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April 2011 Archives
April 30
Current TV
previously & previously, the media company founded by Al Gore after the 2000 election, has picked up the kinds of in depth long form journalism being rapidly dropped by major networks, but has been tantalizingly unavailable for those without cable; until now. They have been putting their Vanguard episodes up on their website and on YouTube.
[more inside]posted by Blasdelb at 4:31 PM PST - 24 comments
I asked what he had in mind, and he explained that he was taking a friend and embarking on a round-the-world trip, from the jungles of Africa to the streets of New York by way of India and Australasia, and planning to record any musicians he could find on the way into his Apple Powerbook, using it as a fully fledged multitrack recording studio. His intention thereby, he claimed, was to create a CD, DVD, and documentary film, all three of which would provide a snapshot of mankind at the turn of the new Millennium, and form a vast multimedia project designed to, as he put it, "celebrate the unity and the diversity of humanity". [more inside]posted by hippybear at 4:26 PM PST - 5 comments
The Death and Life of American Planning - Planning professor Thomas J. Campanella discusses the legacy of Jane Jacob's effect on planning in America: First: "Privileging the grassroots over plannerly authority and expertise meant a loss of professional agency." Second: " It diminished the disciplinary identity of planning." Third: "The seeming paucity among American planners today of the speculative courage and vision that once distinguished this profession." Have these culminated in turning American planning into a "trivial profession" whose goals of equity, social justice, and sustainability are self-undermined?
posted by stratastar at 3:41 PM PST - 40 comments
"On November 22, 1997, there was a party at 635 Logan Street, Steubenville, Ohio. Hubbard attended this party. At the party were several members of the gang known as the Crips. It is contested whether Hubbard is a member of the Crips. During that evening, Wise God Allah, a.k.a. Grier Montgomery, was walking down the street outside of the party. Wise God Allah was known to be a member of the rival gang the Bloods. Hubbard and up to nine other men began shooting at Wise God Allah. One of the shots hit Wise God Allah. The gunshot wound was fatal."*
"
On one record I did called 'Wise' that didn't make the album the Supreme Clientele—I couldn't use it, they took it off
**—I cried writing it. I wrote it on the beach. And I cried. And it started raining when I was crying. It was in Miami. I cried writing it, and then when I went to go record it, it had some tears coming to my eyes too, recording it, because I had to zone out, I couldn't really do it in front of everybody. I don't like to record in front of a lot of people especially when I'm writing emotional stuff." - Ghostface Killah [
audio interview]
[more inside]posted by jng at 3:31 PM PST - 12 comments
The first official pics of Stern's new Tron pinball machine have been released. According to Stern, this game will continue their recent trend of keeping games "short" and "random". Features include a miniature (non-working, of course) arcade cabinet over a cellar hole, a dropping three-target assembly (as seen on
Attack From Mars and
Spiderman) with a whirlwind disc behind it, and a third flipper. Like Avatar, it looks like Tron will have a "normal" and "LE" release, with the LE version adding lots of
EL wire all over the playfield.
posted by luvcraft at 11:10 AM PST - 35 comments
Starting in the summer of 2009, Southern Souls began by capturing unique performances by musicians that call southern Ontario home. Seeing musicians play in the places that they live and breathe, places they themselves have chosen—in the street, in a store, in a kitchen or bedroom—is almost a homecoming for the music itself, returning it to the places in which it started.
[more inside]posted by purephase at 8:32 AM PST - 5 comments
It's not quite the Nile, but there is political strife there too. The Illinois river town of Cairo (KAY-row), IL, is
surrounded by the Ohio and the Mississippi, and is in danger of being flooded. The Army Corps of Engineers wants to activate a flood mitigation plan by breaching some levees into spillways designed to mitigate such a flood. Unfortunately, those floodways are in Missouri, and they would rather not have a bunch of farmland flooded just to save some little town in Illinois. Judge Limbaugh (
yes) gave the OK, but the battle isn't over yet.
posted by gjc at 5:45 AM PST - 39 comments
Finally, here you are. At the delcot of tondam, where doshes deave. But the doshery lutt is crenned with glauds.
Glauds! How rorm it would be to pell back to the bewl and distunk them, distunk the whole delcot, let the drokes uncren them. But you are the gostak.
The gostak distims the doshes. And no glaud will vorl them from you.
Delcot
This is the delcot of tondam, where gitches frike and duscats glake. Across from a tophthed curple, a gomway deaves to kiloff and kirf, gombing a samilen to its hoff. Crenned in the loff lutt are five glauds.
>
[more inside]posted by JHarris at 2:54 AM PST - 65 comments
Rediscovered work by DuMaurier.
"Lost for more than 70 years, this dark story of a man's obsessive passion for Rebecca, a mysterious violinist, hasn't been published since it appeared in a small collection in 1937."posted by bardophile at 2:31 AM PST - 5 comments
Fungus of the month , since 1997. Discover the bright aqua
green stain fungus, which turns wood green, and was used by woodworkers in the Renaissance to add natural greens to inlaid wood work. Stinky and obscene
dog stinkhorn fungus (maybe NSFW), like pink wieners growing out of your mulch. And many more,
poisonous,
infectious (warning: gross),
hallucinogenic, with interesting photos and stories, for what he calls "the myco-curious". Bonus:
I survived the destroying angel, an account of what happens if you eat a poisonous
Amanita mushroom and are really, really lucky.
[more inside]posted by LobsterMitten at 12:41 AM PST - 22 comments
April 29
A wave of powerful storm cells swept the southeastern United States this week, spawning
hundreds of tornadoes that wreaked havoc from Texas to Virginia. While damage was widespread throughout the region, the most terrible toll was seen in Alabama, which has accounted for two-thirds of
the more than 300 reported deaths -- the deadliest since the Great Depression -- and where
many small towns were simply wiped from the map. Especially hard-hit was the university town of Tuscaloosa, the state's fifth-largest, where a monstrous F5 tornado (seen in
this terrifying firsthand video) tore a
vicious track through entire neighborhoods and business districts -- narrowly missing the region's primary hospital -- and continuing a path that rained debris as far as Birmingham, over sixty miles away. The disaster
prompted a visit from President Obama today, who declared
"I've never seen devastation like this" after surveying the area with Governor Robert Bentley, Senator Richard Shelby, and
Mayor Walter Maddox. More: photos from
In Focus and
The Big Picture,
aerial footage of the aftermath,
"before and after" sliders, the path of the Tuscaloosa twister
on Google Maps,
People Locator,
local aid information,
MetaTalk check-in threadposted by Rhaomi at 6:18 PM PST - 102 comments
Since the late '70s,
Gordon Monahan has been
making a
career of extracting the unheard from pretty much anything he can get his hands on.
