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April 2008 Archives
April 30
An extraordinary piece of magazine writing by Chris Jones. Jones tells the story of how the body of Sergeant Joe Montgomery makes its way from a Baghdad suburb to its final resting place in a grave in Indiana. It's one of the finest pieces of journalism that I've read in years. It’s extremely moving without being saccharine or twee. It’s a military story, but utterly without jingoism or indictment. And it’s wonderfully observed. If I taught a first-year creative writing course, I'd make this required reading.
posted by dbarefoot at 9:57 PM PST - 87 comments
The performer
Reggie Watts(wiki) is truly sui generis: comedian, musician, stream-of-consciousness performance artist, he rolls his talents and laid-back, slightly stoner persona together into something quite unlike
anything you've seen or heard before (that's a long-ish video, but well worth it, BTW). Imagine Spalding Gray mixed with Andy Kaufman, channeling a hiphop Sly Stone while reading Gertrude Stein on LSD, and you still won't get what it is that makes Watts so great.
[more inside]posted by ornate insect at 9:42 PM PST - 31 comments
Amber Hawk Swanson was lonely. So, like lonely singles everywhere, she contracted
RealDoll.com, "Home of the World's Finest Love Doll," to provide her with some companionship. But she had one special request - that the doll be made to
look exactly like her. Nine months later,
Amber Doll was born, and the two were
married the next day in a Las Vegas ceremony. Amber documents the wedding, and explores the relationship between
fantasy and reality, in her film
To Have, To Hold, and To Violate, Amber and Doll (5-minute compilation.). (most links nsfw)
[more inside]posted by granted at 8:10 PM PST - 52 comments
Ways of Seeing, the BBC documentary written and hosted by novelist and art critic
John Berger, is back up on YouTube. (scroll down for direct links to all four half-hour episodes) "I actually find it rather disturbing that -- despite our claims to be a culture that's increasing freedom of choice all the time -- we haven't come up with anything quite as astute, subversive or beautiful as Ways of Seeing since. Not on the BBC, and not even -- especially not -- on the internet. Download it while you still can."
posted by vronsky at 2:06 PM PST - 32 comments
If you find yourself in
Finland on the evening of April 30th or on May 1st, you must be aware of the following information. Today is
Vappu. Also known as Walpurgis Night, Vappu is a traditional holiday in Finland, and there are a number of unique social customs and dress you must be aware of in order to avoid embarrassment and ridicule.
[more inside]posted by Lord_Pall at 1:04 PM PST - 12 comments
Homer Simpson in CSS "...I stayed with the idea in mind that more complex designs could be made using the Verdana font and absolute positioning in CSS, thus generating vector drawings directly embedded in the code html."
[via]posted by mewithoutyou at 12:15 PM PST - 52 comments
Want a highway-speed in-production electric car
right now and can't afford a
Tesla Roadster? The now defunct
Corbin Sparrow has been re-born as the
NmG ("No More Gas") from Myers Motors. It uses 12 lead-acid batteries (1-4yr life), 70+mph, 30 mile range, about $50k. It's not for everybody but - in the US - it's currently the only other pure EV option available (that's not
a conversion or low-speed). However if you can wait a couple years more
EV's are in development.
posted by stbalbach at 11:11 AM PST - 32 comments
Isuma.tv is an amazing video sharing site for indigenous filmmakers.
Isuma is perhaps best known for their incredible work on films set in arctic Canada (
Atarnarjuat,
Journals of Knud Rasmussen and the upcoming
Before Tomorrow). Isuma.tv is a fantastic place to work by all sorts of First Nations film makers and is a much needed voice for the generally ignored indigenous artists.
Isuma was last discussed on Metafilter in
2002.posted by dogbusonline at 10:23 AM PST - 3 comments
Well, that's one less Carolina flying squirrel, but having it for dinner might actually help keep them around. A list of endangered American species once common on the dinner table has become a
book, its author, Gary Paul Nabham, encouraging the reader to keep
disappearing local culinary traditions
alive.
Endangered Dinners.
posted by Kronos_to_Earth at 9:45 AM PST - 26 comments
Fugu, derived from fuku (
to blow), is one of the more infamous meals you can order, celebrated in haiku and
pop culture. It's popular enough, however, that there are "farms" raising
10,000 tons of blowfish the Japanese consume each year.
Adam Platt, the latest American to document the dish, dines out on
fugu six ways: fugu sashimi, fried fugu ribs, hot fugu porridge, smoked fugu fins, and two variations of "white babies".
[more inside]posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 8:08 AM PST - 46 comments
April 29
If you were doing research in the 60s, You might've heard of Polywater, A form of water that exhibited wide variety of interesting characteristics and existed under identical conditions to that of normal water. Eventually debunked, none the less is a fascinating story. Naturally one draws parallels to Vonnegut's ice nine, but did you know there
actually is an ice nine? In fact, there's
twelve to sixteen types of ice,
depending on your opinion. More recently, computer simulations have indicated
water may structure itself into icosahedra, which, incredibly, is
the platonic solid (described over 2000 years ago!) representing the element water! And if you don't know what an icosahedron is,
I bet you've used one before. One of the most ubiquitous,
and arguably most important, substances in our lives, our
understanding of water is far from complete.
posted by Large Marge at 10:34 PM PST - 38 comments
The F117A Swan Song, the Fall of the Belgrade Embassy...and China Rising China Matters blog offers a fascinating take on "the role that the Belgrade bombing seems to play as the creation myth of the birth of the 21st Chinese strategic military doctrine, founded on the assumption that the U.S. will unscrupulously use its military, diplomatic, and propaganda advantages not only to contain China but even to attack it when need, desire, and circumstances permit."
posted by Abiezer at 7:42 PM PST - 41 comments
Bemoaning the state of music today? Might you try a little bit of
NaNuchKa, a Brooklyn-Based, Isreali-born rock trio well outside of the fray. Start things out light with
Red, before moving on to some experimentalism with
Oh Yeah, Says Who. And if you really want an emotional punch, try
Mediterranean, "a song about Isreal." Enjoy!
posted by Navelgazer at 7:06 PM PST - 24 comments
In the late '90s, pop-culture historian Bill Geerhart had a little too much time on his hands and a surfeit of stamps. So, for his own entertainment, the then-unemployed thirtysomething launched a letter-writing campaign to some of the most powerful and infamous figures in the country, posing as a curious
10-year-old named Billy.posted by snsranch at 6:07 PM PST - 21 comments
The Ultimate Act of Sports(wo)manship "It kept everything in perspective and the fact that we're never bigger than the game. ... It was such a lesson that we learned—that it's not all about winning. And we forget that, because as coaches, we're always trying to get to the top. We forget that. But I will never, ever forget this moment. It's changed me, and I'm sure it's changed my players."
[via SportsFilter]posted by terrapin at 1:49 PM PST - 42 comments
April 28
Pax Corleone Americana? "Can any of the candidates vying to become the next president of the United States match Michael’s cool, dispassionate courage in the face of epochal change? Will they avoid living in the comforting embrace of the past, from which both Tom and Sonny ultimately could not escape? Or will they emulate Michael’s flexibility—to preserve America’s position in a dangerous world?"
The Godfather as metaphor.
posted by amyms at 8:28 PM PST - 36 comments
"One of the biggest examples of the planned obsolescence of modern American capitalism...is the razor. The two blade razor, then the three blade razor, then the
five blade razor. Um, these things are okay but...mostly not good. You've
gotta go counterintuitive..."
[more inside]posted by 6am at 5:57 PM PST - 115 comments
Viktor Schreckengost who died last year at the grand age of 101, was regarded by some as the father of industrial design. Every adult in America has ridden in, ridden on, drunk out of, stored their things in, eaten off of, been costumed in, etc… and there is no going past his gorgeous
pedal cars. Some of his work can also be seen online at
The Cleveland Museum of Art.
posted by tellurian at 5:02 PM PST - 9 comments
Paracord is a perennial survival kit favorite, but why carry a boring ol' hank of it when you can
get crafty?
Parachute cord lanyards,
bracelets,
watchbands,
belts, and other braided items are
surprisingly easy and fun to make by following some
simple instructions. But they're just the beginning! From
water bottle carriers and
camera tripods to
knife handles,
Khukri conversions,
flashlight & stick wraps,
pace beads,
magazine pulls,
rifle wraps and
rifle slings, there are tons of useful things you can make out of paracord!
[more inside]posted by vorfeed at 10:03 AM PST - 21 comments
Ubuntu 8.04's
Hardy Heron has recently perched on millions of desktops worldwide, but what does the future look like for the darling of the open source world? Now entering a
new 2-year art developent cycle, Ubuntu's
continuing quest for
"pure, unadulterated, raw, visceral, lustful, shallow, skin deep beauty" has begun again in earnest.
Bleeding edge desktop effects [youtube, music] are already creeping into the official distribution and the community is eagerly awaiting the new graphical look, promised as a ground-up re-imagination in the next release,
Intrepid Ibex.
Watch this space.
posted by cowbellemoo at 9:47 AM PST - 86 comments
In the Matter of Daniel Smoote v. Frank & Jesse James As bank robberies go, the 1869 heist pulled off by legendary outlaws Jesse and Frank James in Daviess County, Mo., wasn’t much of a success: They may have left with no money, they probably shot the wrong man, and Jesse James lost his horse.
Perhaps even more frustrating for the outlaw duo, they ended up getting sued by a local farmer and his ambitious young lawyer—the first and only successful civil action against the former Confederate guerrillas-turned-outlaws. [more inside]posted by caddis at 8:44 AM PST - 8 comments
Arizona Then and Now -- When paired with vintage images of the 19th and 20th centuries, Arizona photographers Allen Dutton and Paul Scharbach's modern-day images reveal the changes that have shaped the state's landscape during the past 100-plus years. They searched the state to locate the precise spots from which to rephotograph the scenes captured by their predecessors, endeavoring to achieve the same angles, perspectives, and lighting as in the early photographs.
posted by netbros at 6:12 AM PST - 17 comments
Tohoku University's Kano Collection is an unparalleled collection of japanese books from the Edo period. The beautiful and grizzly
Kaibou zonshinzu anatomical chart has been
making the blogrounds lately but that's only one of the countless treasures the Kano Collection has to offer. Stumbling around near-blindly, like a non-Japanese reader such as myself, with only minimal help from the site, I have come across an amazing variety of beautiful objects, such as
this picture book,
a scroll with images of animals,
city map,
map of Japan,
battle map,
another picture book,
the Kaitai shouzu anatomical chart and
this picture scroll which has
my favorite little scene I've come across in the collection. Whole days could be spent just surfing idly through the Kano Collection.
posted by Kattullus at 4:06 AM PST - 9 comments
April 27
Craig ("Who?") Ferguson at the White House Correspondents Dinner:
Part 1,
Part 2, and
Part 3. (it's a Three-Link YouTube Post!) Not as pointed as Colbert but lots of funny and acouple moments of OMG. SOME JOKE SPOILERS WITHIN...
