country. This map shows which news sources are read and shared at above-average levels by state. Roll over and click on the media outlets below to see where they influence readers and which stories were big hits. Updated monthly to reflect the latest trends.
More about the map.posted by Fizz at 12:51 PM PST - 19 comments
What do John McCain, Rick Santorum, and George Voinovich have in common? They have all been seated at the Senate's
candy desk throughout their careers.
[more inside]posted by Bukvoed at 12:48 PM PST - 35 comments
March 26
In December 1974, there was a memorial service at St. James Episcopal Church on Madison Avenue for Louise Fitzhugh, author and illustrator of Harriet the Spy, the groundbreaking children's novel that has sold 2.5 million copies since its publication in 1964. [more inside]posted by Trurl at 6:25 PM PST - 45 comments
MAIL SUPREMACY - How the Daily Mail Conquered England. 'In January, its Web arm, Mail Online, surpassed that of the New York Times as the most visited newspaper site in the world, drawing fifty-two million unique visitors a month. The Mail is the most powerful newspaper in Great Britain. A middle-market tabloid, with a daily readership of four and a half million, it reaches four times as many people as the Guardian, while being taken more seriously than the one paper that outsells it, the Sun. The Mail’s closest analogue in the American media is perhaps Fox News.'
[more inside]posted by VikingSword at 4:15 PM PST - 64 comments
" Thus in today’s China one confronts the paradox of a communist regime that is at ideological loggerheads with left-leaning intellectuals, but which finds pro-Western, liberal intellectuals on the whole quite congenial." Richard Wolin is
Dreaming In Chinese...posted by artof.mulata at 10:37 AM PST - 12 comments
Why Won't They Listen? Haidt diverges from other psychologists who have analyzed the left’s electoral failures. The usual argument of these psycho-pundits is that conservative politicians manipulate voters’ neural roots — playing on our craving for authority, for example — to trick people into voting against their interests. But Haidt treats electoral success as a kind of evolutionary fitness test. He figures that if voters like Republican messages, there’s something in Republican messages worth liking. He chides psychologists who try to “explain away” conservatism, treating it as a pathology. Conservatism thrives because it fits how people think, and that’s what validates it. Workers who vote Republican aren’t fools. In Haidt’s words, they’re “voting for their moral interests.”posted by shivohum at 9:57 AM PST - 53 comments
"Herman Cain's
latest crazy ad has launched (so to speak), and features a bunny rabbit which represents 'small business' that is hurled into the air with a catapult and then blown to bits with a rifle.
It's a follow-up to his
goldfish snuff film."
*posted by ericb at 8:46 AM PST - 106 comments
Bo Xilai, former Party Secretary of Chongqing and current Politburo member, was
recently sacked by Chinese leadership. He is well known for his economic success at growing Chongqing, and his flamboyant leadership style which included the revival of “Red Culture”[
previously].
[more inside]posted by HabeasCorpus at 7:42 AM PST - 20 comments
Kefirpedia aims to be the authority of all things kefir-related on the Internet, using evidence-based research (not just hype!) and community collaboration for know-how and recipes.
posted by Deathalicious at 5:14 AM PST - 15 comments
The New York Times isn't known for trenchant sports analysis, but in this article, Mike Tanier throws down stats to back up the problem behind the Jet's Tebow acquisition: Tim Tebow, though a "gifted athlete," lacks
passing mechanics.
posted by Gordion Knott at 4:56 AM PST - 78 comments
March 25
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is well-known for having been a child prodigy. A previously unknown composition of his, dated c. 1767, when he would have been 11 years old,
(PDF of score) had it's
premiere earlier this week.
[more inside]posted by bardophile at 2:48 PM PST - 32 comments
You may have heard that they made a movie of the
The Hunger Games. While others discuss its dystopian vision of a barbaric future America, we will concern ourselves with something more important:
the clothes.
[more inside]posted by Trurl at 1:43 PM PST - 84 comments
For years, my self-education was stupid and wasteful. I learned by consuming blog posts, Wikipedia articles, classic texts, podcast episodes, popular books, video lectures, peer-reviewed papers, Teaching Company courses, and Cliff's Notes. How inefficient!
[...]
What if we could compile a list of the best textbooks on every subject? That would be extremely useful.
Less Wrong, a community dedicated to rationality, is compiling a list of
The Best Textbooks on Every Subject.
posted by Foci for Analysis at 11:59 AM PST - 49 comments
HBO Documentary: Child of Rage: (1989) "Story of Beth, a six-year-old child who had faced the loss of a mother, physical abuse, and sexual abuse all before the age of 19 months. Both Beth and her younger brother Jonathan were put up for adoption. They were adopted by a minister and his wife. This unsuspecting couple quickly learned that something was extremely wrong with Beth.
This terrifying and disturbing documentary traces Beth as she goes through therapy in Colorado. The video explains that Beth suffers from
Reactive Attachment Disorder.
[Via]."
posted by Fizz at 10:45 AM PST - 44 comments
Two year old William Stokkebroe clears the dance floor and impresses everyone with
his jive.
posted by gman at 10:26 AM PST - 15 comments
"Is cinema a language about to get lost, an art about to die?" [Vimeo] During the 1982 Cannes Film Festival, Wim Wenders set up a static camera in room 666 of the Hotel Martinez and provided selected film directors (inc. Spielberg, Godard, Fassbinder & Herzog) a list of questions to answer concerning the future of cinema. Each director was given one 16 mm reel (approximately 11 minutes) to answer.
posted by urbanwhaleshark at 9:08 AM PST - 20 comments
I kept going out with the rescue workers and one day we came upon this scene that was so sad that the rescue workers gave me a vest to cross the police line. I shot the scene a bunch of different ways, but the way that worked best was just showing it from the front. These people were killed by one single bullet. The woman is far into her pregnancy. The hit man came in from the left-hand side of the car and fired a bullet into the man’s head when they were embracing and killed both of them.
The violence is really hard to show in a way that is humane. It is almost impossible to give any kind of dignity to the people that have died, because of how horribly they have been maimed. Taking pictures of those things, you feel like you are supporting what the narcos are doing because you are spreading out their message of horror. So I really became obsessed with making a picture that was intimate – while still showing violence – and encompassed humanity and dignity. I wanted to give these people a story.posted by barnacles at 7:11 AM PST - 7 comments
March 24
In the sixty-odd years since their composition, the Four Last Songs have acquired in many people’s minds an unassailable status as simply the most beautiful music known to them, to be listened to in a dimly lit room and a state of rapt meditation, surrendering to the extraordinary spell of profound, other-worldly calm that they cast. This is not surprising. They were, indeed, the last things of any significance that Strauss wrote, between May and September 1948, at the age of eighty-four. (previously) [more inside]posted by Trurl at 1:32 PM PST - 11 comments
But this season, PBS chose to move Independent Lens and P.O.V. to a new time slot -- 10 pm, ET, on Thursday nights. This may not seem like such a big deal at first, until you know that on Thursday nights stations can broadcast any program they like in prime time, whether it's part of the PBS schedule or not. Many take the opportunity to offers viewers locally produced programs, British sitcoms or reruns of Antiques Roadshow. As a result, episodes of the independent documentary series can now be run anywhere local stations choose to fit them in (here in New York, WNET airs the films at 11 p.m. on Sundays) or maybe not at all.
Bill Moyers writes an open letter to PBS about scheduling changes which have ruined PBS as Tuesday night destination for documentary television.
posted by hippybear at 10:50 AM PST - 17 comments
March 23
Organized irreligion! This weekend ,
Washington, D.C. will be invaded by the voice of reason. A free rally featuring
Tim Minchin,
Paul Provenza,
Richard Dawkins,
Eddie Izzard,
Adam Savage,
James Randi,
Bad Religion, and many others, in what is anticipated to be the largest gathering of non-believers in America.
"If we don't organize, we will be the only ones not organized. Religion will be organized. We won't be organized. That means we lose... and they win."posted by markkraft at 11:17 PM PST - 489 comments
Where is the physician outrage? Metafilter's own
jscalzi played host to an anonymous post by an outraged physician who put forth a five point plan for civil disobedience in the face of legislators demanding that physicians prescribe transvaginal ultrasounds to women who may choose to abort.
posted by ChrisR at 10:57 PM PST - 81 comments
Maria Dmitrienko, a member of the Kazakh national shooting team, won a competition in Kuwait. At the medal ceremony, the organizers played
the fake Kazakh national anthem from the movie "Borat", which praises Kazakhstan for its potassium exports and claims that it has the cleanest prostitutes in the region.
[more inside]posted by Chocolate Pickle at 5:49 PM PST - 40 comments
From Dan Lewis, the same guy who writes
Now I Know, the daily e-newsletter of interesting stories
("Every morning, I share something interesting I’ve learned over the last few weeks. It began in June of 2010. As of January 1, 2012, 35,000 people are subscribed." Previously. Archives.), comes the nascent
Fact and a Photo tumblr. Already, there's a picture of a swimming pig.
posted by not_on_display at 2:22 PM PST - 9 comments
If you’re elected president,” asked one guest at a 2007 hedge fund managers event for Obama, “what will you do to the taxes on the people in this room?” “I’ll raise them,” Obama fired back. The managers, who share social circles and an educational background with Obama, approved of his style. These days, however, the bloom is off the rose. In
The Big Split, Alec MacGillis investigates the souring of a 20 year relationship between Democrats and high finance, and surmises that it's the administration's rhetoric more than its policy that has upset the masters of the financial universe.
posted by the mad poster! at 11:50 AM PST - 83 comments
Can
your Partners in Health co-founder college president World Bank president do
this?
posted by lukemeister at 9:00 AM PST - 36 comments
The Sweatbox "the documentary Disney doesn't want you to see" (95-minute SLYT), was made when Sting wrote songs for "Kingdom of the Sun" and his filmmaker wife Trudie Styler got insider access to the production. What? You say there was no Disney movie "Kingdom of the Sun"? I meant "The Emperor's New Groove". Rarely has the decline of an Institution been better documented.