Monahan's works for
piano, loudspeakers, video, kinetic sculpture, and computer-controlled sound environments span various genres from avant-garde concert music to multi-media installation and sound art.
Such pieces include
long string installations activated by wind (Long Aeolian Piano, 1984-88), by
water vortices (Aquaeolian Whirlpool, 1990) and by
indoor air draughts (Spontaneously Harmonious in Certain Kinds of Weather, 1996). His work for
electronic tone generators and
human speaker swingers (Speaker Swinging, 1982), is a hybrid of science, music, and
performance art, where
minimalistic trance music based on the Doppler Effect contrasts with issues central to
performance art such as physical struggle and '
implied threat'.
John Cage once said, "
At the piano, Gordon Monahan produces sounds we haven't heard before."
[more inside]posted by wcfields at 10:17 AM PST - 4 comments
Yes, we turned Office into a game! "Is this Microsoft tone genuinely corny-earnest, reflecting the kind of middle-school pep-rally sensibility that you can only imagine Apple hipsters sneering and snickering at (making you want to punch the hipsters) and Google engineers looking at in amazement? Or is it triple-backflip hipsterism itself, an Onionesque by-golly mockery of corniness? I suppose this is one of the enduring mysteries of life." [
Previously] [
Previously-er]
posted by -->NMN.80.418 at 9:06 AM PST - 66 comments
Inside Pop - The Rock Revolution is a CBS News special, broadcast in April 1967. The show was hosted by Leonard Bernstein and is probably one of the first examples of pop music being examined as a 'serious' art form. The film features many scenes shot in Los Angeles in late 1966, including interviews with Frank Zappa and Graham Nash, as well as the now legendary Brian Wilson solo performance of "Surf's Up." (MLYT) [more inside]posted by overeducated_alligator at 6:30 AM PST - 15 comments
Friday Flash Fun in the (temporary) form of Soul Brother, a retro style 2d flash game from adult swim. You character can jump into a fresh body when killed, which soon proves useful as all the inhabitants of this world have different talents, and thanks to you, very short life spans.
[more inside]posted by Dillonlikescookies at 5:57 AM PST - 10 comments
I drive past the
Meadowlands every day now for the past 2 years on the NJ Turnpike. I kept seeing construction equipment and this area of dead dumping land slowly transform into one with actual streams like out of some
plan. Turns out, there
was.
[more inside]posted by rich at 4:14 AM PST - 19 comments
KTRU Departs FM Airwaves Defiant, Unique As Ever: 2 weeks ago
The FCC Approved controversial sale of Rice University's radio station, KTRU, to the University of Houston and after 40 years of student-run broadcasting, KTRU's FM signal was cut off promptly at 6 a.m. yesterday, leaving a sizable hole in Houston's FM band. The triumphant speech of Jesse Jackson at the 1984 Democratic convention faded into the wall of sound of The Flying Luttenbachers "The Pointed Stick Variations," reaching an almost unbearable harshness before everything ceased.
[
Previously]
posted by Blake at 3:46 AM PST - 50 comments
April 28
Physics tricks could create one-way soundproofing. Materials that genuinely discriminate between the direction of light or sound might be possible, according to a new study. That could make for true one-way mirrors or for directional soundproofing—imagine, for instance, a wall through which sound can enter but not escape.
posted by Leisure_Muffin at 10:11 PM PST - 35 comments
How I Wrote is a series of videos from The Guardian where musicians perform a song after talking about it a little bit. Among the artists who've taken part are
Rufus Wainwright,
Kristin Hersh,
Corinne Bailey Rae,
Laura Marling,
Keren Ann,
Patrick Wolf,
Elbow,
Gruff Rhys,
Warpaint,
Cee Lo Green,
Antony and the Johnsons,
P. J. Harvey and
Emmy the Great, who sings a song about the Royal Wedding, appropriately enough for today (though I suppose the Cee Lo Green song is appropriate too).
posted by Kattullus at 8:42 PM PST - 27 comments
Split Enz were to New Zealand what the Beatles were to the UK, and like the fabs their legacy is impressive: an
endlessly entertaining back-catalogue and some
inspiring solo and band offshoots. One of these,
Crowded House, captured more of the world's attention, but few in New Zealand would question the priority of the Enz. Which must be why, in 2007, Radio New Zealand made an
eight-hour documentary series split over ten podcasts about their fascinating journey from art-folk-classical-prog to New Wave pop mastery:
Enzology is essential listening for any Split Enz fan, featuring "excerpts from all the hits and numerous album tracks, plus previously unreleased demos, live recordings and studio out-takes gathered from the band members' personal archives and elsewhere".
[more inside]posted by rory at 5:16 PM PST - 63 comments
ProCSSor is a powerful (and wholly free) CSS prettifier that lets you format CSS in the exact way you want. Turn your CSS into something that is visually more compelling and readable with a minimum of effort.
posted by netbros at 3:58 PM PST - 27 comments
Go figure: How to succeed in business by doing nothing Article about variability in business and why it is sometimes better to do nothing.
"You're a dynamic business leader. Let's say you make widgets - though you might equally make big-budget Hollywood movies.
Your widgets, or your movies, vary. Some widgets are perfect, some a tad too long. Some movies make mega-bucks at the box office, some bomb.
So what do you do? Well, you're dynamic, so you react, of course. Something must be done. "
[SLBBC]
posted by marienbad at 1:06 PM PST - 16 comments
Jerry Brito and Tate Watkins of George Mason University published a new paper "
Loving the Cyber Bomb? The Dangers of Threat Inflation in Cybersecurity Policy" examining the parallels with the US military's other recent exaggerations.
"Cybersecurity is an important policy issue, but the alarmist rhetoric coming out of Washington that focuses on worst-case scenarios is unhelpful and dangerous. Aspects of current cyber policy discourse parallel the run-up to the Iraq War and pose the same dangers. Pre-war threat inflation and conflation of threats led us into war on shaky evidence. By focusing on doomsday scenarios and conflating cyber threats, government officials threaten to legislate, regulate, or spend in the name of cybersecurity based largely on fear, misplaced rhetoric, conflated threats, and credulous reporting. The public should have access to classified evidence of cyber threats, and further examination of the risks posed by those threats, before sound policies can be proposed, let alone enacted. ...