[more inside]posted by wendell at 10:47 PM PST - 33 comments
The real secret to producing superheroes (bollywood or otherwise) is to start them young, really
YOUNG.
(Link to single video) posted by sk381 at 8:33 PM PST - 48 comments
Two reporters, Stephen
Bevan of The Sunday Telegraph and Barry
Bearak of the New York Times, tell of their ordeal in Zimbabwe. They were arrested for the crime of “committing journalism,” imprisoned, and subsequently released.
posted by found missing at 5:28 PM PST - 20 comments
The
Saluda Grade is the steepest standard-gauge mainline railway grade in the United States. Built by the Southern Railway, the Saluda Grade consists of a three-mile section of track that rises over 600 feet in elevation with a grade of 4.7% between the towns of Melrose and
Saluda, North Carolina. Take a
virtual flyover of the terrain with Google Earth, then ride along on the adjacent Hwy 176 in an
Audi A3. When you get to the top, don't miss
Coon Dog Day.
posted by netbros at 6:00 AM PST - 9 comments
April 26
Decker isn't quite a roguelike about hacking in the world of
Shadowrun with Windows 3.1-era graphics, but it's as close as you're ever gonna come.
posted by Pope Guilty at 10:09 PM PST - 16 comments
Meet
Freddie:
He looks up at me and the bargaining begins. "If I eat two peas is that enough?" I am used to him starting the bids low. "Now Fred there are only seven peas on your plate, can't you just eat them? ". He then starts to turn pale. He slumps down into his chair and fiddles with his cutlery, accidentally on purpose knocking them onto the floor to create a diversion. Can one determined woman turn
Freddie into a vegetable lover?
posted by bigmusic at 7:43 PM PST - 66 comments
A new study in Science claims that
teaching math is better done by teaching the abstract concepts rather than using concrete examples. From an
article by the study authors in Science Mag (requires subscription):
If a goal of teaching mathematics is to produce knowledge that students can apply to multiple situations, then presenting mathematical concepts through generic instantiations, such as traditional symbolic notation, may be more effective than a series of "good examples." This is not to say that educational design should not incorporate contextualized examples. What we are suggesting is that grounding mathematics deeply in concrete contexts can potentially limit its applicability. Students might be better able to generalize mathematical concepts to various situations if the concepts have been introduced with the use of generic instantiations.
posted by peacheater at 3:24 PM PST - 27 comments
The Straylight release of
Nexus War, a browser based PvP MMO in the vein of
Urban Dead (thought significantly more complex) and
Kingdom of Loathing (thought significantly more serious in tone), occurred today. It brings with it a host of changes, new skills, upgrades, and expansions, shaking things up for the old player base and making it an ideal time for new players to join, both because the status quo is being rewritten and because of a vastly expanded in game help menu.
[more inside]posted by Caduceus at 2:32 PM PST - 22 comments
“People like you are not holding up the Constitution ..." Or so said Major Freddy Welborn, Specialist Jeremy Hall's commanding officer in Tikrit. "Last month, Specialist Hall and the
Military Religious Freedom Foundation, an advocacy group, filed suit in federal court in Kansas, alleging that Specialist Hall’s right to be free from state endorsement of religion under the First Amendment had been violated and that he had faced retaliation for his views. In November, he was sent home early from Iraq because of threats from fellow soldiers." (NY Times)
posted by fourcheesemac at 5:59 AM PST - 123 comments
“We try to follow the footsteps of our elders, who cleared the way for us with their clean minds, hearts, and bodies. They walked in clean land, drank clean water, breathed clean air, and ate clean food provided by Mother Earth. This is the
Red Road.” The powwow is an integral part of Native American life, offering the opportunity for peoples to gather and
celebrate their spiritual connections to their ancestors, the earth, community, and traditions through drum, song, and dance. The photography of
Ben Marra.
posted by netbros at 5:34 AM PST - 12 comments
The other day I happened to come upon a music video that is just so grooving, so human and so
real, that, well, it
moved me, darling.
Just check it out. After watching the clip, I learned that these guys are mostly disabled by polio (that's why several of them are in those rather unusual wheelchairs) and that they were living on the grounds of the Kinshasa zoo, which is where the clip was filmed. Then I learned that last year they were seeking to bring
a lawsuit against the UN. Then I found
some other clips. And now I am a
major fan of
Staff Benda Bilili.
[more inside]posted by flapjax at midnite at 3:30 AM PST - 47 comments
April 25
Silver Bookmarks is a collection of images of over 1000 antique silver bookmarks. They can be browsed by category (e.g.
shape,
origin,
style) all of which are divided into myriad sub-categories (e.g.
Art Deco,
cat,
Shakespeare,
Iceland,
Tunbridgeware,
knife).
Stevengraphs has pictures of the famed bookmarks made by the firm of silk weaver Thomas Stevens as well as other products. Among my favorite Stevengraphs are
Ye Faire Ladie Godiva and Peeping Tom,
The Apostle of Free Trade, John Bright, MP,
Assassinated at Washington 14 April 1865 - The Late Lamented Lincoln,
Speed Well Remember Me and for cheap laughs there is the glorious duo of
Ride the Cock Horse and
I Love Little Pussy.
posted by Kattullus at 10:01 AM PST - 2 comments
It's
official, Del Torro is on board for the new Hobbit move and it's...um..sequel.
Anyway, he seems to be adamant in keeping the as much as the original
creative team on board which is a encouraging sign, roll on 2010?
posted by Mintyblonde at 8:35 AM PST - 91 comments
Steve Carrell on how to act brilliant:I've learned to appear scintillatingly intellectual by asking people questions ("Do you like pizza?"). Then I just look at them, nodding and saying "Hmmm" and "Um hmmm" every few seconds. Try and keep one or two things in your head to regurgitate later. After all, what is knowledge, really, but high-resolution regurgitation?
posted by beaucoupkevin at 8:29 AM PST - 64 comments
With the grounds it was built on having hosted the first demonstration of airplane flight in 1909,
Tempelhof International Airport, the world's second-oldest working commercial airport, was officially opened in 1923. Also known as City Airport, it takes its official name from the Tempelhof neighborhood of Berlin, itself named for the
Knights Templar who owned its land in the Middle Ages.
[more inside]posted by Your Time Machine Sucks at 5:12 AM PST - 36 comments
April 24
Sometimes, when you've had your fill of people basking in the golden light of their self-righteous indignation, you just wanna hear a song about somebody telling those holier-than-thou-ers where to get off. Something like, say,
Harper Valley PTA.
[more inside]posted by flapjax at midnite at 6:29 PM PST - 39 comments
" It looks as if our Milky Way will be subsumed into its giant neighbour, the Andromeda galaxy...." A (not so) little trove of images of galactic collisions has been released to mark the 18th anniversary of the Hubble telescope's launch.
Gravitic Mayhem. (
via)
posted by Kronos_to_Earth at 6:04 PM PST - 21 comments
"As a great architect once said, 'Buildings should look like what they are'." John Jessop became so frustrated with the red tape required for his company to get permission to build a farm shed,
he submitted a sarcastic application . Read his full "Planning Application for Erection of Agricultural Implement Shed"
here [pdf, 3 pages]. No word yet on whether the shed was approved.
Via.posted by amyms at 5:55 PM PST - 27 comments
At least it will sound like I'm furiously busy as I fritter away the rest of the afternoon racing.
TypeRacing!
posted by BoatMeme at 12:51 PM PST - 90 comments
On Having A Black Name "I am a white woman, a blond, blue-eyed white woman, and I have a first name strongly associated with black women. My mother, a southerner by birth, never stopped telling me she made the name up. The fact that she truly could not remember ever hearing the name before, is a testament to the strength of southern segregation. It is likely she heard it once or twice, and simply forgot it until later. And so, even at 50 years old, I have a name that makes people do a double-take. "You're _____?" is something I have heard all my life. "Yes, that would be me," is what I say, as they look confused. I have upset the social order. Names, I have learned, are a big, big part of it."
posted by nooneyouknow at 9:06 AM PST - 257 comments
Arthur Mole first developed his technique of collective portraiture in a religious context, photographing fellow church members gathered together in the shape of religious symbols. When the United States entered World War I, Mole and his colleague John Thomas turned to
patriotic themes. They choreographed thousands of soldiers into
formations such as the
Liberty Bell and the
Statue of Liberty. Their largest production was the
U.S. Human Shield, photographed at Camp Custer, Battle Creek, Michigan, which comprised 30,000 men.
Wiki. [more inside]posted by ColdChef at 7:51 AM PST - 10 comments
Awaiting autopsy, the newly deceased lies supine, naked, on a metal table. The head is positioned as if the closed eyes were looking straight up. The arms are at the side. The knees and elbows are straight. The ankles are bent forward, not to the side, at an angle of about 45 degrees. I have seen the bodies this way of persons I had known, persons I had spoken with the previous day. And sometimes a live patient, consulting me for a physical examination, will lie the same way on the examination table, naked, looking up, arms at his side; and my thoughts turn to the autopsy suite. I wonder if I will someday see him too lying this way, recently cold, and I wonder about the complicated awful predicament of the physician.
Short essays by Charles Bardes, M.D. on the practice of medicine.