This may or may not be Disney property and may or may not be taken down any minute, but it has survived on YouTube for over 48 hours after getting blogged-about a dozen times.posted by oneswellfoop at 8:11 AM PST - 97 comments
Artist Doug Aiken's projection installation,
Song 1 on the façade of the donut-shaped Hirshhorn Museum in DC opened last night.
The work is a looped video installation of many people singing "I Only Have Eyes for You." It's very atmospheric and finally brings some art that enlivens the somewhat strange shape of the museum's exterior.
I heard him speak and then got to see the installation. It's beautiful. If you're in DC definitely come down to the National Mall after dusk (projection runs nightly until midnight).
posted by Taken Outtacontext at 8:11 AM PST - 6 comments
The Turkana Basin Institute and the Kenya National Museums are digitizing their fossil collections. Look around their
virtual laboratory and collections and get up close and personal with some of paleoanthropology's most important fossils.
There are over 20,000 specimens that are housed in the National Museum of Kenya in Nairobi as well as in the laboratories of the Turkana Basin Institute to the east and west of Lake Turkana. These range in age from 28 million years to several thousand years in age and have been recovered over the past six decades of exploration of the fossil rich deposits around Lake Turkana in northern Kenya.posted by ChuraChura at 6:43 AM PST - 3 comments
Bill Moyers' scathing 1987 special report on our
secret government.(SLYT)(via)(trigger warning: pictures and video of dead bodies) It includes an in-depth look at the Iran-Contra Affair and much, much more. Note: sound cuts out for a couple of minutes during the intro because of copyrighted song. Sound returns around 3:20.
posted by AElfwine Evenstar at 5:23 AM PST - 19 comments
March 22
'HOME' an exhibition by Ian 'Kid Zoom' Strange In October 2011, after three years living in New York, artist Ian Strange [
Kid Zoom] returned to Australia to create a major new installation work housed in Cockatoo Island's prestigious Turbine Hall. The exhibition featured a full-scale reproduction of his childhood home and a film documenting the violent destruction of three Holden commodores.
This video documents what resulted.
posted by Freen at 2:29 PM PST - 15 comments
Fresh tofu in Japan is far better than it is anywhere else, and the tofu in Kyoto is generally held to be the best in the country. This is generally attributed to the skill, refined court and/or temple-influenced culture and the quality of the local water. ... During my week in Kyoto, I was able to pursue one family business’s vision of what tofu should be from beginning to end. [more inside]posted by Trurl at 1:20 PM PST - 30 comments
/dev/sigh :: user-contributed scenes from the sometimes frustrating world of software and web development.
posted by milquetoast at 11:23 AM PST - 43 comments
A great deal of poetry was written about the Great War, much of it by soldiers in the trenches. Two period books of World War I poetry and poets are
The Muse in Arms and
For remembrance, available in a variety of formats at archive.org. There is also
The First World War Digital Poetry Archive which mostly has things from the most well-known authors, but many of these are available as scans of the original documents. (The interface is a little iffy on the DPA; click on a person, then use the search for "any poem" to get a full listing of what's available)
posted by curious nu at 11:19 AM PST - 9 comments
Imagine one person in America directed Star Wars, the original Battlestar Galactica, Planet of the Apes, Alien and Blade Runner -- basically, all the big sci-fi hits except Star Trek. In Japan, that man existed, and his name was
Noburo Ishiguro. He directed
Super Dimension Fortress Macross (which became the first part of
Robotech),
Space Battleship Yamato (called
Star Blazers in the U.S.), the classics
Super Dimension Century Orguss and
Legend of the Galactic Heroes, and more. Basically, he had his hand in almost all the major sci-fi anime of the '70s and early '80s except Gundam...
While many of his works were subjected to
questionable translation practices (such as changing any mention of sake to "
with water from a favourite spring on Earth" in Yamato) when they were adapted for Western audiences in the 1980s, the popularity of his works helped lay the foundation for anime fandom as we know it today.
On Wednesday, Studio Nue co-founder Haruka Takachiho
reported that Noboru Ishiguro passed away at age 73.
(Via Topless Robot & Anime News Network)posted by radwolf76 at 8:51 AM PST - 62 comments
The
XKCD Holistic Browser allows you to type in a web address and get sent to one typed by someone else. (NB: Results may be NSFW or even outright harmful. Take suitable precautions.)
posted by jedicus at 6:54 AM PST - 101 comments
When artist Troy Gua wanted a new project to cheer himself up with, he hit on the idea of making a tribute to his favorite musician.
Le Petit Prince, a 1/6 scale doll of The Purple One, was born.
posted by BoringPostcards at 6:14 AM PST - 19 comments
March 21
Moments before the annual St. Patrick's Day Parade in the small town of Padua, Minnesota was about to begin, a truck fire broke out at the end of the block. Fortunately, the all-volunteer firefighting crew from nearby Sedan, Minnesota was on hand to celebrate their 125th anniversary, and to raise money to pay for their new fire hall and truck. One of their members was set to drive the new fire truck in the parade, and the others were on a float, dressed in drag to entertain the crowd.
Firemen in Drag Put Out Truck Fire.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 9:14 PM PST - 44 comments
60 years ago, two moments in musical history took place in Cleveland, Ohio: The first, being the original Moondog Coronation Ball, hosted by disc jockey Alan "Moondog" Freed; the event was hailed as the first ever rock concert, and continues in spirit with a
commemorative anniversary performance featuring Mickey Dolenz of the Monkees, Sam Moore, and Creedence Clearwater Revisited.
The second event was the subsequent riot which broke loose that evening, when a printing error on the venue's tickets caused twice the audience's standing capacity to be sold. Frustrated and impatient concertgoers surged into the building, which led to cancellation, a formal apology from Freed, and the cementing of the 50's music scene as dangerous and unruly.
posted by Smart Dalek at 2:49 PM PST - 5 comments
The AV Club's Todd Van der Werf enters the Dungeon "I’ve been at this for three days straight, and I need to start getting back to my everyday life, to start settling back into my real role as a TV critic with -3 dexterity. I go through the motions of playing the good guy, of standing in front of doors as we open them, in case they’re booby-trapped. This, of course, is how I end up getting splashed with copious amounts of acid, which begins to eat away at my health. (“It’s not a second-edition game unless there’s a room full of acid,” Brett says, and everyone agrees.)
Instantly, I’m into it."
posted by Sebmojo at 2:18 PM PST - 52 comments
Could you run a marathon without training? [bbc.co.uk] "London Marathon entrants have a month of training left for what’s seen as one of the greatest feats of human endurance. Yet Irish twins Jedward claim they completed the Los Angeles marathon without any training. So is it possible to run one on a whim?"
posted by Fizz at 12:08 PM PST - 112 comments
"The calculator itself is just over 250x200x100 blocks. It contains 2 6-digit BCD number selectors, 2 BCD-to-binary decoders, 3 binary-to-BCD decoders, 6 BCD adders and subtractors, a 20 bit (output) multiplier, 10 bit divider, a memory bank and additional circuitry for the graphing function." Yes, someone built a
working scientific calculator, in Minecraft.
posted by jbickers at 9:44 AM PST - 46 comments
How One Response to a Reddit Query Became a Big Budget Flick: "Now, in response to The_Quiet_Earth’s question about time-traveling marines, Erwin started typing. He posted his answer in a series of comments in the thread. Within an hour, he was an online celebrity. Within three hours, a film producer had reached out to him. Within two weeks, he was offered a deal to write a movie based on his Reddit comments. Within two months, he had taken a leave from his job to become a full-time Hollywood screenwriter."
[more inside]posted by marcusesses at 8:32 AM PST - 163 comments
Too Smart to Fail : "A résumé filled with grievous errors in the period 1996–2006 is not only a non-problem for further advances in the world of consensus; it is something of a prerequisite. Our intellectual powers that be not only forgive the mistakes; they require them. You must have been wrong back then in order to have a chance to be taken seriously today; only by having gotten things wrong can you demonstrate that you are trustworthy, a member of the team. (Those who got things right all along, on the other hand, might be dubbed “premature market skeptics”—people who doubted the consensus before the consensus acknowledged it was all right to doubt.)" —Thomas Frank,
The Bafflerposted by enn at 8:23 AM PST - 44 comments
Mobile Frame Zero: Rapid Attack is the 10th anniversary revision of
Mechaton, a fast-paced table-top game of giant robot combat. Giant robots made of LEGO!
[more inside]posted by Idler King at 7:53 AM PST - 12 comments
Arrested for speaking out! When does an "open-palm pat on the shoulder" become assault? When it's the Vice President's shoulder, that's when.
The Supreme Court of the United States (
previously) will today hear arguments in the matter of
Reichle v. Howards.
[more inside]posted by gauche at 6:48 AM PST - 40 comments
March 20
Ambient bus arrival monitor from hacked Linksys WRT54GL. Transport for London has a wonderful service called
Countdown that can give live bus arrival times. For example, here's a page showing live buses passing
No. 10 Downing St. Underlying this is a simple JSON API that, while not public, seems to be usable by the average programmer. So with its details deciphered (hardly hard since the web site uses the API) John Graham-Cumming set about building an ambient bus monitor into a model London bus. The idea is to glance at the model bus and see the times of the next two real buses you're likely to want to catch, and know when to leave the house.
posted by netbros at 4:01 PM PST - 35 comments
TIGsource is a blog about indie video games that also has a very active forum community of both amateur and professional indie game designers/programmers/artists. About two months ago
one of the forum members (Daid) whipped up a tool to display the art images of a particular thread so he could find something, and it turns out it's a pretty great thing just to browse for its own sake, which you can do
here. Updated once a day and, obviously, image intensive. [
previous tigsource mentions]
posted by curious nu at 2:53 PM PST - 5 comments
"Andrea Yates'
story tracks so many of the themes we talk about all the time today. The role of religion in family life. The cognitive dissonance of so many marriages. Lingering stigmas about mental illness, especially as they relate to postpartum depression. The Yates trial was a big deal 10 years ago — even though it was overshadowed by the fallout from 9/11." The Atlantic
looks back at the Andrea Yates case and
how she's doing now.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 7:25 AM PST - 145 comments
"The Secret Gestural Prehistory of Mobile Devices is cultural anthropology. It seeks to recover those moments of intuitive prehensile dexterity, when the famous and the ordinary alike felt the unconscious desire to occupy their hands for an as yet unknown purpose. Like Roy Neary's obsession with the image of Devil's Tower in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), this gesture was vague, uncanny and compelling. It is the intimation in images of a gestural second nature to come."