No one wants a “cyber Katrina” or a “digital Pearl Harbor.” But honestly assessing cyber threats and appropriate responses does not mean that we have to learn to stop worrying and love the cyber bomb."
posted by RSaunders at 12:43 PM PST - 17 comments
Storify is a new social media platform that makes it easy to assemble and winnow Flickr photos, tweets, Facebook posts, Google search results and URLS into a coherent story. It went into
public beta on April 25th.
[more inside]posted by msalt at 10:11 AM PST - 17 comments
Rick Hill was vacationing in Hawaii. So was Joe Parker. The two lived within one town of each other in Massachusetts, but discovered on that Hawaiian beach, when Joe offered to take a picture of Rick with his fiancee, that they have the same father.
posted by zizzle at 9:58 AM PST - 32 comments
A
new paper by
William J. Bruno of the Theoretical Biology & Biophysics group at Los Alamos National Laboratory argues that past arguments about the impossibility of biological tissue damage from cellphone signals have failed to consider a quantum effect whereby multiple photons in a small volume can have constructive interference, and that such an effect likely does occur in practice. Synopsis
here. (
previously)
[more inside]posted by crayz at 5:33 AM PST - 40 comments
April 27
Third, class arbitration greatly increases risks to defendants. Informal procedures do of course have a cost: The absence of multilayered review makes it more likely that errors will go uncorrected. Defendants are willing to accept the costs of these errors in arbitration, since their impact is limited to the size of individual disputes, and presumably outweighed by savings from avoiding the courts. But when damages allegedly owed to tens of thousands of potential claimants are aggregated and decided at once, the risk of an error will often become unacceptable. Faced with even a small chance of a devastating loss, defendants will be pressured into settling questionable claims.
—
Justice Scalia delivers the opinion of the Court, and a knife in the back of class-action suits. [more inside]posted by kipmanley at 3:23 PM PST - 107 comments
Where is the Puck? The Chicago Blackhawks won the Stanley Cup last season for the first time in 50 years. But what happened to the puck that was used to score what some are calling the "most famous goal in Chicago sports history?"
posted by zarq at 10:12 AM PST - 133 comments
After rumors late last year about the Delicious bookmarking service being shut down, it was just announced that it has been sold. It's present version will disappear in July 2011. If you want your bookmarks to be transferred to the new incarnation, you have to
opt in.
According to
a post on the Delicious help pages: "Sorry if we've caught you by surprise. Delicious has been acquired by the founders of YouTube, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen and will become part of their new Internet company, AVOS."
posted by kdern at 9:58 AM PST - 72 comments
Before the iconic Power Rangers, Toei Productions tried some other "Super Sensei" series including 1977's
JAKQ (pronounced jah-kuh) with their playing-card-themed identities. With online poker sites down, maybe it's time for them to make a comeback?
posted by oneswellfoop at 9:45 AM PST - 11 comments
The
E. chromi project is forging ahead with its plan, using recombinant bacteria to detect and display disease states of the human body in your toilet.
[more inside]posted by Blasdelb at 8:14 AM PST - 18 comments
Michael had always claimed he could make anything from wood, and James called his bluff in a big way.
More than 1,000 man hours and a considerable amount of skill and ingenuity later, the
SplinterBike was ready to ride.
posted by veedubya at 4:46 AM PST - 39 comments
Hacker Typer - Now you can look like you're doing something important on your computer, like you've always wanted to! (hit hack and just start bashing at your keyboard)
posted by azarbayejani at 4:04 AM PST - 71 comments
Handwritten 1961 memo in father's immigration file notes Obama born in Hawaii. "Documents obtained from the United States Citizenship and Immigration Service through a Freedom of Information Act request offer evidence that President Barack Obama was born in Hawaii. A memo dated Aug. 31, 1961 from William Wood of Immigration and Naturalization Services indicates that Barack Obama, Sr., was attending the University of Hawaii on a student visa and that a son, Barack Obama, II, was born in Honolulu on Aug, 8, 1961."
[Image of Memo]posted by Fizz at 2:55 AM PST - 719 comments
Flogging as an alternative to incarceration? A thoughtful essay that considers flogging as an alternative to incarceration; the author uses this as a rhetorical device to point out the inefficiencies of incarceration, and get a conversation going. Some of the comments in the forum are priceless.
posted by Vibrissae at 2:35 AM PST - 49 comments
April 26
SETI Institute to shut down alien-seeking radio dishes. Lacking the money to pay its operating expenses, Mountain View's SETI Institute has pulled the plug on the renowned Allen Telescope Array, a field of radio dishes that scan the skies for signals from extraterrestrial civilizations. The timing couldn't be worse, say SETI scientists. After millenniums of musings, this spring astronomers announced that 1,235 new possible planets had been observed by Kepler, a telescope on a space satellite.
posted by Leisure_Muffin at 8:32 PM PST - 146 comments
Moving Beyond the Automobile is a series of ten short videos by
Streetfilms that highlights new directions in urban transportation. It shows how cities in the U.S. are encouraging a shift away from car dependency and making it easier and more pleasant to get around by other means.
[more inside]posted by parudox at 7:25 PM PST - 36 comments
Louisiana-born, Texas-based record producer
Huey Meaux, the so-called "Crazy Cajun", has
died. He was the man behind
Barbara Lynn's 1962 hit
You'll Lose a Good Thing. Three years later, in a move to cash in on the British Invasion, he created a faux-British rock band called "the Sir Douglas Quintet" around San Antonio-born singer-songwriter
Doug Sahm, and produced their hit,
She's About a Mover. Meaux also produced Tex-Mex rocker
Freddy Fender's bilingual hit
Before the Next Teardrop Falls as well as Fender's
Wasted Days and Wasted Nights. Sadly, however, Meaux had a very ugly darker side: he was arrested not once but twice on child-sex charges, doing prison time in the late 60s, and an 11-year bid from '96 to '07. Some of the ugly details of this side of his life are detailed in this
Houston Press article from 1996, shortly after his arrest, which will pretty much make your skin crawl... Well, so long Huey.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 5:18 PM PST - 50 comments
Sony's PlayStation Network and Qriocity have been down since April 20 2011 due to an illegal intrusion. Today
Sony announced that user data - birthdate, user name, password, e-mail address, possibly credit card information, and more - has been compromised for its
69 million users, exposing them to identify theft amongst other things.