An appreciation of Charles Bardes by Sven Birkerts.
posted by Kattullus at 7:29 AM PST - 15 comments
Disclosing victim status could mean being denied that housing is even available. Women strong enough to flee their homes and their abusive situations were more likely to be denied housing outright, something that did not happen to people not disclosing.
posted by jacobw at 6:06 AM PST - 29 comments
April 23
The financial turmoil of 2007-?: a preliminary assessment and some policy considerations (pdf) "All episodes of financial distress of a systemic nature, with potentially significant implications for the real economy, arguably have at their root an overextension in risk-taking and in balance sheets in good times, masked by the veneer of a vibrant economy. This overextension generates financial vulnerabilities that are clearly revealed only once the economic environment becomes less benign, in turn contributing to its further deterioration."
A scholarly, sane, relatively brief, accessible-to-the-layperson, and mostly apolitical look at the current turmoil.
posted by Kwantsar at 3:31 PM PST - 36 comments
There’s more than a few valve’s worth of pressurized love for steampunk on MeFi
[previously 1 2 3]. Naturally, we’ve also had to replace many a sump filter due to the vitriol sluicing from the very same. Regardless how
you may feel about it,
Steampunk Magazine seeks to accompany the genre along its transmogrification from a form of fiction into fashion, music, and ‘misapplied technology’.
[more inside]posted by cosmonik at 8:43 AM PST - 47 comments
Once upon a time in the postwar, before the advent of EPA and OSHA and the Consumer Products Safety Commission and weenies in bike helmets and multilingual warning stickers on stepladders, crazy people walked this earth. Good, fun-loving Americans who knew that "instructions" were something you threw in the trash along with the empty Falstaff bottles. A halcyon era filled with manly men who savored the wholesome virtues of a rugged game of un-seatbelted automotive chicken. One of these men was Gene Middlebrooks, who founded
Turbonique.
[more inside]posted by dg at 5:43 AM PST - 50 comments
In celebration of my antipodean homesickness I've spent the morning catching up with some great Australian and New Zealand musical comedy acts I've been to. You've already met
Flight of the Conchords previously on mefi. Now come and meet some...
[more inside]posted by steerpike at 5:40 AM PST - 15 comments
The Open Source Boob Project. At Penguicon, we had buttons to give away. There were two small buttons, one for each camp: A green button that said, "YES, you may" and a red button that said "NO, you may not." And anyone who had those buttons on, whether you knew them or not, was someone you could approach and ask: "Excuse me, but may I touch your breasts?" Once taken online, the grand flurry of
reactions have been decidedly
mixed.
[more inside]posted by Hildegarde at 5:25 AM PST - 247 comments
April 22
The new face of hunger -- “World agriculture has entered a new, unsustainable and politically risky period” says the International Food Policy Research Institute. Food riots have erupted in countries all along the equator because of soaring food commodity prices. So, where does the world get more food? If the extra supplies are to come mainly from large farmers in America and Europe, then they may be
trapped in a farm subsidy Catch-22. Increase production per acre? We just learned about the myth of GM crops (
previously of MeFi). All of this is why some are just
sitting out Earth Day.
posted by netbros at 9:23 PM PST - 114 comments
Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu doesn't speak much, but when he takes up his guitar, he
sings, literally and figuratively. He sings of growing up in an Aboriginal community on a remote island off the north coast of Australia; he sings of coming to terms with being born blind; and he sings the creation stories of his
Yolngu people.
posted by dhruva at 4:34 PM PST - 19 comments
I want you to want me is the latest project from
Jon Harris and
Sep Kamvar. It's an interactive touch-screen installation at
MoMA, part of the current exhibit called
Design and the Elastic Mind. The installation culls dating profiles from the Internet and visualizes trends and statistics. Each person is represented as a floating balloon. If you're in NYC, check the exhibit out before it closes on May 12. Otherwise, here's a
video.
posted by spigoat at 9:07 AM PST - 10 comments
This story from NPR's morning edition discusses a program in a Georgia middle and high school that pays students $8 per day to go to after school study sessions twice a week.
Jackie Cushman is the originator of the project. She is also
Newt Gingrich's daughter.
[more inside]posted by wittgenstein at 6:01 AM PST - 100 comments
The Lighthouse Directory. An information portal for over 9000 lighthouses, and sites of former lighthouses, all around the world. Photos, histories, technical specifications, etc. Most of the links are very thorough, with some including excerpts from keepers' logs. The site also includes links to current news stories and general historical articles related to lighthouses.
posted by amyms at 1:33 AM PST - 28 comments
April 21
Why do we spend so many precious hours of our lives watching films? What is it about cinema that it should occupy a place of such prominence in our lives? And why do we even need movies? It is as though we are trying to fill a gap in our lives - a void, an emptiness within ourselves. So to even begin on the path of our Truth Quest, we have to see the broader picture of how film correlates to life, and life to film. To find this higher perspective, it is helpful to look towards the other arts, as well as philosophy.Cinema Seekers: Searching for truth in cinema and in life.
[more inside]posted by carsonb at 11:49 PM PST - 26 comments
Tul Karem’s refugee camp, the time, if I remember correctly, Chanukah 2003, it was to execute there about 9 people. Sorry, I don’t remember the pretense we were given for the mission.
From Shovrim Shtika or
Breaking the Silence where Israeli soldiers confess the horror they have visited on
Hebronposted by adamvasco at 11:45 PM PST - 13 comments
In 1987, the Caltech biomagnetist and paleomagnetist Joe Kirschvink gave undergraduate Dawn Sumner a rock sample [from South Australia] to study for her senior thesis. The apparent glacial origin of this rock lead directly to the theory that periodically the Earth has been thoroughly glaciated from the poles to the Equator: the so-called
Snowball Earth events. A
website dedicated to this theory includes
detailed teaching slides,
a FAQ, and many other resources on this interesting period in Earth's history.
posted by Rumple at 7:29 PM PST - 7 comments
"So I hit up a garage sale over the weekend and bought a genuine, working-condition Atari 2600, with a huge stack of games nearly mint in their boxes, for a song. I thought I’d scan the box covers and give you all
a look back into the fun of yesteryear."
posted by sveskemus at 3:19 PM PST - 74 comments
Performance Artist Killed on Peace Trip. Pippa Bacca, performance artist, and friend wearing white wedding dresses, planned to hitchhike from Italy to the Balkans to the Middle East to send a message of peace and “marriage between different peoples and nations.” After three weeks on the road, Pippa Bacca was killed by a driver who offered her a ride. Her naked body was found and local authorities said Ms. Bacca had been raped and strangled.
posted by semmi at 12:25 PM PST - 106 comments
Kids-in-mind "provides parents and other adults with objective and complete information about a film's content so that they can decide, based on their own value system, whether they should watch a movie with or without their kids." Informative AND unintentionally hilarious! From the somewhat kid-friendly
Ratatouille (
A rat smokes a mushroom over a chimney, and with another rat they are struck by lightning, thrown from the roof and to the ground (they have electrified fur but are otherwise OK).) to
more decidedly non-
kid-
friendly fare,
and everything in between.
[more inside]posted by (bb|[^b]{2}) at 12:02 PM PST - 81 comments
A Rage In Dalston [
BBC Radio 4 documentary, 1hr, streaming RealMedia] "For four years after 1945, London and the South East witnessed vicious confrontations between the remnants of Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists and Jewish ex-servicemen organised in the
43 Group." Interviewees include
Vidal Sassoon, by day mild-mannered teenage hairdresser of talent, by night militant anti-fascist. Documentary maker Alan Dein was unable to get any surviving Moseleyites to talk for the programme but there's contributions from Trevor Grundy, author of
Memoir of a Fascist Childhood.
posted by Abiezer at 1:17 AM PST - 34 comments
"When I get the time when I'm not raking, whenever I'm near water, I'll beach comb for bits of wood, feather or anything else that appeals and make
some boats."
posted by nthdegx at 1:14 AM PST - 13 comments
April 20
Thirty-six years after the
National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse recommended that "simple possession" of pot be decriminalised, Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) has
introduced a bill, co-sponsored by Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), to remove federal criminal penalties for possession of up to 100 grams (about three-and-a-half ounces) of marijuana and the not-for-profit transfer of up to one ounce (28.3 grams). Drug reform advocates
lit up hailed the legislation as "an important step toward bringing federal law into line with scientific fact, practical reality and public opinion." Is America, at long last, having a collective moment of sanity?
posted by kliuless at 7:40 PM PST - 76 comments
Smooth Jazz, also sometimes referred to as new adult contemporary music or instrumental pop, is generally described as a genre that utilizes instruments and improvisation traditionally associated with jazz and stylistic influences drawn from mostly R&B, but also funk and pop. Since the late 1980s and into the 1990s, it has become successful as a
radio format. [source
wikipedia]
[more inside]posted by netbros at 1:35 PM PST - 251 comments
Robbins Barstow's 1956 home movie. Take a trip back to 1956 with Robbins Barstow, his wife, and three kids. After winning a 3M (Scotch Tape) contest, the family won a trip to Disneyland! For those of you who, like me, lived through the 50's, this will transport you back... for the rest of you, find out what life was like for your Parents and Grandparents.
via [more inside]posted by HuronBob at 5:11 AM PST - 16 comments
April 19
Television military analysts are wooed, courted, and privileged by the Pentagon. An in-depth investigative report by the
New York Times uncovers logrolling, shilling, touting, back-scratching, and just plain bias on the part of the experts that television networks put on the air to talk about the war. Some of them appear to be as good as owned by the Defense Department. "The effort, which began with the buildup to the Iraq war and continues to this day, has sought to exploit ideological and military allegiances, and also a powerful financial dynamic: Most of the analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air. Those business relationships are hardly ever disclosed to the viewers, and sometimes not even to the networks themselves."
posted by Mo Nickels at 6:32 PM PST - 37 comments
Today is Record Store Day!What is it about music? It is Love and Passion channeled through a medium that cuts across and through actual definition straight to your soul whether you love Blues, Reggae, Country, Punk Rock, or Quawwali music, your favorite artists take you places you could otherwise never go - and that place is often a place of love and inspiration. -
Marc Weinstein [more inside]posted by carsonb at 5:58 PM PST - 38 comments
Light makes a comeback. “New technologies — more sophisticated imaging techniques, fluorescent molecules that act as beacons of light in the cell, and the computing power to gather and stitch together multiple images and create videos from high-powered microscopes — make it possible to harness one of light’s key advantages: gentleness. Unlike higher-resolution techniques, light microscopes can image biological structures without killing them or chemically fixing them. At Harvard, the resurgence of light microscopy is making it possible to see structures and events that have never before been seen in the context of living cells and organisms.” Also don't miss the
video samples of “in vivo” imagining.
posted by Frankieist at 8:02 AM PST - 12 comments
April 18
Mole Man to pay £300,000 for burrowing under home. A retired engineer nicknamed “Mole Man”, because of his fondness for burrowing tunnels under his home
(video), has been ordered to pay almost £300,000 to the local council (he lives in London) after his hobby nearly caused his house to collapse
(article with a few photos). William Lyttle, 77, spent 40 years excavating a maze of tunnels beneath his
20-room Victorian property in
Hackney, East London, before the council intervened.