[more inside]posted by taz at 5:50 AM PST - 16 comments
"This guy looks like he’s up to no good, or he’s on drugs or something. It’s raining and he’s just walking around, looking about," Zimmerman told dispatchers. The dispatcher, hearing heavy breathing on the phone, asked Zimmerman: "Are you following him?" "Yeah," Zimmerman said.
"Okay, we don’t need you to do that," the dispatcher responded.
On February 26, 17 year-old Trayvon Martin was killed by a 28 year-old man named George Zimmerman in Sanford, Florida. Police did not arrest Zimmerman; under
Florida's Stand Your Ground law Zimmerman was, according to the local police, acting in self-defense as Martin attacked him in his role as neighborhood watch captain.
However, this is not the story that emerges from newly released 911 tapes - rather, the picture that emerges is of Zimmerman as aggressor and Martin as a scared kid, trying to run away. Ta-Nehisi Coates
has been writing about the case, and now
the FBI and Department of Justice are now investigating.
Previously.posted by (Arsenio) Hall and (Warren) Oates at 4:53 AM PST - 1571 comments
March 19
Why don't you like Community? "Community isn’t a hit under the usual means, but it’s a big fish in a new TV comedy ecosystem, one where the way you make money isn’t by attracting the largest audience, but the most passionate one. " A point-counterpoint from the Onion AV Club.
posted by Sebmojo at 4:32 PM PST - 127 comments
NEO Scavenger is a hex-based, turn-based scavenging/survival/mystery RPG. Dig through abandoned buildings! Punch a looter to death! Get eaten by a Dogman! Contract cholera! Die of cholera! Flash-based browser game, under active development; the current demo lets you explore the landscape and play with the game's mechanics at length.
[more inside]posted by cortex at 4:25 PM PST - 23 comments
About 2 miles into the park... things start to get strange. A forbidding padlocked wrought-iron gate, surrounded by a low lying stone wall sits nestled on the edge of the trail.... Strange rusted debris starts to appear on the side of the paths. What looks like an old water filtration system, broken pieces of farm equipment, half buried sinks, strange concrete slabs with graffiti . A lovely little steam appears and makes delightful background noises, lizards and birds scatter about your feet. And then you see it. A burned-out overgrown concrete building completely covered with graffiti. Cartoon of Hitler? Check. Declaration of undying teenage love? Check.... The bunker of the building is exposed and filled with trash; a metal cage sits menacingly in the corner, and outside a series of stone steps wind up to what seems to have once been a sustenance garden. The steps then continue all the way to the top of the canyon (3,000 steps in all) and ghosts of America Nazis patrolling the wilds fill your head. Baby, we aren't at the Grove anymore... We are at the Los Angeles Nazi Compound! Well, it's actually
the ruins of a small community built by Nazi sympathizers, in
the hills outside of greater Los Angeles.
[more inside]posted by filthy light thief at 1:40 PM PST - 50 comments
Alphabet Soup: Restaurant names are becoming more complicated and enigmatic. Christopher Hirst asks the experts what’s going on.
posted by Fizz at 11:43 AM PST - 52 comments
Religion and Presidential Elections: (video from the C-SPAN Video Library) On March 13, 2012, panelists at Boston College discussed Mormonism and the role of religion in the context of the 2012 Republican primaries and American politics generally. The video is about an hour long.
Kristine Haglund
comments about the discussion on By Common Consent.
posted by The World Famous at 11:24 AM PST - 39 comments
French hospitals have rooms where medical students (
internes) can rest, lunch and vent off steam between calls, but these
salles de garde are not your usual staff room. They are brightly decorated with lively mural paintings showing the current
internes, the doctors and other hospital staff engaging in very (very) explicit sex acts. The frescos are done by the students themselves or commissioned from local artists, and are replaced on a regular basis. Here are some choice examples (sorted by hospital):
Ambroise Paré,
Cochin,
Widal,
Louis Mourier,
Saint-Louis,
Saint-Vincent-de-Paul,
Institut Gustave Roussy (
ibid) (
ibid),
Lariboisière,
Robert Debré,
Saint-Cloud,
Tenon.
Many other images can be seen on the
website of an association of former internes. [
Totally NSFW unless you're a medical student training in France]
[more inside]posted by elgilito at 10:40 AM PST - 203 comments
Role Playing Game pioneer Mohammed Al Rahman Barker
died last week (PDF). Inspired through playing
dungeons and Dragons, M. A. R. Barker created what is possibly the world's second RPG,
Empire of the Petal Throne, set in the world of Tekumel, a world he would continue to keep building for the rest of his life.
[more inside]posted by MartinWisse at 5:35 AM PST - 28 comments
March 18
In Mexico, extortion is a booming offshoot of drug war. 'From mom-and-pop businesses to mid-size construction projects to some of Mexico's wealthiest citizens, almost every segment of the economy and society has been subjected to extortion schemes, authorities and records indicate. Even priests aren't safe. Extortionists have shut entire school systems, crippled real estate developments, driven legions of entrepreneurs into hiding or out of the country.'
[more inside]posted by VikingSword at 6:32 PM PST - 35 comments
'These plants, native only to Sumatra, bloom very infrequently (only 140 times in cultivation since 1889) and then only for one or two nights before collapsing. Until it opens, there’s no noticeable odor. After that there’s little doubt where the name “Corpse Flower” comes from.'
Tonight, Cornell University's Titan Arum is expected to bloom.
Live feed here.
(
previous blooms on the blue)
posted by womprat78 at 2:54 PM PST - 51 comments
On June 3, 1961, a poor drifter named Clarence Gideon was seen getting into a cab with a bottle of wine, some smokes, and some cash in his pockets as he left the Bay Harbor Pool Room. Police had been called to investigate a broken cigarette machine and promptly found and arrested Gideon. Unable to afford an attorney and forced by the trial judge to represent himself, he was convicted and sentenced to five years in prison. After having his petition for a writ of Habeus Corpus denied by the Florida Supreme Court, he petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court.
49 years ago today, the court ruled unanimously in his favor, setting a lasting, fundamental precedent. His case was sent back down to Florida, and with proper representation, he was acquitted.
posted by disillusioned at 2:39 PM PST - 51 comments
Blogger-writer Andrew Sullivan proudly attended Obama's latest state dinner for Cameron
with his husband, in an open display of growing acceptance of same-sex marriage possibly by the powers-to-be. Michael Shaw's always-insightful BagNews (but not MS himself in this post) notes that there
were 3 bearded men in the photograph.
posted by growabrain at 12:17 PM PST - 60 comments
Record Shops is a new web site that's attempting to list all record shops world wide. Allows you to rate/review shops you're familiar with and scope out the scene in places you're travelling to.
posted by You Should See the Other Guy at 10:36 AM PST - 36 comments
W. C. Fields appeared in the Earl Carroll Vanities in 1928. George Mann, part of the dance team of Barto & Mann, was on the same bill, and
captured Fields in
The Mormon's Prayers.
posted by Ideefixe at 10:22 AM PST - 13 comments
Surfing at Byron Bay: Jorgelina "Lina" Reyero shows off the beauty of Wategos Beach at Byron Bay, Australia with a camera mounted to her surfboard.
posted by quin at 9:31 AM PST - 39 comments
In June 1979, I left Paris, returning home to San Francisco without saying farewell to Barthes. Why advertise my failure? I left Paris without fulfilling my reason for coming. His letter arrived in October. Barthes explained that he was retiring from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes at the end of the year. If I wished to complete my thesis under his direction, then I would have to have it written and in his hands by the 15th of December. No extension was possible. The date was a deadline. "A vous de jouer," he wrote. "Your move."
-
Deadline [pdf] by Stewart Lindh, Roland Barthes' last doctoral student, is an account of how he wrote his Ph.D. thesis.
posted by Kattullus at 9:31 AM PST - 28 comments
Welcome to the world of Britain's working poor. The Rowleys belong to a section of society not much mentioned in ministerial and media dispatches. They are neither the very wealthy affected by the 50p tax nor the "squeezed middle" expressing anxiety about child benefit and this week's budget; nor are the Rowleys representative of the long-term unemployed or one of the 120,000 "troubled families" in which the government is investing £448m over the next three years.
[more inside]posted by modernnomad at 5:34 AM PST - 105 comments
March 17
John Demjanjuk, a Ukrainian immigrant to the United States and later accused and convicted of serving in the Nazi SS as a concentration camp guard,
has died.
posted by downing street memo at 9:56 PM PST - 42 comments
Mass Effect 3, a
blockbuster video game (previously:
1,
2), and no stranger to controversy, is encountering controversy of a different sort over the series ending. Some fans feel it is incomplete and lacks closure, over 90% by some polls. It opens up interesting questions, such as: how are video games different than other media? Do consumers of video games have a reasonable right to ask for another ending, or is it akin to asking for modifications to the Mona Lisa? Many spoilers inside.
[more inside]posted by brool at 6:27 PM PST - 260 comments
"It was hot as blazes as we tore through the south side, pulling up at lights all the people laughing at the white kids doing their little dance in the car." John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats performs '
The Sign,' by Ace of Base, interspersed with a story about the song and hand-signal dancing.
posted by kaibutsu at 12:08 PM PST - 29 comments
Fans of BBC series Planet Earth will once again be thrilled by the power of nature in HD as Discovery Channel airs the new series
Frozen Planet, made by the BBC Natural History Unit, which created the original series.