[more inside]posted by Foci for Analysis at 1:58 PM PST - 285 comments
Funny Bones -- Anatomy of a Celebrity Caricature. Artist John Kascht looks for the unique character in Conan O'Brien's face and body. And hair. (Half-hour video)
posted by TimTypeZed at 1:25 PM PST - 10 comments
Nadezhda Korotkaya, 77, a widow who lives alone in her small wooden house on the edge of Stary Vyshkov, still remembers the World War II. "The Germans came and went," she said. "But Chernobyl came here to stay." It was 25 years ago today that reactor number four at the Chernobyl power plant exploded, following an emergency shutdown (
detailed recounting of the disaster on Wikipedia).
A memorial was held in Kiev, Ukraine, this morning for the
liquidators who were the first human responders, with
a bell struck at the exact moment of the Chernobyl explosion on April 26, 1986. See also: a look back,
with The Big Picture.
[more inside]posted by filthy light thief at 11:54 AM PST - 23 comments
The Burns Archive is a collection of over 700,000 historical photographs that document
disturbing subject matter: obsolete medical practices and experiments, death, disease, disasters, crime, revolutions, riots and war. Newsweek posted a
select gallery this past October, as well as a
video interview and walk-through with curator and collector Dr. Stanley B. Burns, a New York opthalmologist.
(Via) (Content at links may be disturbing to some.) [more inside]posted by zarq at 9:35 AM PST - 15 comments
Suffering from emotional distress caused by receiving a parking ticket? Not to worry -- members of NYC's
Parking Ticket Emotional Reclamation Project places a therapeutic hand-written note with art into the ticket envelope in hopes to "restore emotional balance to New York, The World, The Universe."
posted by bayani at 9:09 AM PST - 11 comments
April 25
Cute overload The Shiba Inu Puppy Cam has returned, this is the third (and, according to the site, last) litter from the original puppy cam dog mom that we've seen before.
Take a break from the world...
posted by tomswift at 4:45 PM PST - 36 comments
"Good people, unfortunately due to circumstances beyond our control, the "clean" version of our new album, The Hot Sauce Committee pt 2 has leaked. So as a hostile and retaliatory measure with great hubris we are making the full explicit aka filthy dirty nasty version
available for streaming on our new site. We hope this brings much happiness, hugs, and harmony. Enjoy Kikoos for life!"
[more inside]posted by nickheer at 11:32 AM PST - 60 comments
Every year, nine million children under five die from preventable diseases such as diarrhea and malaria. Often, the treatments for these diseases are cheap, safe, and readily available. So why don't people pick these 'low-hanging fruit'? Why don’t mothers vaccinate their children? Why don’t families use bednets, or buy chlorinated water? And why do they spend such large amounts of money on ineffective cure instead?
Poor Economics is a book and website by Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo. It has maps, graphs, and data drawn from the research at MIT's
Poverty Action Lab. It is currently being
reviewed and discussed (
1,
2,
3) at the Economist. BONUS: Duflo
discusses the book and
Randomized Controlled Trials (Wikipedia:
RCT).
posted by anotherpanacea at 11:11 AM PST - 46 comments
"For the progress of humanity, work alone is not adequate, but the work should be associated with love, compassion, right conduct, truthfulness and sympathy. Without the above qualities, selfless service cannot be performed."
On
Sunday morning, Indian guru Sri Sathya Sai Baba
passed away. He leaves behind a massive
empire, several million
mourning devotees worldwide, an
extensive religious philosophy, a great deal of
controversy and a legacy of large-scale philanthropic projects in India, including
free hospitals and mobile medical facilities,
a free university and schools, and other efforts which included supplying
clean water to hundreds of rural villages.
[more inside]posted by zarq at 9:19 AM PST - 41 comments
(notes on) biology, a short stop-motion animation (5.39) by ornana films, features a robot elephant. You have to wait a bit, but it's worth it. Stuff gets good at about 2.25.
posted by bwg at 6:00 AM PST - 8 comments
A federal justice report on policing in New Orleans since 2009 presents damning evidence of brutality, cop misconduct and systemic abuse of black citizens post-Katrina. The city’s jails are not far behind.
No limits to the law in NoLaposted by fearfulsymmetry at 2:56 AM PST - 111 comments
Massive leak reveals secret dossiers on 759 captives
The Guantanamo Files
New York Times and
Guardian
(
) For all the sensitive types that can't read actual wikileak files with out having tanks on your lawn or SWAT teams down your chimney, please rest assured that none of my links here or inside lead directly to *sekrets*)
[more inside]posted by adamvasco at 1:37 AM PST - 391 comments
April 24
Blogging the Hugos: Decline (
part 1,
part 2,
part 3), is a series of blog posts covering some dystopian trends in recent Hugo nominees and itself
winner of the of the BSFA award for non fiction. Meanwhile the 2011 Hugo finalists
have been announced, with Mefi favorites featuring strongly: In Best Novella
The Lifecycle of Software Objects by Ted Chiang (
previously), In Best Short Story
The Things by Peter Watts (
previously). Doctor who features heavily under Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form (
too many posts to mention), but has strong competition from
Fuck Me, Ray Bradbury.
posted by Artw at 7:06 PM PST - 27 comments
Today is a day to celebrate the Risen God. I mean, of course, Cthulhu, that most adorable of Old Ones, who stars in
The Adventures of Lil Cthulhu. If you haven't been eaten yet and need to waste time until then,
The Calls for Cthulhu series is a nice way to distract yourself from your impending doom. If all that cuteness isn't enough, or perhaps too much, then you might want to check out oldie but goodie
Cutethulhu.
posted by Kattullus at 3:21 PM PST - 35 comments
Children in foster care in Michigan get an allowance for clothing. Republican State Senator Bruce Caswell wants to limit their clothing purchases to
thrift stores only.
posted by helloknitty at 11:04 AM PST - 241 comments
Cranking. "She couldn't really help my Dad. My Dad couldn't really help her. But they sure tried. She cranked and cranked. I was seven. I didn't know how to help anyone." - A brief essay on life, happiness and work by Merlin Mann.
posted by Memo at 8:15 AM PST - 50 comments
April 23
The Internet can be a powerful tool when it comes to collaborations between artists of all ilks. Laptop band Project Jenny, Project Jan harnessed said power when it set out to create a video for its new song,
“Lucky Me,” producing a lovely, painterly video courtesy of a Turkish
Ebrû artist the band had never met.