"I often used to joke that I expect him to come tunnelling up through the kitchen floor," said Marc Beishon, who lives a few yards from William Lyttle's house,
in 2006, when the Mole Man was first ordered to stop.
[more inside]posted by KokuRyu at 10:33 PM PST - 31 comments
My Beautiful Mommy is a children's book for children whose mothers suddenly come home from the doctor with giant hooters, or significant amounts of fat suddenly missing. A
bold new market in childrens publishing awaits.
posted by jonson at 9:17 AM PST - 66 comments
Since 1999,
The Language of Lagomorphs has been the foremost resource on the web for information about the body language of domestic rabbits. "It's been pretty amazing to see how many people, even those who live with rabbits, are outright shocked at just how communicative they really are once you learn to notice. The contrast between this reality and the popular misconception that rabbits 'just sit there' could not be greater."
[more inside]posted by clavicle at 8:45 AM PST - 27 comments
A leaflet on alternative medicine produced by the Prince's Foundation for Integrated Health has been condemned by Britain's first Professor of Complementary Medicine.
[more inside]posted by Phanx at 8:22 AM PST - 29 comments
What’s for Dinner? The Pollster Wants to Know"If there’s butter and white wine in your refrigerator and Fig Newtons in the cookie jar, you’re likely to vote for Hillary Clinton. Prefer olive oil, Bear Naked granola and a latte to go? You probably like Barack Obama, too. And if you’re leaning toward John McCain, it’s all about kicking back with a bourbon and a stuffed crust pizza while you watch the Democrats fight it out next week in Pennsylvania."
[more inside]posted by ericb at 8:10 AM PST - 74 comments
The Serenader.
Roberto’s long moon-shadow stretches absurdly across the walls of the house as he plucks prettily at his guitar while his drunk client swaggers like a cat... Like many men in San Cristóbal, Roberto holds two jobs. At night he plays and sings the love songs that men use to woo women; in the day he teaches guitar to young men who may someday be his competition. Of the two jobs, serenading is far more lucrative.posted by amyms at 2:49 AM PST - 3 comments
April 17
A few years ago when I was visiting Alaska, one of the more interesting portions of the trip was the 45-minute drive from Anchorage to Girdwood along the
Turnagain Arm of Cook Inlet. This is one of the world's rare bodies of water that features
bore tides, an amazing scene. The highway is one of only 15 roads in the United States that have been designated an "All-American Road." What about some of the world's greatest highways?
[more inside]posted by netbros at 9:00 PM PST - 17 comments
Superstar Scottish comics writer
Grant Morrison is about to tear the DC Universe apart again with
Final Crisis, the latest in a series of apocalypses and world ending events he's inflicted
on various comics worlds over the years. But there was a time before fame when he wrote the tie-in comic for
ZOIDS, the robot dinosaur children's toy. So what did he do? Ushered in the apocalypse, in the form of
THE BLACK ZOID.
posted by Artw at 8:53 PM PST - 74 comments
Pond scum saves the planet? In the beginning, there were algae, but there was no oil. Then, from algae came oil. Now, the algae are still there, but oil is fast depleting. In future, there will be no oil, but there will still be algae. ^ Power your ride with pond scum. In some
iterations you don't even need l
ight. (we have talked about this
before and the fact that CO2 powers the algae production is not insignificant) More
details here.
posted by caddis at 8:04 PM PST - 28 comments
Canadian-born New Yorkers Adam Gopnik and Malcolm Gladwell have
an eloquent conversation (MP3) about the nature of our eternally under-confident country. Gladwell quips early on that "those of you who are familiar with my writing will know that this practice of talking about X by discussing Y is my only rhetorical move."
Text (though not an exact transcript) is also available, as is
a report.
posted by dbarefoot at 2:08 PM PST - 27 comments
Labour, which had started the disasters of Cyprus by denying it any decolonisation after 1945, had now completed them, abandoning it to trucidation [by doing nothing when Turkey invaded Cyprus in 1974]. London was quite prepared to yield Cyprus to Greece in 1915, in exchange for Greek entry into the war on its side. Had it done so, all subsequent suffering might have been avoided. It is enough to compare the fate of Rhodes, still closer to Turkey and with a comparable Turkish minority, which in 1945 peacefully reverted to Greece, because it was an Italian not a British colony. In the modern history of the Empire, the peculiar malignity of the British record in Cyprus stands apart.
The Divisions of Cyprus, an article in The London Review of Books by historian Perry Anderson, is an excellent history of Cyprus from 1878 to the modern day as well as a polemic against the way that outside powers have treated the island.
[more inside]posted by Kattullus at 11:59 AM PST - 17 comments
Will States Respond to the Foreclosure Crisis? Their headline is that 1 in 33 homeowners are projected to face foreclosure in the next two years. But I found the stat that neighboring homes will lose $356 billion in value a rather staggering number to swallow for those not facing the threat of foreclosure.
posted by jacobw at 11:30 AM PST - 65 comments
Abortion as Art To quote: "she artificially inseminated herself “as often as possible” while periodically taking abortifacient drugs to induce miscarriages. Her exhibition will feature video recordings of these forced miscarriages as well as preserved collections of the blood from the process."
posted by GuyZero at 8:41 AM PST - 500 comments
"As American as Apple Pie" is an oft-repeated remark on the innate "Americaness" of the dish - but when was the last time you actually had apple pie? When was the last time you had General Tso's Chicken?
Jennifer 8. Lee gives an interesting talk on the
cultural phenomenon of Chinese Food.
posted by plexi at 7:38 AM PST - 91 comments
- "Please don't beat me. I'm having my period." ~ Mama Wangari
- "It is being both black and gay [which is problematic]." ~ Zanele Muholi (Nehanda Nyakasikana) [NSFW]
- "Sisters at heart, these women are: from Kibera to Loresho." ~ WM
- "My vagina wants an Uzi" ~ Larissa Klazinga (Amanda Atwood)
- "You are from Kenya? So are you Kikuyu or Luo?" ~ Wangui
Blogs of women from Africa. That is all.
posted by hadjiboy at 6:29 AM PST - 25 comments
cb.vu is a javascript virtual terminal which opens up full window in your browser and lets you fiddle with some UNIX goodness without being connected to a server, or affecting anything in The Real World whatsoever. Try creating, copying and reading files (and, particularly, read the about.txt), or playing one of the games provided. It even has an implementation of
vi!
[more inside]posted by benzo8 at 5:18 AM PST - 18 comments
According to ComScore, Google takes 59.8% of search traffic in the US, leaving Yahoo, MSN and smaller players to fight for the scraps.
Pretty pie-chart here. Slightly different numbers are available from
Compete and
Hitwise, but Google still rules the roost.
posted by SharQ at 3:52 AM PST - 25 comments
The Drug Addiction Paradox "The plants should never have developed toxins that reward animals for eating them, and humans should never have developed a reward mechanism for toxic plants"... De-evolution or Idiotic Design?
[more inside]posted by wendell at 3:30 AM PST - 65 comments
KayakPaddling.net These animated sea kayak paddling tutorials, created by a single student as a final work, just won Finnish eLearning award over national broadcasting company and other big name publishers.
Try
melontaopas.fi for other languages.
posted by Free word order! at 2:46 AM PST - 8 comments
April 16
Monsieur, you vill not speak disrespectfully of a member of ze family! It is a boon travelling companion, without which I do not function, I cannot operate. It has been with me for 21 years, zis thing, this chair!
Glenn Gould performed for 21 years seated in a folding card chair modified by his father to be height adjustable. That one
chair accompanied him around the world in support of each of his recordings and performances, and now resides on a pedestal at the National Library of Canada. Luckily, exact replicas of the skeletal, cushion-less chair
are available for only €990.
[more inside]posted by carsonb at 10:00 PM PST - 20 comments
The 257-foot
Delphine was a 1921 steam-powered yacht designed by and for the Dodge brothers (of Dodge Motors). Today, "of all the large American-built steam yachts built between 1893 and 1930, the
Delphine is the only one left in her original condition with her original steam engines still in service."
Forbes has a fascinating history and
cool pictures of the fully restored 1921 lush decor. But probably forget about chartering it (unless you have 40-60k euros a day).
posted by stbalbach at 8:05 PM PST - 7 comments
Eviction Slip :"In the spring of 2003 about 8,000 tribal people and low-caste farmers living in the Kuno area of Madhya Pradesh, India, were summarily uprooted from the rich farmlands they had cultivated for generations and moved to 24 villages on scrub land outside the borders of a sanctuary created for a pride of six imported Asiatic lions."[
via]
posted by dhruva at 5:46 PM PST - 4 comments
FamilyTales started out as an online archive of letters from a few families but has since expanded to contain letters from many historic figures.
[more inside]posted by ozomatli at 11:03 AM PST - 2 comments
It's the hat. The German ad agency
serviceplan uses the iconic image of Der Führer to create an ad for selling hats. Thomas Weber of the Bonn hat retailer,
Hut-weber, was "a bit reluctant at first, but won over fast by the rather cunning idea and the craftiness carrying the simple, straightforward message that 'hats make people'."
posted by three blind mice at 10:50 AM PST - 61 comments
Gormenghast, that is, the main massing of the original stone, taken by itself would have displayed a certain ponderous architectural quality were it possible to have ignored the circumfusion of those mean dwellings that swarmed like an epidemic around its outer walls.
[more inside]posted by steerpike at 5:19 AM PST - 57 comments
Enough bad news, enough gloom and doom. You remember that
Asteroid 99942 Apophis that we were afraid might hit Earth in 2029? Ain't gonna happen. But it will get close enough for Earth's gravity to alter its orbit and there's a chance it could hit the next time around in 2036.