Entertainment Weekly has a lengthy interview with the series producer and director about
Frozen Planet and the making of the series. The series premieres on Discovery Channel on March 18 at 8pm.
posted by hippybear at 8:28 AM PST - 33 comments
"The Detroit metropolitan area is covered with freeways. Ever freeway you could possible imagine has been built. And they have solved the problem that they identified, which was congestion. The city of Detroit doesn’t really have a problem with congestion anymore. That’s the least of their problems".
How demolishing freeways is reviving American cities. [via][bonus]posted by unSane at 6:00 AM PST - 83 comments
Extracts from Escape From Camp 14 -
How one man escaped from a North Korean prison camp. There was torture, starvation, betrayals and executions, but to Shin In Geun, Camp 14 – a prison for the political enemies of North Korea – was home. Then one day came the chance to flee…posted by fearfulsymmetry at 5:56 AM PST - 25 comments
Earth in perspective:
- Stratocam takes the most beautiful landscape satellite photographs from Google Maps, as voted on by visitors, and switches them every few seconds, with a fullscreen mode.
- ChronoZoom is an interactive, zoomable HTML5 timeline of the entire history of the universe, from the Big Bang to Homo Sapiens, with embedded video and lectures.
posted by Bora Horza Gobuchul at 1:55 AM PST - 10 comments
March 16
How Three Germans Are Cloning the Web
"Launched out of a loft in New York City’s Garment District last June, Fab had sales of $20 million in its first six months and is on track to earn $100 million in 2012....Six months after Fab launched, it was knocked off. An e-commerce design site called Bamarang opened for business in Germany, the U.K., France, Australia, and Brazil...
Bamarang is the creation of Oliver, Marc, and Alexander Samwer, a trio of German brothers who have a wildly successful business model: Find a promising Internet business, in the U.S., and clone it internationally. Since starting their first dot-clone in 1999, a German version of EBay, they’ve duplicated Airbnb, eHarmony, Pinterest, and other high-profile businesses. In total, they’ve launched more than 100 companies."
[SLYBloombergBusinessweek]
posted by FirstMateKate at 3:21 PM PST - 51 comments
Classic Hollywood Guide on how to react when you screw up a scene. Movie bloopers with Bogie, Bette Davis, Carole Lombard, Claudette Colbert, Errol Flynn, Claude Rains, Kay Francis, Edward G. Robinson, Jane Wyman, George Brent, Merle Oberon, Patricia Neal, Mickey Rooney and more.posted by Wonton Cruelty at 1:45 AM PST - 26 comments
March 15
About two years ago, Ryan Matheson visited Canada. Canadian customs checked out his notebook computer and found a Japanese manga on it which the customs official decided was out of line. Matheson was charged with possession of, and importation of, child porn. After two years of legal maneuvering, the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund
just announced that Matheson "has agreed to plead to a non-criminal code regulatory offense under the Customs Act of Canada. As a result of the agreement, Matheson will not stand trial." He also won't be listed as a sex offender, in Canada or anywhere else, and he won't have a criminal record.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 11:13 PM PST - 201 comments
The Sun has been in a bit of a mood lately,
spitting out some pretty big flares (including the second largest one of the current magnetic cycle)
Be sure to scroll down for the photo of the entire Sun, it will change the way you think about it.
posted by HuronBob at 7:38 PM PST - 61 comments
E.L. James's
Fifty Shades of Grey started out as
Master of the Universe, an adults-only
Twilight fanfiction posted under the pseudonym
Snowqueens Icedragon. The erotica re-imagining of Bella Swan as a 21-year-old college student and Edward Cullen as a 27-year-old billionaire -- with BDSM tastes -- was published by Australia's Writer's Coffee Shop Publishing in May 2011; names and details linking it to Stephenie Meyer's bestselling trilogy were changed (
...for the most part). In recent months,
the book has gone viral, selling more than 250,000 copies (over 90% in ebook format) and landing the #1 spot on the New York Times Bestseller List. Last week, E.L. James sold republishing rights for the
Fifty Shades trilogy to Vintage Books in a seven-figure deal.
[more inside]posted by changeling at 1:17 PM PST - 97 comments
Plenty of people collect
Disneyana, the toys, books, animation cels, and theme-park souvenirs. Then there are those fans who collect information and details on the Disney parks themselves,
collecting official park maps or
drawing up their own ride blueprints,
assembling the design history behind the attractions, and even
collecting vintage tickets and
ticket books.
Yesterland (previously:
1,
2,
3) is an ever-growing collection of Disneyland history, and has
an updated collection of links to similar fan sites and Imagineering blogs, which is a whole collection of rabbit holes of nostalgia and behind-the-scense information. So grab a
riding crop and
pretend like it's the 60s all over again!
posted by filthy light thief at 12:56 PM PST - 9 comments
The Hacker Shelf is nice crowd-sourced guide to (legally) free books on various computational and mathematical subjects. The
topics page gives you an idea of the breadth of material available.
posted by philipy at 9:56 AM PST - 24 comments
"Vitamin R goes straight to the head. Ruby will teach you to express your ideas through a computer. You will be writing stories for a machine. The language will become a tool for you to better connect your mind to the world."
Slate compiles the mystery of _why. (
Previously).
posted by oulipian at 7:08 AM PST - 78 comments
Why Nations Fail -
In a nutshell: "Proximately, prosperity is generated by investment and innovation, but these are acts of faith: investors and innovators must have credible reasons to think that, if successful, they will not be
plundered by the powerful. For the polity to provide such reassurance, two conditions have to hold: power has to be centralised and the institutions of power have to be inclusive."
[more inside]posted by kliuless at 6:54 AM PST - 78 comments
Oh yeah. There he is, Mr.
RL Burnside, in the year of nineteen and seventy eight, Independence, Mississippi, porch fulla kids, singin' about
when his first wife left him, million-dollar smile on his face. And there he is again, with his guitar and amp, out by the barb wire fence, a
poor boy a long way from home. These two little gems just added to the
Alan Lomax Archive YouTube channel, where you'll also find some wonderful newly-uploaded clips (filmed in 1983) from
fretless banjo plucker Tommy Jarrell, the toast of Toast, North Carolina.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 4:56 AM PST - 9 comments
March 14
The Man Who Broke Atlantic City Don Johnson (no, not that one) won nearly $6 million playing blackjack in one night, single-handedly decimating the monthly revenue of Atlantic City’s Tropicana casino. Not long before that, he’d taken the Borgata for $5 million and Caesars for $4 million. Here’s how he did it.
posted by modernnomad at 5:00 PM PST - 98 comments
Official Spoiler Etiquette. The stars of your favorite TV shows
(assuming your favorite TV shows include The Wire, Heroes, Walking Dead, Battlestar Galactica, Dexter, or True Blood) teach you how not to ruin them for your friends.
posted by lazaruslong at 4:23 PM PST - 141 comments
Last weekend, the annual Sweetwater Rattlesnake Roundup took place in Sweetwater Texas, as it has since 1958.
Previously 1,
Previously 2,
plus on the Simpsons. Sponsored by the
Jaycess, it attracts a huge crowd and lots of press, but when
Danny Mendez, a zoologist and host of
Urban Jungles Radio showed up to
see for himself what it was like, he was refused entry and given a citation for Criminal Trespassing. What sort of issues would a zoologist be concerned about and why the Sweetwater Jaycees not want Danny (as well as
Sky Stevens, a Texas biology student, Wildlife enthusiast and contributor to the show) not to even enter to see a beauty pageant?
[more inside]posted by katinka-katinka at 3:49 PM PST - 31 comments
"Much of the history of Black people, particularly our intimate history, is still unseen and unexplored." Beautifully understated,
The Black Vernacular is a communal memorial to this history.
[more inside]posted by sudama at 12:36 PM PST - 12 comments
Do you enjoy the work of independent musicians? Do you like Capcom's
Mega Man X series of video games? Then you'll love
OverClocked Remix's latest album,
Maverick Rising. The free five-disc album features 62 tracks by 49 artists in a collection totaling over 4 1/2 hours of
Mega Man X music remixes spanning 8 of the primary games in the series and a few extra goodies.
posted by Servo5678 at 11:39 AM PST - 3 comments
As fans of
Community get ready for the show's return from hiatus tomorrow night, AV Club writer Todd VanDerWerff, who writes the
weekly episode reviews of the show, drew attention to something odd that happened while the show was off the air. The discussion in his review of the last episode before the break
Regional Holiday Music, didn't die down after people had put in their two cents about the episode and his review. People
kept talking, and not just about the show. The show's fans developed their own self-contained piece of the web. Last week, the post passed 30,000 comments (now at 35,000):
[more inside]posted by dry white toast at 10:56 AM PST - 63 comments
Lytro, the 6-year-old[
1] consumer plenoptic camera start-up started shipping their first
light field camera to end users last week. Reviews have
been mostly positive with regards to the technology and industrial design, but also warn users of specialized hardware and software that is difficult to use, the "poor quality"[
2] display, and low resulting image quality. However everyone seems to agree that light field technology is the way of the future and is here to stay.
Previously.
[more inside]posted by jeffamaphone at 10:53 AM PST - 70 comments
A new
working paper by economists Charles Courtemanche (University of Louisville) and Daniela Zapata (UNC-Greensboro) shows that Massachusetts 2006 uniform healthcare coverage caused
improvements for numerous health outcomes. To the degree that the Massachusetts experiment is a guide for the federal Affordable Care Act, this study provides some guidance for guessing which individuals and approximately how much the benefits of the program will be.
[more inside]posted by scunning at 10:44 AM PST - 24 comments
What is the minimal number of clues necessary to create a uniquely solvable Sudoku puzzle? It turns out to be
17, though it took fancy symmetry arguments and nearly a year of computer time to prove it. But no need to read the paper when you can
watch the video.posted by Obscure Reference at 5:55 AM PST - 54 comments
'Bike Thief' [NYTimes] The filmmaker Casey Neistat conducts an experiment in New York City, where he locks up his own bike and brazenly tries to steal it, to determine whether onlookers or the police would intervene.