Hikmet Barutçugil redefined the aspects of Ebrû with a scientific approach and managed to transfuse marbling into other disciplines, from architecture to popular crafts.
[more inside]posted by netbros at 5:29 PM PST - 1 comments
Terraria is a recently announced game that is currently in closed alpha. It is similar in play style to the Internet favorite
Minecraft (
previously, and
previously-er, and
previously-er), except it operates in a 2D, sidescrolling world. Players harvest resources to craft items and structures to defend themselves against enemies. A teaser trailer is available
here, and a more extensive gameplay trailer is available
here. The developers are currently uploading "let's play" videos on to their youtube account:
part one here, and
part two here.
[more inside]posted by codacorolla at 4:11 PM PST - 46 comments
Lewis R. Binford, one of the most influential American archaeologists of the last half-century and an early advocate of a more scientific approach to investigating ancient cultures, died on April 11 at his home in Kirksville, Mo. He was 79.
[more inside]posted by infinite intimation at 1:58 PM PST - 7 comments
- It was written by Raymond Scott in 1937, and first heard by the world played by the Raymond Scott Quintette on CBS Radio's Saturday Night Swing Club.
- It was first recorded in 1937 and released by Master Records. It was later re-released by Brunswick and then Columbia.
- It contains a middle section that has a greatly different tempo and style from the rest of the song, to the degree that it is sometimes considered to be two different songs.
- It was a popular tune of its time. Among Raymond Scott's admirers was Carl Stalling, music director for Warner Bros. cartoons. Stalling's appreciation for Scott lead to his music being featured frequently in Warner cartoons. Itself, it has been used in dozens of classic cartoons, especially in places depicting rapid motion or heavy machinery. Despite this, no Warner cartoon contains a complete version of the work.
- It's now so recognized from its use in cartoons that most people can probably hum portions of its middle potion, and recognize the rest, even if they don't know it's name. It's so connected with cartoons that Cartoon Network used it as a distinctive bumper tune from 1997 to 2003.
- Regardless of its iconic nature, it's still in copyright and is controlled in the US by Music Sales Corporation, and elsewhere by Warner/Chappell Music.
- That song is called "Powerhouse."
[more inside]posted by JHarris at 11:34 AM PST - 62 comments
April 22
It wasn't supposed to be like this. Amazon.com's
Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
crashed yesterday, taking with it popular sites like Reddit, Quora, Foursquare, Hootsuite, Act.ly, and about 70 other sites. Amazon.com was affected, as was some functionality of the New York Times. Amazon Web Service's
Health Dashboard indicates that there are still major operating disturbances.
[more inside]posted by 2bucksplus at 4:01 PM PST - 135 comments
Deadspin tells
the story of the unlikely friendship between Kendrick Perkins of the Oklahoma City Thunder and two fans.
posted by reenum at 3:02 PM PST - 22 comments
How Genius Works. The Atlantic asks artists like T.C. Boyle, Tim Burton, Paul Simon, and Frank Gehry (and others who aren't so well-known) to describe their creative process.
posted by helloknitty at 12:01 PM PST - 68 comments
Seth Mnookin courageously fought heroin addiction and re-launched himself as a well-regarded writer. His new book
The Panic Virus raised several questions about the science behind claims that vaccinations contribute to autism, and that the consequences of doing so resulted in the reemergence of formerly eradicated diseases such as measles and whooping cough. In that light, he recently criticized a new
PBS Series which, despite strong scientific evidence to the contrary, again suggests the vaccination-autism connection. This led to a
classless attack on Mnookin's former struggles with addiction. His pained
response.
posted by littlemanclan at 9:49 AM PST - 80 comments
Beastie Boys 25 years later are still fighting for their right. Starring: Jack Black, Will Ferrell, John C. Reilly, Seth Rogen, Elijah Wood, Danny McBride, Orlando Bloom, Kirsten Dunst, David Cross, Will Arnett, Amy Poehler, Jason Schwartzman, Adam Scott, Rainn Wilson, Steve Buscemi, Chloë Sevigny, Alicia Silverstone, Martin Starr, Ted Danson and Rashida Jones.
Here's a link to the original. This may be NSFW.
posted by TheBones at 7:20 AM PST - 64 comments
Iraq Vet Who Advocated For Others Kills Himself "Handsome and friendly, Clay Hunt so epitomized a vibrant Iraq veteran that he was chosen for a public service announcement reminding veterans that they aren't alone." - Clay Hunt died March 31 of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. The article states he had been dealing with "survivors guilt" and frustrated by a difficult disability claim process from wounds received in Iraq.
posted by randomkeystrike at 6:36 AM PST - 70 comments
Yale's 2010 Environmental Performance Index (EPI) ranks 163 countries on 25 performance indicators tracked across ten policy categories covering both environmental public health and ecosystem vitality. These indicators provide a gauge at a national government scale of how close countries are to established environmental policy goals.
posted by wilful at 5:48 AM PST - 8 comments
"By this point there was devastation everywhere. All junctions were blocked by overturned glass bottle dumpsters and makeshift neighbourhood roadblocks blocks."
Last night, a
huge clash between protestors and the police kicked off in the colourful Stokes Croft area of Bristol. The cause? A recently-opened
Tesco Express supermarket.
posted by hnnrs at 5:00 AM PST - 56 comments
April 21
Bacon-wrapped cupcakes: What could possibly go wrong? Well, try explaining your Internet-famous project (
Epic Meal Time) in English on Quebec’s most popular French-language talk show. Bonus difficulty points: You already
are from Quebec, but you don’t speak French well enough to swagger through an interview. Anglo journo Fagstein
analyzes the “controversy.” (The interview in question, from
Tout le monde en parle,
on YouTube;
alternate.)
posted by joeclark at 7:43 PM PST - 97 comments
Portal 2 has finally hit the streets, and despite a somewhat
rocky start with their controversial promotional ARG (
previously), it looks to be a huge success. Interestingly for such a critically-acclaimed blockbuster, the title's core ideas steam from a pair of concept projects from student design school
DigiPen: the original portal system from
Narbacular Drop (
video -
download -
previously) and the sequel's physics-altering gels from
Tag: The Power of Paint (
video -
download -
previously -
previouslier). Combine these innovative ideas with some
Lost-meets-
Life After People level design, excellent
voice acting, and top-notch writing, and it's easy to see why so many people
called in sick this past week. But playing the game is just the beginning -- look inside for a collection of easter eggs, story theories, videos, and other goodies from the post-mortem.