But only a tiny chance: "
less than 1 in 45,000 using standard dynamical models". according to NASA. Oh wait... NASA just got
skooled by a 13-year-old German Astronomy Geek who says the chances are more like
1 in 450. Still a tiny chance, and the official numbers were only off
by a factor of 100. Oh yeah, we're doomed.
posted by wendell at 12:55 AM PST - 60 comments
April 15
tiny ghosts "is not supposed to be funny. It isn't a comic. It's about what it feels like to be a monster/ghost/robot/toy/etc. but not the scary kind."
posted by owhydididoit at 9:00 PM PST - 11 comments
Dear Monster Lawyers, Let me begin by stating, without equivocation, that I have no interest whatsoever in infringing upon any intellectual property belonging to Monster Cable. Indeed, the less my customers think my products resemble Monster's, in form or in function, the better.posted by veedubya at 12:49 PM PST - 87 comments
What happens when a US President declares war on a concept? In 1964, Canadian photojournalist Hugh O'Connor traveled to eastern Kentucky to document the battlefields of Lyndon Johnson's
war on poverty and was shot for trespassing.
The incident is the subject of a wonderful documentary,
Stranger with a Camera by filmmaker
Elizabeth Barrett, produced by
Appalshop, a non-profit organization in Whitesburg, Kentucky, that works with local artists to promote self-representation in media and the expediency of culture to counteract a stagnating local economy.
Makes you think twice about
nostalgic representations of poor Appalachian coal miners plucking their banjo strings in the hollers, doesn't it?
posted by billtron at 11:02 AM PST - 14 comments
After breaking the ice with his
video message to all Americans, His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI arrives in Washington, D.C. this afternoon for the initial part of his first Papal visit to the United States of America. Watch it all
live.
[more inside]posted by resurrexit at 10:28 AM PST - 36 comments
Riffing on the 1970s as the "Me Generation," Esquire Magazine once referred to the 1980s as the "Re Generation," making the case that all of our popular music, fashion, etc was being recycled from previous decades.
They had no idea. Since then, the flood of entertainment has deposited many more sedimentary layers of pop culture. Today, musicians and music videos mine these condensed strata of modern media as raw materials, producing works of
hyper-compressed cultural references. Case in point:
The Scissor Sisters' "Comfortably Numb",
Justice's "DVNO", and
The Darkness' "I Believe in a Thing Called Love." [more inside]posted by adamrice at 7:54 AM PST - 99 comments
The last of Disney's Nine Old Men, Ollie Johnston, has
passed away at the age of 95. His work at Disney on several classic features and his books with Frank Thomas (
The Illusion of Life in particular), have long been inspiring to animators like myself. He was one of the great ones, and will be missed.
posted by May Kasahara at 6:07 AM PST - 23 comments
April 14
New Security Blanket, Stat! What do you do if you're a parent and your darling child's favorite toy has been worn down to nothing? Or perhaps you're thinking ahead and want a "backup binky?" You start a
"Lost Lovies" thread, of course. Think of it as a hive mind for real desperate housewives looking for something better than a creative explanation as to why Sprinkles the Cow is suddenly MIA.
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 9:27 PM PST - 20 comments
In 1963, General Dynamics Astronautics asked politicians, scientists, and military commanders to speculate on the potential state of the world in 2063, recording all these speculations in a book, and sealing it in a time capsule that was lost during the demolition of the General Dynamics Astronautics building. Thankfully, the entirety of the book is
available as a download thanks to the fine folks at
Paleo-Future. Found
Via.
posted by jonson at 9:24 PM PST - 10 comments
London Cross: "If you walk across a great city such as London in two straight lines, south to north and east to west - a cross-section - what do you find?"
posted by Falconetti at 9:10 PM PST - 34 comments
Hurstwic is a loosely affiliated group based in New England with an interest in the societies and peoples who lived in Northern Europe during the Viking age. While no longer formally organized, they still have events, frequently at
the Higgins Armory Museum in Worcester MA.
[more inside]posted by owhydididoit at 8:22 PM PST - 12 comments
The wonders of technology! Browse the web, access your email, telephone your clients - all with the aid of a 7 inch touch screen. It's the
iPhone!posted by Neiltupper at 2:25 PM PST - 24 comments
"A lot of people have lumped us in with punk, but I've never aligned myself with it. I didn't want to be part of a scene, never have. And I knew it wasn't going to last. Once that quick statement was over, most of the main players couldn't handle
the fall-out: they were like a bunch of shell-shocked army majors stuck in time, endlessly repeating their once-successful war cries. When you're dealing in slogans like the Clash and the Pistols, it's hard to keep that shit fresh."
An extract from Mark E. Smith's new autobiography. Bonus: long, rambling, exceedingly pointless
4-part interview with Ian Svenonius
(Nation of Ulysses).
(previously)posted by nasreddin at 11:05 AM PST - 29 comments
Who said anything about a recession? Sometime between the government bailout of Bear Stearns and the Bureau of Labor Statistics report that America lost 80,000 jobs in March, Lee Tachman,
a Wall Street banker, spent roughly $50,000 last month on a four-day jaunt to Miami for himself and three close friends.
“It was just all out — it was insane,” said Mr. Tachman. “I’m not afraid to spend money like that.”
posted by The Jesse Helms at 7:37 AM PST - 259 comments
The Rather Difficult Font Quiz Do you know your Birch from your Bembo from your Bauer Bodini (Hey! Where's Bookman?) At the moment, 34 fonts to identify with more coming soon. A fun way to spend 2-3 minutes and learn just how much a font nerd you really are. (I only got 25 out of 34? I'm ashamed!)
[more inside]posted by wendell at 5:09 AM PST - 39 comments
A couple years ago, The Inquirer noticed that the same college student was endorsing competitors Dell and Gateway. Readers started mailing examples of her selling UPS, Hewlett-Packard, Siemens, Ford, Siemens, CNN, Greyhound, and
quite a few others. After being dubbed The Dell Girl, she was promoted to The Everywhere Girl. People
critized her shallow commitments to the universities she endorsed. Nonstop appearances across most of the western world
must have been fatiguing. She's even in
high demand among Christian and textbook publishers.
[more inside]posted by ardgedee at 4:00 AM PST - 33 comments
April 13
Dear God is a global project for people around the world to share their innermost hopes - and fears - through prayer. Some photos NSFW.
posted by ColdChef at 9:25 PM PST - 39 comments
The best-known version of that joyful ode to getting smashed,
Drinkin' Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee, would surely be the
Jerry Lee Lewis rendition, and Memphis rockabilly singer
Johnny Burnette recorded a
hopping little version of the tune as well. But the song was written and
originally recorded by
Stick (aka "Sticks") McGhee, who adapted it from a chant he learned during his stint in the Army. And yes, "spo-dee-o-dee" was a substitute for
another word, which, though fine for the Army, wasn't exactly radio friendly. Stick wrote a few other tunes in celebration of the alcoholic beverage, including
"Six To Eight" and "Jungle Juice". And as has been pointed out
previously, the song title was likely the inspiration for the alcoholic concoction known as the "
spodi". Drink up!
posted by flapjax at midnite at 8:46 PM PST - 8 comments
Quentin Bryce has been chosen as Australia's new head of state from next month. As the first Australian female in the role she joins a growing list (
currently 48) of international national leaders. Bryce previously served as the Federal Sex Discrimination Commissioner and director of the Queensland Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission prior to her role as Queensland governor.
Replacing a highly decorated
ex-soldier, who cut a
low profile, who had himself replaced a
controversial clergyman, Bryce has the opportunity make a significant mark on the country.
She will join the
list of first holders of political offices, and bring us closer to to a situation where the appointment of women to positions of power is no longer remarkable.
posted by bystander at 8:20 PM PST - 30 comments
Aryan Outfitters - a photo and audio essay from Mother Jones magazine about a day in the life of a 58-year old seamstress who caters to the Ku Klux Klan.
posted by ooga_booga at 1:16 PM PST - 105 comments
If you've ever been to Bangkok you might've run into
one of them and not even known it. They are a ubiquitous fixture on the
bar scene and can be found in the
Nana Plaza area. If you're asking yourself the same question that I was then
this maybe your answer. Although they enjoy a certain amount of acceptance, they still have a
long way to go to be recognized as full citizens with equal rights. Of course, this hasn't
stopped them from staking their claim to the
spotlight, and trying to become as much of the
mainstream as they can. But, if you thought that they were pushovers, well then,
think again.
[previously mentioned here]posted by hadjiboy at 6:47 AM PST - 21 comments
If you love the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain (and who in their right mind doesn't?) and enjoyed the Japanese version of Smoke on the Water, you might just barely tolerate
this.
Warning: contains five minutes of repackaged progressivepretentious rock and images of cello-based dorkiness. I gave it 98/100.posted by wendell at 1:46 AM PST - 26 comments
April 12
FontStruct lets you quickly and easily create fonts constructed out of geometrical shapes, which are arranged in a grid pattern, like tiles or bricks. Once you're done building, FontStruct generates high-quality TrueType fonts, ready to use in any Mac or Windows application.posted by Dave Faris at 9:43 PM PST - 21 comments
"Ten Thousand Cents" is a digital artwork that creates a representation of a $100 bill. Using a custom drawing tool, thousands of individuals working in isolation from one another painted a tiny part of the bill without knowledge of the overall task.
[more inside]posted by sveskemus at 6:24 AM PST - 35 comments
April 11
Friday Free Game Download: If you were presented with the concept of a lesbian BDSM video game, the first word that leapt to your mind would probably not be "adorable." But that is exactly what
Mighty Jill Off is.
[more inside]posted by Countess Elena at 4:15 PM PST - 15 comments
Folk/acoustic Friday: braving
infatuation, heartbreak, pregnancy, Thatcherism, corporate drudgery and bad 90s hair, these artists come bearing gifts.
[more inside]posted by aihal at 3:15 PM PST - 2 comments
Do you find relaxing very taxing? Are you tense? anxious? worried? Always tired but can't fall asleep? Are you afraid you're losing your grip? You may not know it, but that's good. Yes, good! Because this video can help you. Yes, it can! No matter who you are, you will feel better—and live better!—when you learn to relax. You can start right now by watching
The Relaxed Wife (in
two parts). Go ahead, watch!