[More]posted by Fizz at 5:03 AM PST - 64 comments
A Tough Oil World Why High Gas Prices Are Here to Stay by Michael Klare (
via)
It was the easy oil—that’s what fueled our prosperity. Back in the fall The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health highlighted
The five key areas that illustrate the potential health fallout of petroleum scarcity.
posted by adamvasco at 4:07 AM PST - 61 comments
Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs. New York Time Op-Ed. March 14th 2012:
TODAY is my last day at Goldman Sachs. After almost 12 years at the firm — first as a summer intern while at Stanford, then in New York for 10 years, and now in London — I believe I have worked here long enough to understand the trajectory of its culture, its people and its identity. And I can honestly say that the environment now is as toxic and destructive as I have ever seen it.
[more inside]posted by Skygazer at 2:41 AM PST - 150 comments
Cities in dissolution. "It’s a game for anyone who has ever wondered what happens in the grandest house in town once the lights go out at night. It’s for anyone who has ever seen two men slumped at a hotel bar and wondered what other secrets are contained in such temporary lives. Thief is a game for anyone who has ever walked through a city at night and thought, which parts are still breathing and what does each seclusion contain."
Rockpapershotgun's Adam Smith thinks about cities.
posted by Sebmojo at 12:57 AM PST - 8 comments
March 13
The nation is awash with a new black market commodity... Across the country, retailers are finding massive amounts of this product missing. In West St. Paul, Minnesota, one enterprising individual has taken $25,000 dollars of this chemical that some Police Departments are calling liquid gold:
Tide Detergentposted by symbioid at 6:57 PM PST - 100 comments
Civil rights activist, (and adopted Newfie) dies at 88 As reported
previously, Philips was the sole black survivor in a shipwreck of US navy vessels of the coast of Newfoundland. The kindness shown to him by those who nursed him in the tiny town, where no one had seen a black man before, inspired Phillips' life of activism for civil rights.
A good reminder of the power of small kindnesses ...
posted by chapps at 5:59 PM PST - 14 comments
Remember iamamiwhoami? Jonna Lee's previously mysterious little music project complete with codes and secrets, has begun releasing new song-length videos every couple of weeks. On Valentines Day,
Sever, then
Drops. Today,
Good Worker. The videos are just as odd as when the project first
started.
posted by cashman at 8:49 AM PST - 8 comments
"
Homicide Watch is a community-driven reporting project covering every murder in the District of Columbia. Using original reporting, court documents, social media, and the help of victims’ and suspects’ friends, family, neighbors and others, we cover every homicide from crime to conviction."
[more inside]posted by BobbyVan at 7:19 AM PST - 8 comments
In a new working paper provocatively entitled
Law Deans in Jail, Emory law professors
Morgan Cloud and
George Shepherd
examine the widespread reports of lying by law schools and their administrators, and the publication of these fabrications by U.S. News, and explain how the reported conduct could constitute federal crimes, [specifically] mail and wire fraud, conspiracy, and racketeering.
Advisory: 77-page PDF; click on the link on the top-left to download the full paper. [
Abstract].
Previously.
Previouslier.
[Via the always trenchant Margaret Soltan].
posted by Sonny Jim at 5:28 AM PST - 45 comments
Quadrotors? Check. Flying Delorean? Check. Roads? No need. While a full-size model may still be a few years away, this crafty Russian tinkerer has constructed his very own
hover-conversion model Delorean, and the results are pretty darn cool. (SLYT)
posted by ShutterBun at 1:12 AM PST - 16 comments
Here are two stories about men hiding themselves under toilets for strange/unknown/sexual reasons. [
1] [
2a] [
2b]. NSFW, NSF people who don't want to read about men hiding under toilets.
posted by Meatbomb at 12:22 AM PST - 61 comments
March 12
Tag Challenge! "The infamous Panther Five has pulled an audacious new heist: they’ve stolen the world’s 3rd most expensive jewel, the Adly Diamond, from the Overholt Showroom in Washington, DC. Now they’ve split up and fled—dispersed to five different cities. We’re offering a reward to help find them. We’ll release their mugshots here on game day: March 31, 2012."
If you can get a team together that can cover these 5 cities, then you've got a shot at $5000 (USD).
Washington, DC |
New York City |
London |
Stockholm |
Bratislava [more inside]posted by juliplease at 9:10 PM PST - 28 comments
"Would you let a skull pick you up at a bus stop? Definitely not. But on Twitter you find yourself doing all sorts of things you wouldn't otherwise do. And once you've entered the Enchanted E-Forest, lured in there by cute bunnies and playful kittens, you can find yourself wandering around in it for quite some time. You might even find yourself climbing the odd tree—the very odd tree—or taking refuge in the odd hollow log—the very odd hollow log—because cute bunnies and playful kittens are not the only things alive in the mirkwoods of the Web. Or the webs of the mirkwoods. Paths can get tangled there. Plots can get thickened.
Games are afoot."
posted by vidur at 3:52 PM PST - 57 comments
The 3D printer uses a liquid resin, which is hardened at precisely the correct spots by a focused laser beam. The focal point of the laser beam is guided through the resin by movable mirrors and leaves behind a hardened line of solid polymer, just a few hundred nanometers wide. This fine resolution enables the creation of intricately structured sculptures as tiny as a grain of sand. "Until now, this technique used to be quite slow", says Professor Jürgen Stampfl from the Institute of Materials Science and Technology at the TU Vienna. "The printing speed used to be measured in millimeters per second – our device can do five meters in one second." In two-photon lithography, this is a world record. Article and
video.
posted by curious nu at 2:10 PM PST - 36 comments
Today expensively educated graphic artists sit at expensive designer tables in expensive offices, solely in order to put "Ithaca is gorges", rainbows, and band names on t-shirts all day … but even this quasi-preindustrial situation has now come to an end.
Riesenmaschine's collaborators have succeeded in automating the production of modern t-shirt designs. The
chance shirt machine mechanically produces, from a chance combination of a chance picture and chance text, in a chance font and chance colors, a chance design existing only once.
posted by kenko at 11:25 AM PST - 58 comments
When you need to get past that cat bully in the alley, you must be willing to have a
Cat Fight!posted by quin at 5:24 AM PST - 20 comments
March 11
The earliest surviving Charles Dickens film, thought lost since 1954, has been re-found in the British Film Institute's archive.
The Death of Poor Joe (
YouTube HD,
IMDB,
Wikipedia), a one minute-long silent film based on an episode in Dickens' novel
Bleak House, was filmed in 1901.
posted by stbalbach at 9:35 PM PST - 8 comments
In the spring of 1945, three weeks after VE Day, Private First Class Kurt Vonnegut, Jr wrote a letter home to inform his family that he was alive. His infantry unit had been smashed by Panzer divisions in the Ardennes; his unmarked POW train attacked by the RAF; miraculously, he and a handful of fellow prisoners escaped incineration by American and British bombers. "Their combined labors killed 250,000 people in twenty-four hours and destroyed all of Dresden – possibly the world’s most beautiful city", Vonnegut wrote. "But not me."
-
Survivor:
How Kurt Vonnegut created a novel, a cult following and one of the most loyal readerships in American Fiction by Thomas Meaney in The Times Literary Supplement.
posted by Kattullus at 3:45 PM PST - 85 comments
Are you thinking what I’m thinking? Don’t even go there! You know as well as I do, I’ve literally been there, done that, bought the t-shirt and to be honest with you at the end of the day when push comes to shove and it all boils down to it if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem. Know what I mean? Basically, what I’m trying to say is with all due respect between you and me screenwriting is not rocket science, it’s about breaking the mold, thinking outside the box, giving it 110% 24/7. And I think we can all agree clichés suck but, hey, it’s a job. You gotta do what you gotta do. Just remember you’re writing for an audience and there’s no “I” in . . . you get the picture.
—
Definitive List of Cliched Dialogue
,
Go Into The Storyposted by ob1quixote at 2:11 PM PST - 114 comments
Go to Trial: Crash the Justice System. Michelle Alexander argues that ubiquitous plea bargains have allowed America's politicians and judicial system to short-circuit constitutional due process and ignore the mechanics of mass incarceration.
If everyone charged with crimes suddenly exercised his constitutional rights, there would not be enough judges, lawyers or prison cells to deal with the ensuing tsunami of litigation.posted by the mad poster! at 8:28 AM PST - 84 comments
If you're celebrating St. Patrick's Day or March Madness in New York, the State Liquor Authority can help plan your festivities with this
handy guide to every establishment in the state of New York licensed to sell alcohol.
[more inside]posted by cedar at 8:10 AM PST - 8 comments
Jim Henson's Red Book "In June 1965, 28-year-old Jim Henson started a written log of his activities in what became known as “The Red Book.” He noted what had happened up until that point (deemed “Ancient History”) and then recorded anything that he felt was worth recording as single line journal entries until the end of 1988." via
retroist.
posted by PhoBWanKenobi at 6:34 AM PST - 7 comments
More diversity in sci-fi webcomix? Yes please:
Athena Wheatley, or Warp & Weft features a black female scientist from the 19th century time-travelling to 9283. Fun, and looks good: Moebius meets Futurama meets Adventure Time
(and sexy too! occasionaly cartoonishly NSFW)posted by Tom-B at 4:32 AM PST - 4 comments
March 10
Kayfabe Memories has a small book's worth of material on the history of professional wrestling's regional territories and the grapplers who animated them.
posted by Trurl at 7:37 PM PST - 9 comments
"
It all started with wondering what it was really like to be tapped on the shoulder and told that you are the savior of mankind. Ten years of thinking about that, and I began writing." He was James
Oliver Rigney, Jr., a Vietnam vet who went on to get a degree in physics from The Citadel, and was then a nuclear engineer for the US Navy. He put all that behind him and started writing a variety of fantasy novels under various aliases. As Reagan O'Neal, he wrote
the Fallon trilogy of historical fantasy in the early 1980s, which he followed up with
a quick series of Conan novels as Robert Jordan. Under this pen name, he spent a decade planning and four years writing
The Eye of the World, the first book in
The Wheel of Time, an epic storyline in a fantasy world. Jordan had planned out the broad story arc from the beginning to the "
final scene in the final book," but
he died before his epic tale could be completed. A young author,
Brandon Sanderson, was chosen by Rigney's wife and editor, Harriet McDougal, to complete the portions of the tale left as a loose collection of notes. One last book became three, and just last month, the release date of the final book was set:
January 8, 2013, in the final month of the Year of the Dragon. Now that the end is in sight, you might feel the pull of nostalgia to finish the series, or maybe you're interested to see what all this fuss is about. With around 11,000 pages, 635 chapters, and more than four million words, it's a complex, daunting world to (re)enter. Fear not, the internet is here to help.