[more inside]posted by Rhaomi at 2:31 PM PST - 425 comments
Captured: A Look Back at the Vietnam War on the 35th Anniversary of the Fall of Saigon. (The following photo collection contains some graphic violence and depictions of dead bodies.)
posted by docgonzo at 2:13 PM PST - 18 comments
From an early age, it was clear that Carly Fleishmann had autism. Furthermore, she couldn't speak, and professionals who had diagnosed her considered her moderately to severely cognitively impaired. Therapy helped, but she still wasn't able to speak. Then at age ten, working with a computer equipped with pictures and symbols, she started typing and spelling words. She started with single words, then wrote sentences,
describing how she felt, and how she wanted people to treat her.
Her story has been presented on a variety of shows, often with insight provided by Carly that
she typed with one finger. As her writing ability has improved over the years,
she has shared her thoughts through her blog (and
as a guest on Larry King's blog), on her own
Twitter feed, and
Facebook page. Now 16, she recently
appeared again on TV, talking through her writing (
transcript).
[more inside]posted by filthy light thief at 1:09 PM PST - 46 comments
... and there is no dark matter/energy! Dr. Philip
Mannheim has succeeded in developing a cosmological and quantum field theoretic consistent PT symmetric theory that contains no kind of dark matter and dark energy.
Space is flat in the absence of matter, and even the largest galactic rotation curves are predicted. Perhaps most interestingly, it also handles the cosmological constant and zero-point energy 'problems' simultaneously! (This is the final paper in a
long list of publications, but it makes the case such that it's importance is immediately recognized. I leave it to the experts to recognize it's true beauty.) All hail the internets!
posted by quanta and qualia at 11:41 AM PST - 210 comments
Max Mathews, died today, here in San Francisco. One of the fathers of electronic music, whose early voice synthesis project became a centerpiece in 2001: A Space Odyssey - HAL singing that old tune "Daisy Bell."
posted by njohnson23 at 11:01 AM PST - 28 comments
When film critic Roger Ebert lost his lower jaw to cancer, he lost the ability to eat and speak. But he did not lose his voice. In a moving talk from TED2011, Ebert and his wife, Chaz, with friends Dean Ornish and John Hunter, come together to tell his remarkable story. [Ted Talk video - 20minutes]
posted by hippybear at 10:11 AM PST - 10 comments
Lester Bangs, the late, great early-rock critic, once said he dreamed of having a basement with every album ever released in it. That's a fantasy shared by many music fans—and, mutatis mutandis, film buffs as well. We all know the Internet has made available a lot of things that were previously hard to get. Recently, though, there are indications of something even more enticing, almost paradisiacal, something that might have made Bangs put down the cough syrup and sit up straight:
that almost everything is available.posted by octothorpe at 5:12 AM PST - 137 comments
April 20
Avoid the News: Towards A Healthy News Diet. (large-ish PDF) Go without news. Cut it out completely. Go cold turkey. Make news as inaccessible as possible . . . . After a while, you will realize that despite your personal news blackout, you have not missed – and you’re not going to miss – any important facts. If some bit of information is truly important to your profession, your company, your family or your community, you will hear it in time – from your friends, your mother-in-law or whomever you talk to or see. When you are with your friends, ask them if anything important is happening in the world. The question is a great conversation starter. Most of the time, the answer will be: “not really.”posted by jason's_planet at 4:58 PM PST - 113 comments
"Weird" Al Yankovic
wanted to do a parody of Lady Gaga's "Born This Way," so he did what he usually does: he contacted the artist and asked permission. Lady Gaga said she'd have to hear the lyrics, so Weird Al wrote the lyrics and sent them to her. Gaga then said she's have to actually hear the song, so Weird Al went into the studio and recorded it - at which point Gaga refused to give her permission. Weird Al responded by doing something he's never done in his entire career: he's asserted his fair use rights and
made an unapproved parody available to the public.
posted by mightygodking at 11:04 AM PST - 538 comments
Paige Johnson works as a nanotechnology researcher at the University of Tulsa, Oklahoma. [...] Her current landscape research is focused on the strange and fascinating story of atomic gardening, a post-war phenomenon in which plants were irradiated in the hopes of producing beneficial mutations.
Pruned talks to Paige Johnson about atomic gardens.posted by shakespeherian at 10:00 AM PST - 22 comments
"Cumbia is one of the world's great dance grooves. It is made up of merry guitars and accordions, torrid brass, and insistent, deep-toned drums and percussion, pounding out a lopsided, strutting 4/4 rhythm with a kick like nitroglycerine. Cumbia is the result of three colliding cultures that settled in Colombia at different times. Indigenous peoples were followed by the Spanish conquistadors, who added on Moorish influences from the sack of Granada. Finally, African slaves were brought in, and they supplied both the rhythm and the means to bring it forth. From its beginnings as a courtship dance among the slave population, cumbia gradually became the soul of the entire nation."
PRI's The World asks, which do you prefer,
Cumbia old or Cumbia new? For Cumbia old the list is long:
Amaneciendo! ::
Cumbias En Moog "Cumbia De Sal" ::
Cumbia Sampuesana ::
Pedro Laza - Cumbia del Monte ::
Gabriel Romero - La Subienda ::
Cumbia plegaria ::
Soledad - Lucy Gonzalez ::
La Zenaida :: For Cumbia new start here:
Chancha via Circuito and then check out the ZZK Mix Tapes:
Fauna Megamix ::
Tremor ::
King Koyaposted by puny human at 9:44 AM PST - 24 comments
Meet Doctor Doom "Forty years ago, with his band Pentagram, Bobby Liebling invented a style of fiendishly heavy metal that hardly anyone heard. He spent the ensuing decades in a haze of hard drugs and big trouble. (5 arrests, 35 detoxes, more than 200 hospital visits.) Now, with the genre he spawned on the rise and a young wife and baby boy in tow, Liebling is feeling the first rumblings of success. Here's where things start to get weird."