[more inside]posted by carsonb at 9:09 AM PST - 7 comments
Do you remember those days when mom and dad used to pack you up in the back of the station wagon and drive you to
grandma's and grandpa's? Or when you were a dreamer with nothing else on your mind but to escape from the
one street town to the big city? Have you ever dreamed of
going back, maybe to settle down, get in touch with your roots, and start a new life for yourself. Well,
here's your chance. Why not just
get up and do it this time. Sure, it's not going to be easy, but maybe it's the change you've been
looking for. On the other hand, maybe not, so be advised. But whatever you decide, it sure does look like a
way of life that does hold a lot of potential.
[more inside]posted by hadjiboy at 8:40 AM PST - 42 comments
April 10
The antidote to LOLbushsuxx0rs. Over the course of the past week, Slate ran a ten (10!)-piece series, "Fixin' It", in which various writers postulated how the course of various aspects of the United States' military, culture, and policies could be redirected for the better. Although the articles are not entirely devoid of Bush criticism, there's mostly a fairly rare focus on the positive actions to be taken from here onward by the next President (whether it be McCain or Obama or Clinton).
posted by WCityMike at 5:54 PM PST - 33 comments
"Moralistic, prejudiced, racist, misogynist, manipulative, sexist, daring, exciting, critical, sarcastic and passionate - these are just a few adjectives that commonly describe Mexico's most widely-read publication:
the historieta."
[more inside]posted by jbickers at 2:35 PM PST - 4 comments
Elephant Polo. Alf Leif Erickson is the Captain of the American Screw Tuskers Elephant Polo team . Alf is a retired attorney and former law professor from Florida. This alone doesn't make much of a post, but, you guessed it, there more, sometimes NSFW, inside.....
[more inside]posted by HuronBob at 2:15 PM PST - 19 comments
A Million Voices. Staff members of the University Archives at Virginia Tech are working to catalog and make available the more than 87,000 letters, poems, posters and artifacts that arrived at the school in the wake of the April 16 shootings. Dubbed T
he Prevail Archives, the website has
a database with images of some of the items.
[more inside]posted by marxchivist at 12:38 PM PST - 11 comments
Mortified is a group in various cities that allows people to "share their own adolescent journals, letters, poems, lyrics, home movies, stories and more." It's
embarrassing, to be sure, but it's frequently also
hilarious (NSFW). Recently they've set up
a page to share videos of live performances, and the latest is my favorite so far. "
500 Miles To Hollywood" features Elijah Wood, James Denton (Desperate Housewives), Busy Phillips (Freaks & Geeks), Kevin McDonald (Kids in the Hall) and Curtis Armstrong (Revenge of the Nerds) "helping Jason Smith fulfill his dream and bring a 2-decade-old screenplay to life."
posted by ktoad at 9:44 AM PST - 20 comments
Jemima Packington a Worcester fortune-teller claims she can tell people's futures by using
asparagus.
Ms Packington, who calls herself Britain's only "asparamancer", showed off her technique at the British Trade and Travel Fair at Birmingham's NEC. Actor Tony Robinson, Baldrick in the comedy series Blackadder, also happened to be there and had his asparagus read by her.
[more inside]posted by electricinca at 8:09 AM PST - 22 comments
Baby Loves Hip-Hop? Kids albums are designed to amuse wee tots at the expense of parental sanity, right? Maybe not. What if you asked one of rap's finest producers to form a supergroup of some of the brightest names in the genre, all to create an album to introduce little minds to the world of hip-hop? You'd end up with
Dino 5, a dinosaur-themed collection of tracks featuring Scratch (from
The Roots), Ladybug (from
Digable Planets), Wordsworth (from
eMC) and Chali 2na (of
Jurassic 5), all under the direction of the one and only
Prince Paul.
(Props to Ivan at Hip-Hop Is Read)posted by grabbingsand at 8:03 AM PST - 17 comments
Learn (or teach) fundamentals of computer science,
without a computer. Provided as hands-on exercises suitable for children, or even CS-illiterate adults. (If this is too basic for you,
go here.)
posted by orthogonality at 12:12 AM PST - 13 comments
April 9
The Mexican kitchen's Islamic connection :"When Mexico’s leading writer, Nobel Prize laureate Octavio Paz, arrived in New Delhi in 1962 to take up his post as ambassador to India, he quickly ran across a culinary puzzle. Although Mexico and India were on opposite sides of the globe, the brown, spicy, aromatic curries that he was offered in India sparked memories of Mexico’s national dish, mole (pronounced MO-lay). Is mole, he wondered, “an ingenious Mexican version of curry, or is curry a Hindu adaptation of a Mexican sauce ?” How could this seeming coincidence of “gastronomic geography” be explained ?"
posted by dhruva at 11:18 PM PST - 53 comments
Just the other day I was thinking about World War 2-era propaganda songs, so of course I gave a listen to
Smoke On the Water. Say what? You didn't know it was about kickin' Hitler's ass? Or Hirohito's? Guess you weren't listening well enough when ol'
Red Foley sang:
"...there'll be nothing left but vultures to inhabit all that land, when our modern ships and bombers make a graveyard of Japan..." I tell you, they just don't write songs like that anymore, friends. Anyway, by 1951 Red was looking forward to
Peace in the Valley.
[more inside]posted by flapjax at midnite at 8:15 PM PST - 20 comments
The individualism-collectivism split between Eastern and Western cultures is well known but it's origin somewhat of a mystery. Now a team of researchers has come up with a surprising explanation:
disease-causing microbes.
posted by stbalbach at 7:00 PM PST - 46 comments
Italy
produced and sold at least 70 million litres of cheap wine containing acid, manure and fertiliser, Italian weekly L'Espresso said on Friday largely blaming organised crime in the south.
[more inside]posted by preparat at 5:10 PM PST - 54 comments
Food insecurity may not be as sexy a cause as climate change, refugees or terrorism, (or bird flu for that matter) but for many people around the world, rising food prices are driving them to
riot .
[more inside]posted by Megami at 4:33 PM PST - 44 comments
The intersect of data visualization and aural phenomena is a fascinating space, from simple chartings of the history of
sampling to mapping the entire
world of music (or even
just electronica). Pop songs become
sketches, iTunes libraries become
twisted geometric forms, and last.fm listening behaviors form coloured
orbs and
waves. The collaborative networks of
comtemporary rappers,
jazz musicians, and
classical composers are revealing of specific and meaningful community structures. Explore
the algorithmic music of Stephan Wolfram's computational universe,
listen to pi or
e or
the Mona Lisa or
the weather or the
temperature in New York City,
discover the shape of sound, or just, you know,
see music.
Use the
Echo Nest to visualize your own music (
example),
tag your music collection with colours, or just wade through the
plethora of
ways to map connections between
artists and
genres.
(several previously)posted by youarenothere at 1:50 PM PST - 12 comments
Limited nuclear war would damage ozone layer. Apart from the human devastation, a small-scale nuclear war between India and Pakistan would destroy much of the ozone layer, leaving the DNA of humans and other organisms at risk of damage from the Sun's rays,
say researchers at the
Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics.
Michael Mills at the LASP and his colleagues used computer models to study how 100 Hiroshima-sized bombs would affect the atmosphere.
They say that their scenario – in which each country launches 50 devices of 15 kilotons – is realistic, given the countries' nuclear arsenals.
"The figure of 100 Hiroshima-sized bombs compares pretty accurately to the approximately 110 warheads that both states reportedly possess between them," agrees Wyn Bowen, professor of non-proliferation and international security in the War Studies Group at King's College, UK.
Here is an
earlier 2006 report by Michael Mills about the devastating effect even a limited nuclear war would have on the ozone layer.
posted by KokuRyu at 12:23 PM PST - 55 comments
So, you're planning to take a trip around the world, are you? Well, in that case--you'll need to know a couple of things before you leave (in order not to offend the sensibilities of the local population). Let's see--suppose you're making your way through
Azerbaijan for example, and your host happens to be a businessman who is about to embark on a journey to the city: what would you do to give him the appropriate send off? Would you:
- a) Bid him farewell and shake his hand.
- b) Dance in front of him and do a traditional jig that everyone else is doing in order to ward off evil spirits.
- c) Throw a bowl of water in his wake.
Don't know, well, that's okay.
[more inside]posted by hadjiboy at 9:17 AM PST - 25 comments
Riding The Tiger; Muqtada al-Sadr and the American Dilemma in Iraq is the final chapter of
Patrick Cockburn's new book.
Seymour Hersh has called Cockburn, who writes for the British paper, The Independent, "quite simply, the best Western journalist at work in Iraq today."
Meanwhile al - Sadr has
called off his million man march for now.
Juan Cole asks: What if the US military presence is juvenilizing the Iraqis and prolonging the civil war?
posted by adamvasco at 3:50 AM PST - 29 comments
"It's ethnic cleansing happening." Fully ten days after elections that most are speculating were indeed won by the opposition party (Movement for Democratic Change), Robert Mugabe still clings to power in Zimbabwe. The voting results have
still not been released, and 5 election officials have been arrested, "accused of tampering with the vote to the detriment of Mugabe's tally." Its been a tense time for Zim, and now the violence and land seizures have started again.
[more inside]posted by allkindsoftime at 12:30 AM PST - 67 comments
April 8
At TED this past March, Al Gore once again presented the Mother of all Power Point Shows. This time around, there is a renewed sense of urgency, with updated slides about Arctic sea ice loss, among other things. More so than in the past, Gore specifically focuses on the necessity for laws to change, and how before that can happen, politics, especially American politics, must change as well. Another theme of Gore's latest TED appearance is how climate change is also a tremendous opportunity for a new heroic generation, to be remembered as the ones who solved the greatest crisis of human civilization.
posted by [expletive deleted] at 2:43 PM PST - 30 comments
Paul Theroux reviews Patrick French's frank, full, authorized (!) biography of Nobel Prize-winning author V.S. Naipaul. Sir Vidiadhar is not, in Theroux's estimation, a very nice man. He tortures his wife emotionally, his mistress physically, and he treats people of all races with narcissistic condescension. But can he write?
[more inside]posted by sy at 1:41 PM PST - 18 comments
The
One Man Band has evolved. No longer will the one man band be burdened by the weight and bulk of backpack drum kits, guitars, or accordions - or knowing what notes to play. Behold!