[more inside]posted by filthy light thief at 5:09 PM PST - 66 comments
Mary Brown, a 56-year-old Florida woman who owned a small auto repair shop but had no health insurance, became the lead plaintiff challenging President Obama's healthcare law because she was passionate about the issue.
Brown "doesn't have insurance. She doesn't want to pay for it. And she doesn't want the government to tell her she has to have it," said Karen Harned, a lawyer for the National Federation of Independent Business. Brown is a plaintiff in the federation's case, which the Supreme Court plans to hear later this month.
But court records reveal that Brown and her husband filed for bankruptcy last fall with $4,500 in unpaid medical bills. Those bills could change Brown from a symbol of proud independence into an example of exactly the problem the healthcare law was intended to address. [more inside]posted by gerryblog at 8:38 AM PST - 189 comments
If Batman is a child's fantasy, then
Spider-Man is very much rooted in being a teenager. When we're first introduced to Peter Parker in Amazing Fantasy #15, he's an outsider who feels isolated from everyone around him. He's miserable and resentful, but not because of some sort of defining tragedy, but because that's how you feel when you're a teenager. When he gets the one thing he wants -- the power that makes him stronger, faster and more popular than anyone else -- he promptly screws up and loses one of the only people that truly cared about him.
(via
Chris Sims @
Comics Alliance)
posted by radwolf76 at 5:03 AM PST - 43 comments
March 9
Take Wikipedia: 87% of its contributors are male; a bigger discrepancy than Pinterest by any count. However, when discussing Wikipedia, it certainly is not the norm to go on and on about how male the site is. Instead, it is far more common for the site to be praised for its “neutral point of view.”
Pinterest as a tool for analyzing
difference vs. dominance feminism.
Via The Beheld.posted by latkes at 8:48 PM PST - 127 comments
With a “chief scientist” specializing in consumer behavior, an “analytics department” monitoring voter trends, and a squad of dozens huddled at computer screens editing video or writing code, the sprawling office complex inside One Prudential Plaza looks like a corporate research and development lab — Ping-Pong table and all. But it is home to the largely secret engine of President Obama’s re-election campaign, where scores of political strategists, data analysts, corporate marketers and Web producers are sifting through information gleaned from Facebook, voter logs and hundreds of thousands of telephone or in-person conversations to reassemble and re-energize the scattered coalition of supporters who swept Mr. Obama into the White House four years ago.posted by Trurl at 7:25 PM PST - 59 comments
END:CIV [full 75 minute movie] "If your homeland was invaded by aliens who cut down the forests, poisoned the water and air, and contaminated the food supply, would you resist?" [more inside]posted by Burhanistan at 7:12 PM PST - 37 comments
Sierra DeMulder is one of the most accomplished and recognizable young women in the world of slam poetry. The two-time National Poetry Slam champion has spent the past five years energizing audiences at colleges and poetry events across the nation, seamlessly weaving complex issues of identity and gender with the honesty of heartbreak. Her piece
'Paper Dolls', recently shared on
Project Unbreakable (previously), is very, very good.
TRIGGER WARNING - subject matter pertains to sexual assault.posted by lazaruslong at 5:22 PM PST - 31 comments
"
I know you are out there, just wanting to put your wig on, just like me. And I know you're just waiting to have a good time. Just put a little ball earring on, a little bad sunglasses, and a big, bad wig on, 'cause it's good. It feels good, works, it does." It is, or was,
Wigstock, an annual outdoor drag festival held in NYC, starting in 1985 by
"Lady" Bunny and friends. Each year
the party grew, moving to
Union Square in 1991, then
to Christopher Street waterfront in 1994 to deal with the expanding crowd.
2001 was supposed to be the last year, but
the party came back in 2003,
in conjunction with the annual HOWL festival. That carried the tradition on for another two years, and
Wigstock's official website is stuck in 2005, a reminder of the festivities that were. You can
reminisce with Gawker, or take a short journey back to 1987 with
Wigstock: The Movie (part 1 of 4), not to be confused with the longer film of the same name,
capturing Wigstock 1995 (part 1 of 8).
posted by filthy light thief at 12:57 PM PST - 18 comments
Friday dreams. Simon Raymonde, bassist of Cocteau Twins,
writes:
A rare nostalgia moment: i didnt think any footage from the Heaven or Las Vegas tour in 1990 existed and i remember how cool it was being able to have a lighting designer for the first time that tour but have never seen how our stage looked from the audience till tonight so this is a treat to me. The whole concert in on youtube now pretty much. And my god, what a voice Elizabeth had on this tour, absolutely perfect on every song. Some rare good memories. [more inside]posted by timshel at 11:18 AM PST - 48 comments
Did the Met betray rape victims to avoid bad PR? "Former Metropolitan Police officer -- and Lib Dem mayoral candidate -- Brian Paddick has appeared at the Leveson Inquiry, and his witness statement contains an astonishing allegation against his ex-employers.
In a section about the Metropolitan Police Service's attempt to improve its image in the media, Paddick details the "negative commentary" on Ian Blair after he took over as Met commissioner. "The Met went from being very open to being almost paranoid," he writes.
One of the consequences of this, he adds, was that he was asked to "water-down" a report critical of the Met's handling of rape cases."
[more inside]posted by marienbad at 8:45 AM PST - 13 comments
March 8
The Holga D, a digital camera concept based on the popular Holga medium-format camera. It's a minimalist digital camera that maintains the mystery of film. There's no display, just a little e-ink shot counter on top. The controls are equally spare: shutter speed, ISO, and a completely manual lens.
[more inside]posted by duien at 7:18 PM PST - 158 comments
The web site of
The Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art has more than 30,000 images searchable by who, what, where, and when.
posted by Trurl at 7:13 PM PST - 11 comments
Lionel Messi is the first player to score 5 goals in a Champions League match as Barcelona
demolished Bayer Leverkusen
7-1.
Compa
rsions with Mardaonna and Pele abound. Like Mozart, Messi at
5 years [YouTube, Spanish] old was better than most.
posted by vac2003 at 3:13 PM PST - 65 comments
The first episode of the second season of PBS Arts web-original series Off Book is
Animated GIFs: The Birth of a Medium (mini-documentary, ~7 min). "OFF BOOK explores cutting edge arts and the artists that make it. Breaking the mold of the definition of art, OFF BOOK explores the avant-garde, the experimental and the underground artforms that are supported by online communities."
[more inside]posted by flex at 2:50 PM PST - 10 comments
Cartoo uses Google Maps to show you how far you could get by car, bike, or foot in a set amount of time.
posted by Paragon at 1:37 PM PST - 38 comments
March 7
"The Turnip Princess" is one of
500 German fairy-tales recently unearthed in an archive. They were collected by
Franz Xaver von Schönwerth about 150 years ago, around the same time as the Grimm brothers were collecting fairytales. Some are variations of well known stories such as Cinderella, others are completely new like a Turnip Princess, or the story of a maiden who turns herself into a pond to escape a witch, who then attempts to drink the lake. A translator is working on an English edition.
posted by stbalbach at 10:37 PM PST - 38 comments
Data.gov.au is a site giving public access to datasets from the Australian federal, state and territory governments. It was created in response to the
Declaration of Open Government, which aims to get more citizen collaboration in policy and service delivery design. People are encouraged to use these datasets to produce apps or conduct research. So far the little-publicised site has resulted in apps such as
Dunny Directory,
Convict Records of Australia and
Transhub, a public transport planner for the nation’s capital. If you’re interested in more online government participation in Australia, Craig Thomler is tracking developments on his
eGov AU blog.
posted by harriet vane at 7:46 PM PST - 19 comments
“Aaliyah would have been on Twitter. It is fucked up that she is dead.” Poet and Twitter entity
Patricia Lockwood talks with HTMLGIANT about Twitter, literature, twitterature, comedy, poetry, sexting, Aaliyah and Olive Garden. Lockwood suggests that there may be something substantial and heretofore unexamined rumbling in the bowels of certain Twitter communities and people (such as
@graeyalien and
MeFi's own @gregerskine.)
posted by naju at 5:28 PM PST - 29 comments
"
This is a less-than-six-minute video and I had to take five breaks to watch the whole thing because I don’t think I could stand being subjected to this much grace and perfection all in one sitting. It was causing me emotional turmoil." –
Adam Lisagor, on a fantastic comedy sketch by Key & Peele.
More on their upcoming show.posted by Rory Marinich at 4:48 PM PST - 69 comments
The amazing, disturbing things your gaming console can learn about you. Consider the Kinect, the Microsoft console that sold 8 million units in its first 60 days of release. This inexpensive, book-sized panel has the ability to create a realistic, virtual likeness of the player. In doing so, it creates a delightful interface to play games—instead of hitting a button to kick a ball, you kick your foot and the digital character on screen mimics your movements. How does the Kinect produce this dazzling immersive experience? By capturing every move you make.
posted by Strass at 4:27 PM PST - 43 comments
Britain's Channel 4 has
broadcast graphic and disturbing footage apparently showing torture within a Syrian military hospital. The UN special rapporteur on torture, Juan Mendez,
says that the allegations are "consistent with what my mandate has been receiving over the last several months."