[more inside]posted by zarq at 8:03 AM PST - 26 comments
April 19
Interactive map of international adoptions, from the superlative Schuster Institute
for Investigative Journalism. The site contains an amazing amount of information about corruption in international adoption in countries like
Nepal and
Vietnam.
posted by the young rope-rider at 5:09 PM PST - 18 comments
Alan Moore and
Ian Gibson's epic story
The Ballad of Halo Jones concluded 25 years ago today (bar the odd strange
one page appearance hinting at why it did not return). Despite being unpopular with readers at first due to it's female protagonist and relative lack of action it is now rightly regarded as one of 2000ads classic stories. However despite Quality Comics reprinting a color monthly version (which was anything but quality) it has remained a rarity in the US,
until now. But how would the other 6 chapters of the planned 9 part chapter have gone? Moore
revealed how it would have ended in a
recent interview.
posted by Artw at 2:33 PM PST - 20 comments
There are many ways to be immortal. Israel Aharoni, a Jewish biologist working in Turkish-controlled Jerusalem, imagined that his enduring legacy would come from giving Hebrew names to the animals of the Holy Land.... In the spring of 1930, Aharoni staged an expedition to the hills of Syria, near Aleppo, one of the oldest cities in the world. His quest was simple: he wanted to catch the rare golden mammal whose Arabic name translates roughly as 'mister saddlebags.' [more inside]posted by mudpuppie at 1:01 PM PST - 10 comments
The Tao of Poo We can exhaustively explore every aspect of athletic life -- victory, defeat, violence, racism, drugs, brain damage, paralysis, death -- but nothing reveals as much about the physiology, psychology and sociology of sport as the excretory experience of athletes.posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 12:48 PM PST - 48 comments
ShelvAr: an augmented reality app for shelf-reading library stacks, from Miami University Augmented Reality Research Group (
MU ARRG!).
posted by steef at 12:09 PM PST - 25 comments
Andres Serrano (some NSWF images) has made controversial art for decades, with his piece
Piss Christ causing controversy shortly after it was created in 1987. In 1989, the photograph initiated
outrage against the National Endowment for the Arts because of "anti-Christian bigotry". Then the piece was physically attacked
two times in one weekend, when it was first shown in the
National Gallery of Victoria in 1997. In December 2010, the
Collection Lambert museum of contemporary art in Avignon, France opened
a show called "I Believe in Miracles" that includes pieces of minimal art, conceptual art and land art, and includes
Piss Christ. The photograph had been shown in France before without disturbance, and had been shown without incident in Collection Lambert for four months, but
around 1,000 protesters marched to the museum on Saturday, and on Sunday vandals succeeded in attacking the picture, breaking the plexiglass shield and slashing the photograph.
The museum is open again, and the damaged work is still on display.
[more inside]posted by filthy light thief at 10:55 AM PST - 143 comments
What we do is what we do. The brand new DEVO video takes the crowd-sourcing/focus-grouping element of their album
Something For Everybody to the music video world. It's a 360-degree video where the user can control the camera. (For the lazy among us, there's also a "random" button that moves from shot to shot.) The link also includes a brief interview with DEVO co-founder/video co-director Gerald V. Casale.
posted by Rev. Syung Myung Me at 10:09 AM PST - 15 comments
"
Bruno Munari was an Italian artist and designer, who contributed fundamentals to many fields of visual arts (painting, sculpture, film, industrial design, graphics) and non visual arts (literature, poetry) with his research on games, infancy and creativity." Here are a collection of
Bruno Munari's Faces. You can see more of the maestro's work in this short documentary:
1,
2,
3, and on this Italian
children's show from the 1970s. And here are scans from some of Munari's famous
illustrations for children's books.
posted by puny human at 8:36 AM PST - 5 comments
'Star Wars' Producer Gary Kurtz Reflects When George Lucas and I began planning the first film, we had no idea what it would become; the kind of devotion it would attract... So what was it that made Star Wars so different, so special? I can give you one small example of the kind of care we took when putting the film together...posted by modernnomad at 7:12 AM PST - 132 comments
April 18
"From then on, the difference became clear. It’s the male band members who don’t take you seriously, and when you get upset with how you’re treated, ask you if you’re menstruating. It’s the promoters and planners who screw you, then call you a diva when you assert yourself. It’s the kids who don’t talk to you after your set, but talk to your male bandmates because they assume you’re only there for show. It’s the people who think you’re sleeping with the guitarist, the people who assume you’re queer, or the journalists who mention your weight in reviews. It’s every single time a producer has told me I can’t play guitar on my own record because “sweetie, you’re not a studio musician” or “sing it again, but naked.”
Mariel Loveland from
Candy Hearts and
Lauren Denitzio from
The Measure [SA] discuss sexism in modern punk rock. For further reading there's Jessica Hopper's classic essay
Emo: Where the Girls Aren’t.
Previously.posted by Lovecraft In Brooklyn at 6:56 PM PST - 39 comments
As
discussed over the weekend, in less than two weeks the millions of videos uploaded to six-year-old erstwhile YouTube competitor Google Video will
no longer be viewable. Though a download button has been added to each video page for easy back-up,
that will only be available though May 13th, and the company will not be offering transfer service for users with YouTube accounts. The search giant has been slowly winding down the service over the years since their billion-dollar buyout of YouTube, controversially
revoking purchased content (with a refund) in 2007 and
disabling new uploads in 2009. The shutdown is a big blow to the web video ecosystem, as Google Video was one of the few major services to allow free hosting of long-form video, including the content for many popular MetaFilter posts. But all is not lost! Reddit users have organized
a virtual potluck to share the most interesting and unique videos not available anywhere else, and the
Archive Team, preserver of doomed web properties like Geocities (
previously), is partnering with Archive.org to
back up as much content as possible. In that spirit, click inside for a list of some of the most popular Google Video-centric content posted here over the years.
[more inside]posted by Rhaomi at 1:32 PM PST - 54 comments
"
English As She Is Spoke is a broken Portuguese-to-English phrasebook written by two translators, José da Fonseca and Pedro Carolino. Sort of. You see, in reality, translator Pedro Carolino wanted to create a phrasebook on his own. Not knowing English, he took José da Fonseca’s French-to-English phrasebook and then used a Portuguese-to-French phrasebook to translate that. It’s sort of like what you and your friends do on Google Translate, but with a poor, mislead Portuguese man doing it by hand in candlelight."