Beamz by The Sharper Image. Give your nearest buddy a high-five and catch a glimpse into the future of music performance and one of the most hilarious promotional videos you might ever see.
posted by hellslinger at 12:40 PM PST - 60 comments
Sacred Steel is a
pedal-steel guitar style that evolved in the African-American Pentecostal denomination
The House of God, Which Is the Church of the Living God, the Pillar and Ground of the Truth. Brothers and lap steel players
Willie and Truman Eason, inspired by the electric blues and Hawaiian steel guitar of the 1920s and 30s, brought the sound to two branches of the church, the
Keith and
Jewell dominions. Its hallmark: "talking guitar," in which the sliding steel
emphasizes and mimics the words of preachers and
singers. In the 1970s, a new "
Motor City" tradition began, featuring the more complicated pedal steel guitar. This body of music was known mainly in church circles until two things happened: first, folklorist
Robert Stone became interested in the music and relased several
CD collections. And then, church player
Robert Randolph (and his
Family Band) began taking Sunday morning's music out on
Saturday night.
[more inside]posted by Miko at 12:10 PM PST - 19 comments
Wired, which famously
included the Tesla Roadster in its annual roundup of vaporware,
takes on another electric car firm.
Over the years, ZAP has taken millions from investors and dealers eager to see the company's line of green cars hit the road. But that line has never materialized. Of nearly a dozen groundbreaking eco-vehicles ZAP has promised in public announcements and on its Web site, only the Xebra and its sibling, a truck version, have ever made it to market. [more inside]posted by M.C. Lo-Carb! at 10:34 AM PST - 27 comments
Music is good. Free is good. So
free music must be double good. With over 1000 albums listed from netlabels and other sources,
Free Albums Galore (mentioned a
while ago) is a well-curated collection of links to some of the best free full-length releases on the 'net. Of course, there are a lot more netlabel resources out there.
[more inside]posted by Shepherd at 9:35 AM PST - 9 comments
110 Best Books. 'The perfect library' - According to the Torygraph... at least there's a 'Sci-fi' section among the usual suspects (And one or two bizarre choices - Pelzer! What the heck!)
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 8:09 AM PST - 78 comments
Nothing but short Flash animations, all with the most awesome or annoying techno/8bit soundtracks ever.
Crazy techno monster
,
fingers from craters
,
sometimes it doesn't pay to get up
,
not quite an oomp lompaa
,
furies need exercise too
,
happy at my day job,
all downhill from here,
lunch with my little brother
,
looking for tps reports
,
cardboardobots transform!,
more fingers in crators ,
dive into happy hell
,
mario, wtf?!,
hey kitty
,
dance with me you big bear
and finally,
something to calm you down
Found via
this AskMe question.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 6:13 AM PST - 18 comments
April 7
Storm chase from your desk. This link will not be interesting after a bit, but the technology is impressive. Storm chasers can now stream video of their chases, LIVE. This could be a good show between now and sundown.
[more inside]posted by spock at 4:03 PM PST - 19 comments
Pay to play. The children of big-donor
Harvard alums are systematically
given preference over legacy offspring of lesser means. Additionally David Karen, now a professor at Bryn Mawr, concluded that alumni children at Harvard lose most of their admissions advantage if they apply for financial aid.
posted by The Jesse Helms at 12:02 PM PST - 95 comments
Generative Creativity is a course offered by the University of Sussex through their Informatics department. The
lecture series discusses tools and techniques for generating graphics, music, jokes and riddles, and more.
posted by weston at 10:31 AM PST - 7 comments
Bioculture critiques Cultural Critique Until literature departments take into account that humans are not just cultural or textual phenomena but something more complex, English and related disciplines will continue to be the laughingstock of the academic world that they have been for years because of their obscurantist dogmatism and their coddled and preening pseudo-radicalism. Until they listen to searching criticism of their doctrine, rather than dismissing it as the language of the devil, literature will continue to be betrayed in academe, and academic literary departments will continue to lose students and to isolate themselves from the intellectual advances of our time.posted by jason's_planet at 10:26 AM PST - 107 comments
French Theory. "This is drivel about drivel — “metadrivel” as some stucturalist, post-structuralist or deconstructionist might say."
posted by Xurando at 8:25 AM PST - 132 comments
April 6
I know a man who once went to Sioux City, not one of the world’s leading destinations, precisely because he had never been there before. More than a decade later he still talks about the experience, from the Sergeant Floyd obelisk to the dog track of North Sioux and the meat packing plant converted to a shopping mall. The same impulse explains a non-specialist’s reading a history of Byzantine iconography or a survey of Australian wildlife. Both offer a break in daily life and an enlargement of our sense of wonder and possibility. That awareness can provide a sense of transcendence, and connection, or even the spark of divine discontent that leads people to change their lives.
Reading as Vacation, an essay by J. D. Smith and
Subway Reader, pictures of people who read while using public transportation.
posted by Kattullus at 10:44 PM PST - 17 comments
Located in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of the Canadian province of Nova Scotia, tiny
Sable Island has a population of about 15 humans, assorted marine birds and seals, and more than 300 wild horses.
The island is a bastion of purity, wildness and beauty unmatched in the world.
[more inside]posted by loiseau at 6:19 PM PST - 27 comments
"If feminism is about social change,
white feminism -- a feminism of assimilation, of gentle reform and/or strengthening of institutions that are instrumental to economic exploitation and white supremacy, of ignorance and/or appropriation of the work of feminists of color -- is an oxymoron. And it is not a thing of some bygone era before everyone read bell hooks in college.
It is happening now; you might be part of it."posted by nasreddin at 3:52 PM PST - 182 comments
New York City is the greenest city in America. Eighty-two per cent of Manhattan residents travel to work by public transit, by bicycle, or on foot. That's ten times the rate for Americans in general, and eight times the rate for residents of Los Angeles County. New York City is more populous than all but eleven states; if it were granted statehood, it would rank 51st in per-capita energy use....
But this is not necessarily something people want to hear:
In a conversation with a Sierra Club representative involved in Challenge to Sprawl, I said that the organization's anti-sprawl suggestions and the modified streetscapes in the slide show shared many significant features with Manhattan-whose most salient characteristics include wide sidewalks, narrow streets, mixed uses, densely packed buildings, and an extensive network of subways and buses. The representative hesitated, then said that I was essentially correct, although he would prefer that the program not be described in such terms, since emulating New York City would not be considered an appealing goal by most of the people whom the Sierra Club is trying to persuadeposted by storybored at 2:56 PM PST - 61 comments
Compulse - Drop the different blocks on the stage to affect the direction of the ball. Try to use as few as possible, but you may use as many as you want.
posted by sveskemus at 5:20 AM PST - 32 comments
April 5
The Boneyard.
I’ve come to bear witness to American folly, to rest my eyes on the flying machines that flattened the forests of Southeast Asia, poisoned its people, and changed my life. A personal essay about the long-reaching effects of Agent Orange.
[more inside]posted by amyms at 7:35 PM PST - 14 comments
Free Speculative Fiction Online is a database of free science fiction and fantasy stories online by published authors (no fan-fiction or stories by unpublished writers). Among the authors that FSFO links to are
Paul Di Filippo (14 stories),
James Tiptree, Jr. (4 stories),
Connie Willis (3 stories),
Eleanor Arnason (3 stories),
Bruce Sterling (5 stories),
Robert Heinlein (7 stories),
Ursula K. LeGuin (3 stories),
Jonathan Lethem (5 stories),
Michael Moorcock (6 stories),
Chine Miéville (2 stories),
Samuel R. Delany (3 stories),
Robert Sheckley (8 stories), MeFite
Charles Stross (33 stories) and hundreds of other authors. If you don't know where to start, there's a list of
recommended stories.
posted by Kattullus at 1:52 PM PST - 34 comments
Social Watch monitors the progress of efforts, articulated in numerous international agreements (
1 2 3), to end poverty and increase equality worldwide. By coordinating the reports of a
network of citizens' organizations, Social Watch aims to keep tabs on progress toward specific initiatives in each country, lobbying national governments as appropriate.
Search by country for a snapshot of social and economic progress.
Browse various measures of stability and meaningful development. Lots more, including meaty, well-documented reports and statistics, and holy crapola, nice graphics.
posted by Rykey at 11:05 AM PST - 6 comments
How many times have you heard
this before. Who else can you imagine voicing that line except for the indomitable
Ruth Elizabeth Davis. A screen icon for more than
six decades,
Miss Davis (as she preferred to be called) was in a
league all by herself. The first
woman recipient of the American Film Institutes Life Time Achievement Award, she
minced no words and inspired the
next generation of actresses to come. (If you'd like, you can tune into
TCM and watch some of her most memorable performances that are being telecast this month, or if you're lucky enough to be in Britain, you can probably catch it at a
cinema near you.) Until then, here's the immortal
Bette Davis Eyes sung by Kim Carnes, which Bette Davis herself was a
fan of, and a
clip of the Academy Awards Radio Broadcast featuring Miss Davis for her role in Jezebel. In the end, she did do it the
hard way.
posted by hadjiboy at 3:57 AM PST - 16 comments
The Olympic torch is being welcomed this weekend in the UK as a symbol of the sporting spirit, uniting people around the world in peaceful competition.
But the idea of lighting the torch at the ancient Olympian site in Greece and then running it through different countries has
much darker origins.
[more inside]posted by flapjax at midnite at 2:24 AM PST - 37 comments
Need money? Have a blog? Well, your troubles may be over: "Hiring a block of bloggers to verbally attack a specific person or promote a specific message may be worth considering." Of course, if you don't want to play along, there are other ways to make your blog useful:
Hacking the site and subtly changing the messages and data—merely a few words or phrases—may be sufficient to begin destroying the blogger’s credibility with the audience.... If the messages are subtly tweaked and the data corrupted in the right way, the enemy may reason that the blogger in question has betrayed them and... take down the site (and the blogger) themselves....
Who might you be interested in
"clandestinely recruiting or hiring prominent bloggers"? Oh, the US military.
posted by orthogonality at 2:19 AM PST - 20 comments
April 4
"Some Florida teens believe drinking Mountain Dew or smoking marijuana will prevent pregnancy and that swallowing a capful of bleach will prevent HIV/AIDS."