[more inside]posted by Joe in Australia at 3:01 PM PST - 92 comments
I remember with crystal clarity when I realized I was making more money from this enterprise than I was at my full-time job. I quickly decided to expand and hired four guys in Singapore to play 24/7. I paid them unreasonably well for the time, almost 3x as much as they would for other re-sellers; this bought me loyalty, and in this enterprise, loyalty is everything."
How I Helped Destroy Star Wars Galaxies [more inside]posted by Foci for Analysis at 1:37 PM PST - 165 comments
The Chicago Reader's current cover story, "The Color of His Skin," (parts
1 and
2,) revisits the murder of a black man on Chicago's South Side in 1970 by a gang of white teens. Last September, a similar article by the same author, "The Price of Intolerance," (parts
1 and
2,) examined an incident from 1971, in which a twelve year old boy and thirteen year old girl were killed.
posted by zarq at 12:57 PM PST - 3 comments
#JonathanFranzenHates: "Twitter is unspeakably irritating. Twitter stands for everything I oppose… it’s hard to cite facts or create an argument in 140 characters… it’s like if Kafka had decided to make a video semaphoring The Metamorphosis. Or it’s like writing a novel without the letter ‘P’… It’s the ultimate irresponsible medium."
[Via: Slate.com] More [Via: The Guardian]posted by Fizz at 7:51 AM PST - 155 comments
"Magic Angle Sculpture": John V. Muntean creates intricate carvings of wood which, at first glance, can be difficult to discern or understand, but when a light is applied, the shadows they cast create several different images based on their orientation.
[more inside]posted by quin at 5:44 AM PST - 11 comments
March 6
Kony 2012 ... The "Invisible Children" movement, a primarily university student effort in opposition to
Joseph Kony's Lord's Resistance Army's kidnapping of children, has produced this video to make 2012 the year that marks the end of his utilization of children to maintain his power. This is a moving 27 minute film.
posted by HuronBob at 8:35 PM PST - 187 comments
... it was notable for the nation’s top law enforcement official to declare that it is constitutional for the government to kill citizens without any judicial review under certain circumstances. ... “Some have argued that the president is required to get permission from a federal court before taking action against a United States citizen who is a senior operational leader of Al Qaeda or associated forces,” Mr. Holder said. “This is simply not accurate. ‘Due process’ and ‘judicial process’ are not one and the same, particularly when it comes to national security. The Constitution guarantees due process, not judicial process.” [more inside]posted by Trurl at 6:40 PM PST - 224 comments
What would happen if you significantly dropped barriers to entry for bone marrow registration?
Graham Douglas, a copy writer whose twin brother's life was saved by a bone marrow donation, had a brilliant idea that will do just that.
[more inside]posted by charmcityblues at 2:53 PM PST - 32 comments
The most immediately apparent characteristic of James Benning’s film is surely its form: thirteen ten-minute static takes, which (save the leader between shots) comprise the entire visual track of the picture. Far from cursory, this detail accounts for the totality of Benning’s æsthetic. Everything that Benning says in 13 Lakes, he says using this formal language – along with a soundtrack recorded on-site, thought not necessarily concurrently with the image. Moreover, Benning, as has been noted, repeats the same basic framing in each of the thirteen segments, presenting the horizon-line in centre of the frame, dividing lake and sky into approximately equivalent fields. James Benning’s Art of Landscape: Ontological, Pedagogical, Sacrilegious, by Michael J. Anderson for Senses of Cinema (
via; see also:
13 Lakes Q&A at
LA Film Forum)
[more inside]posted by filthy light thief at 12:53 PM PST - 5 comments
Did the Little Ice Age start with a big bang? According to the new study, the Little Ice Age, a period of cooling temperatures that began after the Middle Ages and lasted into the late 19th century was triggered by repeated, explosive volcanism and sustained by a self- perpetuating sea ice-ocean feedback system in the North Atlantic Ocean
posted by 2manyusernames at 9:57 AM PST - 12 comments
In October 2010, William Niskanen, the 78-year-old economist and minority shareholder in the
Cato Institute, died.
The Koch Brothers, the liberal boogeymen who also finance most of the Cato Institute's operations, are now seeking control over Niskanen's shares
and have sued the remaining shareholder and founder of the institute,
Ed Crane III, in order to cement their control over the institute's future.
[more inside]posted by anewnadir at 9:50 AM PST - 71 comments
Fifty years ago, the Royal College of Physicians released a report titled
"Smoking and health (1962)", showing the relation between smoking and lung cancer. In 1962, about 70% of men and 40% of women in the UK smoked, and the BBC spoke to a number of them as seen in this
archive footage.
posted by Petrot at 8:19 AM PST - 40 comments
March 5
Dewey Bozella landed a hard right cross on his opponent's jaw at the final bell, and the 52-year-old boxer raised his arms in victory. After 26 years behind bars for a murder he didn't commit, Bozella triumphantly realized a dream deferred in his first and only professional fight. [more inside]posted by Trurl at 6:36 PM PST - 7 comments
Well, it'll probably take
82 fans from 22 countries. Graham Coxon, with the help of director Ninian Doff, brings you a little Monday evening (at least in the US, the rest of you do the calculations as necessary) fun.
posted by HuronBob at 6:35 PM PST - 3 comments
This is a clip of Tim Kurkjian, a major league baseball analyst known for his citation of obscure statistics and unorthodox sources.
These are
clips of
baseball players imitating Tim Kurkjian, plus ensuing hilarity.
[via]posted by googly at 5:32 PM PST - 17 comments
"A man wearing bowler hat reading a newspaper is seen leaning leisurely against a car. Another person comes from behind and starts hitting the poor man on the head with an iron bar. He does not react at all, still reads his paper. The third man appears looking puzzled. The man takes his hat of and shows it to the other two. They take the hat and examine it."
Beat The Bandit, 1961 is a video (01:46) presentation of amazing security/anti-theft inventions that you'll surely feel compelled to buy.
posted by vidur at 11:33 AM PST - 23 comments
Joe Posnanski asks why football fans aren't fazed by the news that the New Orleans Saints had a bounty pool to reward players who knocked opponents out of their games.
If pitchers were offered bounties to throw at Albert Pujols' head and knock him out for a series, that would be a scandal beyond anything in memory. If we found out that Dwyane Wade was actually offered extra money to hurt Kobe Bryant in the NBA All-Star Game, he and the people offering the bounty might be suspended for life. Hockey is a violent sport, but if a team of players and coached really had pooled together money to pay anyone who could get Sidney Crosby taken off on a stretcher, wouldn't that be one of the great disgraces in the sport's history?
So what does it say about the NFL -- and what does it say about us as football fans -- that this would happen in pro football and there would be a vague, "Eh, everybody does it, everybody's trying to hurt everybody in football anyway" reaction from so many?posted by benbenson at 8:38 AM PST - 146 comments
The idea that the form of a product should correspond to its essence does not simply mean that products should be designed with their intended use in mind. That a knife needs to be sharp so as to cut things is a non-controversial point accepted by most designers. The notion of essence as invoked by Jobs and Ive is more interesting and significant—more intellectually ambitious—because it is linked to the ideal of purity. No matter how trivial the object, there is nothing trivial about the pursuit of perfection. On closer analysis, the testimonies of both Jobs and Ive suggest that they did see essences existing independently of the designer—a position that is hard for a modern secular mind to accept, because it is, if not religious, then, as I say, startlingly Platonic.
—
Form and Fortune is an essay about Steve Jobs and Apple's design philosophy by Evgeny Morozov.
posted by Kattullus at 7:07 AM PST - 23 comments
Counting Stars is a powerful and touching comic from artist Katie O’Neill, which looks at loneliness, wishes, and what we might really need more than a white knight to come along and rescue us.
[more inside]posted by quin at 5:28 AM PST - 11 comments
March 4
How to Host a Dungeon is a solitaire pen-and-paper game in which you create an underground complex of rooms, populate them with various fantasy races and monsters, and simulate its history. At almost any time you can stop and have the basis for a D&D campaign. Here's a YouTube playthrough of a game:
Part 1 -
Part 2 [more inside]posted by JHarris at 9:44 PM PST - 53 comments
Opportunity Cost: The Eric Clapton and Bob Dylan Problem. Think you understand the fundamental economic concept of opportunity cost? Answer this:
"You won a free ticket to see an Eric Clapton concert (which has no resale value). Bob Dylan is performing on the same night and is your next-best alternative activity. Tickets to see Dylan cost $40. On any given day, you would be willing to pay up to $50 to see Dylan (because he's so cool!). Assume there are no other costs of seeing either performer. Based on this information, what is the opportunity cost of seeing Eric Clapton?
A. $0
B. $10
C. $40
D. $50"
[more inside]posted by storybored at 9:21 PM PST - 137 comments
"The People's Song Book," published in 1948, was intended to be "a folio of freedom folklore, a weapon against war and reaction, and a singing testament to the future," according to its
foreword, which was written by
Alan Lomax.
"[T]hese songs have been tested in the fire of the people's struggle all around the world. They emerged quietly and anonymously in the vanguard of apparently lost causes, where men of good will have fought to keep this a decent world to live in. ... These folk, heritors of the democratic tradition of folklore, were creating for themselves a folk-culture of high moral and political content."
[more inside]posted by MonkeyToes at 8:23 PM PST - 25 comments
The ‘white’ slave children of New Orleans:
Almost immediately after the law came into practice, Northerners and abolitionists set up relief organisations, which battled to establish schools and provide other forms of support – but their resources were limited. They soon discovered it was near-impossible to find sympathy and support in a war-torn and racially-prejudiced county.posted by nickyskye at 6:04 PM PST - 11 comments
The SF Jazz Collective just began their month-long Spring 2012
tour. Each year since 2004 the eight musicians have selected a composer to honor — including many of the usual suspects: Coltrane, Hancock, Monk, Shorter, Tyner. (In 2013 it will be Chick Corea) This year, changing things up a bit, they've decided to showcase the music of
Stevland Hardaway Morris.
[more inside]posted by LeLiLo at 4:39 PM PST - 3 comments
"
Tech’s latest boom has generated a new,
more testosterone-fueled breed of coder. Sure, the job still requires enormous brainpower, but today’s engineers are drawn from diverse backgrounds, and many eschew the laboratory intellectualism that prevailed when semiconductors ruled Silicon Valley.... At some startups the pendulum has swung so far in the other direction that it’s given rise to a new 'title':
brogrammer."
posted by dw at 3:45 PM PST - 175 comments
Last night Dustin Lance Black's
traveling Prop. 8 play, "
8," was performed at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre in Los Angeles with a
star-studded cast. "Framed around the trial's historic closing arguments in June 2010, '8' provides an intimate look what unfolded when the issue of same-sex marriage was on trial." "Saturday's benefit performance was broadcast live on YouTube, where director Rob Reiner said it drew 200,000 viewers."
* You can watch an archive of the performance
here [02:01.32].
[more inside]posted by ericb at 3:14 PM PST - 21 comments
Snowdrops, or
Galanthus, are those little white flowers you often see in the early Spring, sometimes poking up from under the snow. At first glance, they're charming, but not terrifically interesting.
Galanthophiles of the world think otherwise.
[more inside]posted by sciencegeek at 12:38 PM PST - 15 comments
Is Privacy Dead? A conversation. "For the entirety of human history, we have operated on small scales and in relative anonymity. Our words are heard by the few people close to us and most are quickly forgotten. We walk down the street without passers-by knowing our names or history. The internet has started to change that. Our words and actions can easily be shared with billions of people around the globe and archived indefinitely. The details of our lives can be found simply by typing our name into Google.
We need to understand the risks of this type of technology so that we can fully gain its benefits. We need protections, both technical and legal, so that a small mistake cannot devastate our lives. We also need education to help us function in a world where privacy is no longer the natural state of being."
posted by Sebmojo at 11:58 AM PST - 34 comments
The 'precariat' "consists of a multitude of insecure people, living bits-and-pieces lives, in and out of short-term jobs, without a narrative of occupational development, including millions of frustrated educated youth who do not like what they see before them, millions of women abused in oppressive labour, growing numbers of criminalised tagged for life, millions being categorised as ‘disabled’ and migrants in their hundreds of millions around the world".
[more inside]posted by hydatius at 11:57 AM PST - 27 comments
It’s a very specialized set of sports that the Chinese focus on but they simply kick absolute ass at them. ... If you look at the 2008 Olympic weightlifting results in Beijing... the women didn’t just squeak by to win a medal; most were simply so far ahead of their competition that it was a joke. In most cases, the Chinese women took their first attempt after everyone else had already finished lifting for the day. And they came out and just dispatched their weights in perfect form, setting new world records and winning medals with abandon. [more inside]posted by Trurl at 10:31 AM PST - 52 comments
Network Rail virtual archive Original drawings and plans of Britain's railway infrastructure from Network Rail, including the Forth Bridge, Bristol Temple Meads station, the Tay Bridge and lots more.
posted by Helga-woo at 6:25 AM PST - 6 comments
Mari0 is a fan-made mash-up of Nintendo and Valve Software's games, with a 4-player co-op mode and a level editor. And as a nod to
Team Fortress, there are
hats. Downloadable for PC, OS X and Linux.[
via]
posted by Smart Dalek at 2:54 AM PST - 23 comments
March 3
Our Corrupt Politics: It’s Not All Money. Ezra Klein on corruption in US politics.
The key mistake most people make when they look at Washington—and the key misconception that characters like Abramoff would lead you to—is seeing Washington as a cash economy. It’s a gift economy. That’s why firms divert money into paying lobbyists rather than spending every dollar on campaign contributions. Campaign contributions are part of the cash economy. Lobbyists are hired because they understand how to participate in the gift economy.posted by russilwvong at 11:14 PM PST - 36 comments
The Cabbie v. the Morgan Stanley Executive "Those of you who have any degree of contact with the financial blogosphere no doubt caught the news today that one William Bryan Jennings, the co-head of fixed income for the Americas for Morgan Stanley, was arrested and charged with second-degree assault, theft of services and intimidation by bias or bigotry and released on bail of $9,500. He has been put on leave." [
Via].
posted by marienbad at 10:36 AM PST - 57 comments
Welcome to Omni Consumer Products. "First they came for the NHS and I said nothing because I was not sick. Then they came for the disabled people and those on benefits and I said nothing because I had an income and didn’t care what the ‘scroungers’ said. Then they came for the schools and I said nothing because I had no kids. Then they came for the police force with private/public partnerships and for speaking up, I received a baton to the face. The private guards looked at their targets and smiled: dissent down 35% this month."
[more inside]posted by ClanvidHorse at 3:53 AM PST - 75 comments
March 2
Fifteen years and three weeks ago, four lads from Dublin wandered into a K-Mart in NYC and attracted a crowd as they played a song they've never played live since. They then took some questions from the audience about their intentions over the next year or so. The proceedings were carried live on music television stations around the world. (Part
1 2 3 4) The day was February 12, 1997; the song was Holy Joe; the men performing were U2. They were announcing the release of their new album,
POP, released 15 years ago, on March 3, 1997. Loved by many critics, adored by many fans, met with an indifferent shrug by the general public, and repeatedly scorned by the band themselves, perhaps it's time to look back again at this controversial groundbreaking album and landmark tour.
[more inside]posted by hippybear at 7:28 PM PST - 84 comments
Yo La Tengo are once again playing requests for pledges Yo La Tengo are once again playing requests for pledges, beginning at 9pm US EST TONIGHT on WFMU. Every year, Yo La Tengo perform requests live on-air in exchange for pledges, to help keep freeform noncommercial radio station WFMU (91.1 FM in Jersey City, NJ) on the air. This year is no exception. They will begin playing at 9pm US EST tonight, and will be playing listener requests for several more hours.
posted by trashflow at 4:48 PM PST - 85 comments
The Passion of Dave Stevens — The work of the late, great Dave Stevens is known to comic book aficionados in the form of his enduring creation, The Rocketeer, and to art collectors and illustration enthusiasts for his reverently retro yet brilliantly modern renditions of vintage pulp characters, science fiction adventurers and iconic superheroes. But as dedicated Stevens fans know, the artist's true passion and inspiration manifests in his seemingly countless and unfailingly exquisite renderings of the female form, most typically in the classic pinup and "good girl art" style at which he became one of the very best. [nsfw comic art]
posted by netbros at 3:30 PM PST - 11 comments
Wally Wood is most acclaimed for his comical comic books, mainly his acclaimed work for Mad back in its original, pre-magazine, 1950s incarnation. But his personal life was a drama verging on tragedy and culminating with his suicide in 1981. Only now, three decades later, is his story heading toward a happy ending, with a burst of renewed interest in his work.
A
graphics heavy interview with J. David Spurlock, newly named director of the Wood estate, on the renewed interest in the artist and his work.
[via] [more inside]posted by marxchivist at 11:46 AM PST - 10 comments
Is SEO killing America? Clay Johnson about how media gives us what we want, not what we need, and how it's destroying democracy. If you don't have time or can't watch a 17 minute video, read
this article discussing and summarizing the video.
posted by desjardins at 10:54 AM PST - 88 comments
Understand something of the earth beneath your feet and the landscape in front of you. These sites provide a chance to see geologic sites and also see expert interpretations.
Geology of Southern England's
Jurassic Coast - many pages with detailed strata and sometimes questions to
challenge yourself (click photos to enlarge), by Ian West of Southampton University.
[more inside]posted by Listener at 9:24 AM PST - 6 comments
For more than a decade, questions have lingered about the possible role of the Saudi government in the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, even as the royal kingdom has made itself a crucial counterterrorism partner in the eyes of American diplomats. Now, in sworn statements that seem likely to reignite the debate, two former senators who were privy to top secret information on the Saudis’ activities say they believe that the Saudi government might have played a direct role in the terrorist attacks.posted by Trurl at 8:43 AM PST - 86 comments
People need to realise that their wars are not fought by the guy on the news that lost a leg and loves his flag — he was the FNG [f--king new guy] that got blown up because he was incompetent, who left the fight before it turned him into one of us. A private military contractor and former infantryman talks about the military PR complex.
[more inside]posted by bumpjump at 8:35 AM PST - 64 comments
March 1
NASA has announced that the latest Kepler
data dump contains
1,091 extrasolar planet candidates, with 196 Earth-sized planets among them. The data shows "a clear trend toward smaller planets at longer orbital periods is evident with each new catalog release. This suggests that Earth-size planets in the habitable zone are forthcoming if, indeed, such planets are abundant." Total Kepler candidates as of February 27, 2012:
2,321.
[more inside]posted by IvoShandor at 7:12 PM PST - 44 comments
An investigative "Cold Case Posse" launched six months ago by "America’s toughest sheriff" – Joe Arpaio of Arizona’s Maricopa County – has concluded there is probable cause that the document released by the White House last year as President Obama’s birth certificate
is a computer-generated forgery. Livestream
here as THE TRUTH is exposed.
posted by (Arsenio) Hall and (Warren) Oates at 12:45 PM PST - 306 comments
No Robots: An engaging animated short about prejudice in a future in which robots have been banned.
posted by quin at 11:35 AM PST - 10 comments
Rick Santorum
released an anti-Romney ad in January that borrows
ahem liberally from Apple's famous
1984 ad. Weirdly, it
also copies Apple's second Super Bowl advertisement,
Lemmings, which was viewed as insulting to its audience and became a legendary failure. (Via
Ken Segall, a former creative director at Apple who writes, "Note to Rick: if you’re going to copy Apple’s marketing success, try not to copy its failure as well.")
posted by Rory Marinich at 7:29 AM PST - 73 comments
"Everyone knows there’s a catastrophe unfolding, that few can afford to live in their own city. It was not always so." - China Miéville on
Apocalyptic Londonposted by timshel at 4:04 AM PST - 58 comments