* As a result, lawmakers are pushing "for an overhaul of sex education in the state. State lawmakers said the myths are spreading because of Florida's
abstinence-only sex education"
* "On Tuesday, a bill that would 'require a more comprehensive approach' to sex education narrowly won approval from a state Senate committee."
*posted by ericb at 9:34 PM PST - 61 comments
There seems to be a resurgence of interest in
Charles Manson, the notorious lifelong convict who is currently serving a life sentence for masterminding the 1969 Tate/LaBianca murders, as of late. You may have heard about the
search for bodies buried at the group's final hideout at Barker Ranch, Death Valley, using specially trained cadaver dogs. Besides that,
Lindsey Lohan has signed on to star as Manson follower Nancy "Brenda" Pitman in a new film entitled
Manson Girls. Also, documentary filmmaker Robert Hendrickson has finally given his classic 1973 film
MANSON a proper DVD release, and has also released a new film entitled
The Manson Gang, consisting of leftover original footage from his first film. There are even rumors that ol' Charlie might receive a new trial. So why all the sudden interest?
[more inside]posted by DecemberBoy at 7:25 PM PST - 52 comments
The
Every Child Matters Education Fund, a non-profit organization that lobbies for better education and services for children,
released a report (audio accompanies link text) this week that reveals that geography is as important as race and class in determining which children succeed, and which fail.
The five highest ranking states, based on such factors as child poverty, infant mortality rates, juvenile incarceration rates and the like, were all in New England, with Vermont on top. The bottom five were all in the central South, with Louisiana coming in last... States with a high tax burden did a far better job of minimizing childhood poverty than low-taxing states.
Via John Ibbitson in the Globe and Mail
[more inside]posted by KokuRyu at 3:18 PM PST - 26 comments
Taaz is a fun, easy-to-use website that gives women the opportunity to “try on” the hottest makeup and hairstyle looks from the convenience of their homes. From creating the perfect smoky eye to painting on a dramatic ruby-red lip for a night out on the town, taaz.com allows women to become their very own makeup artist and create the perfect look for any occasion. [more inside]posted by Dave Faris at 1:20 PM PST - 22 comments
'Is there any chance there would be some Brain Death left?' Brain Death was the creation of two homebrewers and certified beer judges, both brewers of whom are highly respected in their hobby. (For reasons that will become apparent, they wish to remain anonymous.) A potent barleywine (OG 1,100), Brain Death contained an extra ingredient that one of the euphemistically calls "special hops".
posted by mrblack at 11:57 AM PST - 30 comments
Fun Flash Friday:
Throw Me - throw the little guy as far as you can. Avoid the thunderclouds. Use the wrecking balls and colored clouds for an extra boost. Simple as that.
posted by champthom at 11:13 AM PST - 20 comments
Where has all the pubic hair gone? After sweating through the [eight-year-old girl's] eyebrow wax, Engle [...] was directed to give her pint-size client a … bikini wax. “But … there’s nothing there, right?” I ask Engle. “I mean, at eight? Am I forgetting something?” “Nope,” she says. “There’s not. Doesn’t matter. That’s when the mothers are starting them these days.”
posted by desjardins at 9:05 AM PST - 207 comments
April 3
NBC offers
Way Back Wednesdays where you can watch full vintage episodes online of Rod Serling's Night Gallery, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Emergency, Battlestar Galactica, The A-Team,
Buck Rogers, and Miami Vice.posted by Fuzzy Skinner at 9:25 PM PST - 24 comments
In an
alternate universe, the golden mean is found, moderation is possible, and everyone on MeFi will hear their counterparts point of view first.
posted by phyrewerx at 3:58 PM PST - 56 comments
Monsanto’s Harvest of Fear. "Monsanto already dominates America’s food chain with its genetically modified seeds. Now it has targeted milk production. Just as frightening as the corporation’s tactics–ruthless legal battles against small farmers–is its decades-long history of toxic contamination."
posted by homunculus at 1:00 PM PST - 77 comments
After nearly 21 months of hiatus, whimsical politics blog
Fafblog is back! And it's redesigned, too!
Right now I would ordinarily include a link to best posts of the past, but I would have to include
all of them.
posted by JHarris at 11:58 AM PST - 49 comments
Disc golf- like it's ball-and-club cousin- challenges the player to navigate the obstacles of a pre-designed course from tee to basket, with progress being marked by the distance of your throw. It's my favorite way to enjoy the outdoors- and most courses are free to play! The sport is easy and fun to get into, yet provides an exhilarating challenge to players of all skill levels. You can play to relax, socialize, or win, depending on your style.
What is disc golf, and
where did it come from?
With over 1000 courses in the US alone, you should have no problems
finding a course in your area.
Pick out some discs, grab a few friends, and go get throwing! Here are
some tips for new players.
[more inside]posted by baphomet at 11:04 AM PST - 53 comments
“You could almost see their dicks getting hard as they got new ideas." A
Vanity Fair reporter investigates the chain of command that tossed out the Geneva Conventions and instituted coercive interrogation techniques -- some might call them torture or even
war crimes -- in Bush's Global War on Terror. UC Berkeley law professor John Yoo's now-obsolete 81-page memo to the Pentagon in 2003 [available as PDFs
here and here] was crucial, offering a broad range of legal justifications and deniability for disregarding international law in the name of
"self-defense." Others
say that Yoo was just making "a clear point about the limits of Congress to intrude on the executive branch in its exercise of duties as Commander in Chief." [previously
here and
here.]
posted by digaman at 7:53 AM PST - 76 comments
Brijit is sort of like a MeFi for magazine articles, but each post is 100-words and you get $5-$8 for each post (if you can write a good summary of the article). It is part of a
"new" wave in non-algorithmic human-powered filtering of the net.
posted by stbalbach at 7:14 AM PST - 37 comments
Steam locomotives are dead, right?
Awe-inspiring though they might be, labor issues and diesel fuel at 4 cents a gallon killed them in the 1950's and 60's, and they survive only in isolated pockets around the world and on tourist railways.
[more inside]posted by pjern at 6:56 AM PST - 51 comments
April 2
"1 Crunchwrap Supreme + 1
OCTO-MAC + 20 or so Taco Bell Fire Sauce packets + Taco Bell Cheese Sauce + Bacos + Garfield's Macaroni & Beef + A splash of Jim Beam + Approximately 2 cups of salsa =
GODKILLER, for why else would it exist but to kill God?"
[more inside]posted by Del Far at 9:28 PM PST - 64 comments
An Artist's
view from her tent. Listen to the view. Yes, listen. Katie Paterson via mobile phone and underwater mike at a glacier lake in Iceland, captures underwater sounds of melting and cracking Jökulsárlón Glacier.
Hear it piddling away. Call to listen what the seals are talking about, if they're nearby.
[more inside]posted by alicesshoe at 5:53 PM PST - 9 comments
A very special '
This American Life' about an administration with the endemic belief that laws only apply to the little people, and a limitless refusal to concede on even petty issues, no matter the costs. The highlight is about immigrant widows of US citizens (30:50). The program also discusses the constitutional beliefs of the presidential candidates.
[more inside]posted by East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabaddi Champion '94 at 7:45 AM PST - 43 comments
Toys - 59,237 of them.
This group is about collecting photographic evidence that toys get up to things when people are not around. Well, not just that - It is also simply a space to collect good images of toys for everyone to enjoy. (via dorian) [more inside]posted by caddis at 7:09 AM PST - 4 comments
Roger Ebert to return to writing movie reviews. Love him, hate him, disagree with him, worship him, whatever, but Pulitzer Prize winning movie critic Roger Ebert, after several operations that have left him without the power of speech, will return to writing movie reviews shortly after his 10th Annual movie festival, Ebertfest.
Me, personally, I'm happy as heck about this.
posted by willmize at 4:49 AM PST - 56 comments
More business innovation from Radiohead Radiohead, iTunes and GarageBand are giving you the opportunity to remix the band's new single "Nude". To make remixing easy, the separate 'stems'* from the song are available to purchase from iTunes
_here_. The 'stems' available are bass, voice, guitar, strings/fx and drums. You can mix them in any way you like, either by adding your own beats and instrumentation, or just remixing the original parts.
posted by psmealey at 3:39 AM PST - 69 comments
April 1
The End Of The World As We Know It.
If you want to imagine the catastrophe - how you would cope, what would you do to save yourself and your family - where do you turn for advice?... The idea of dying together, all of us, in some ways seems less appalling than the thought of going alone.
Via.posted by amyms at 11:32 PM PST - 29 comments
Porn for the Blind is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to producing audio descriptions of sample movie clips from adult web sites. This service is provided free of charge. [NSFW]
posted by basicchannel at 11:09 PM PST - 32 comments
An ancient tradition or despicable exploitation? As in ancient Greece and Shakespeare's theatre,
boys dress as women to entertain men. A hint of Afghan homosexuality was included in the movie
The Kite Runner. An Uzbekistan theatre group is presenting
two plays on this theme in Seattle this month. The homosexual element of Afghan culture has waxed and waned depending on who is invading their country at the time.
posted by binturong at 4:22 PM PST - 109 comments
Max Mosley,
controversial president of the
FIA (the governing board of F1 and other international motorsports), made headline news this past weekend for a
"sick nazi orgy with 5 hookers" that was caught on tape (posted, but has since been pulled down). He has
apologized, but does not plan to leave his position, despite many who feel his vices may
detract from motor racing.
posted by jaimev at 1:22 PM PST - 87 comments
Life Before Death - (from the site)
"This sombre series of portraits taken of people before and after they had died is a challenging and poignant study. The work by German photographer Walter Schels and his partner Beate Lakotta, who recorded interviews with the subjects in their final days, reveals much about dying - and living."posted by blue_beetle at 8:41 AM PST - 67 comments
3D map of Shanghai. Double Click a building and get a pic of the building My Chinese isn't up to it but if you double click a building you seem to get a pic of the building and nearby flats for rent. The links on the lower left seem to take you the nearest McDonalds, Hospital, and KFC.
You start in the new area of Pudong, go west of the river (direction left) to find the older sites. The cranes on building sites is a nice touch.
If you want to see Shanghai from ground level try here:
City8posted by priorpark17 at 2:33 AM PST - 13 comments