[more inside]posted by item at 8:52 AM PST - 52 comments
Oracle didn't see this coming. There were some significant concerns when Oracle took stewardship of Sun's open source projects like MySQL and OpenOffice, and these concerns led to contributors to OpenOffice asking Oracle to fork over control of the project. Oracle refused.
[more inside]posted by juiceCake at 6:57 AM PST - 108 comments
April 17
In 1946 Charlie Wohlford, leveraging his reputation for repairing Canadian loggers' boots to better than new, founded
Dayton Boots. The company emphasized quality and grew largely on word of mouth. In 2010 they hired
Rethink Canada for an ad campaign.
The result was interesting.
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 6:42 PM PST - 81 comments
Farewell Good Brothers "An off-beat, irreverant and often hilarious documentary about the making and the makers of a modern myth - the widespread belief in flying saucers and alien visitations. Combining strange and unusual archive footage from the 1950s with several contemporary interviews, the film focuses on a few people who helped to pioneer such beliefs; the so-called ‘contactees’ and on one leading researcher who believes in them." (1991, 77 mins.)
posted by puny human at 6:23 PM PST - 13 comments
As he travels the highways of America, courthouselover stops in every county and parish along the way to snap
a photo of its courthouse. "From the Prairie-style courthouses in the Dakotas to the antebellum beauties of Alabama, and from the Romanesque masterpieces of Central Texas and Indiana to the Mission style structures of New Mexico, they are all national treasures."
[more inside]posted by SpringAquifer at 5:54 PM PST - 33 comments
Bill Moyers interviews David Simon "Again, we would have to ask ourselves a lot of hard questions. The people most affected by this are black and brown and poor. It’s the abandoned inner cores of our urban areas. As we said before, economically, we don’t need those people; the American economy doesn’t need them. So as long as they stay in their ghettos and they only kill each other, we’re willing to pay for a police presence to keep them out of our America."
posted by bitmage at 3:46 PM PST - 67 comments
"
Despite promises that the 43rd Parliament would be kindlier and gentler, it has been characterised by vitriol in question time, a Prime Minister labelled a liar - and outside Parliament, a bitch - and an Opposition Leader called an extremist. Both sides complain the other is mean." [
So much for kinder, gentler politics]
posted by vidur at 1:58 PM PST - 35 comments
Fareed Zakaria: Are America's Best Days Behind Us? - "We have an Electoral College that no one understands and a Senate that doesn't work, with rules and traditions that allow a single Senator to obstruct democracy without even explaining why. We have a crazy-quilt patchwork of towns, municipalities and states with overlapping authority, bureaucracies and resulting waste. We have a political system geared toward ceaseless fundraising and pandering to the interests of the present with no ability to plan, invest or build for the future. And if one mentions any of this, why, one is being unpatriotic, because we have the perfect system of government, handed down to us by demigods who walked the earth in the late 18th century and who serve as models for us today and forever. America's founders would have been profoundly annoyed by this kind of unreflective ancestor worship." [
for/
against]
posted by kliuless at 1:23 PM PST - 93 comments
Big
dust up about kin selection. Biologists E.O. Wilson, Martin Nowak, and Corina Tarnita publish a paper attacking kin selection, the idea that the reproductive success of a gene is influenced not only by its effects on its carrier, but also by its effects on related individuals (kin) carrying the same gene. 130 some odd other
biologists respond.
Richard Dawkins
weighs in. Some talking bears offer a
summary.
[via]posted by AceRock at 8:18 AM PST - 46 comments
The Birka Jazz Archive is a treasure trove of record jackets from all eras of jazz. American releases are grouped by label (for example,
Columbia,
Blue Note,
Atlantic, etc.) with, in some case, further sub-categorization by designers or visual artists (such as the amazing
David Stone Martin). European releases are sorted by country (
France,
Sweden,
Germany, etc.) and it all adds up to a fabulous online resource for jazz fans and graphic design fans alike.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 3:10 AM PST - 9 comments
April 16
We tend to think of blogs that showcase large images as a phenomenon of the past few years. But NASA's Earth Observatory has been posting its
Image of the Day since April 1999 (when its first "large" image available for download was
a 214 KB jpeg of the North Pole). Now, Image of the Day has downloads of images in multiple formats, most of which measure in megabytes, not kilobytes, and these stunning images of the earth's surface give context to the human activity down below:
a toxic spill in Hungary,
wildfires in Mexico, the growth of
a coal mine in West Virginia,
agriculture in Brazil,
snowmelt flooding in Fargo, North Dakota,
last year's oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico,
artificial islands in Dubai,
the aftermath of Japan's recent tsunami.
posted by ocherdraco at 4:26 PM PST - 4 comments
"The march toward
gender-specific clothes was neither linear nor rapid. Pink and blue arrived, along with other pastels, as colors for babies in the mid-19th century, yet the two colors were not promoted as gender signifiers until just before World War I—and even then, it took time for popular culture to sort things out."
posted by Houyhnhnm at 10:40 AM PST - 58 comments
Color Me Obsessed is a new documentary about legendary Minneapolis rock band
The Replacements. It features over 140 interviews with rockers, journalists and fans (including Colin Meloy, Craig Finn, Tommy Ramone and Robert Christgau) but not one note of the Mats music. Director Gorman Bechard has been documenting the making of the film on his
blog and screening it in
select cities.posted by Lovecraft In Brooklyn at 9:49 AM PST - 63 comments
El Tiede: The Mountain. A timelapse of shots taken from the El Tiede mountain, known for being an excellent site for astrological observations. Includes a timelapse of the Milky Way, as seen through a sandstorm coming off from the Sahara Desert. (SLYT)
posted by flibbertigibbet at 9:46 AM PST - 15 comments
The Captain John Smith Chesapeake National Historic Trail is America’s first water-based national historic trail. It consists of the combined routes of Smith’s historic voyages on the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries in 1607-1609. Designated by Congress in December 2006, the trail stretches approximately 3,000 miles up and down the Bay and along tributaries in Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, and the District of Columbia.
[more inside]posted by netbros at 6:37 AM PST - 5 comments
April 15
Your 2010 Federal Taxpayer Receipt. "In his State of the Union Address, President Obama promised that this year, for the first time ever, American taxpayers would be able to go online and see exactly how their federal tax dollars are spent. Just enter a few pieces of information about your taxes, and the taxpayer receipt will give you a breakdown of how your tax dollars are spent on priorities like education, veterans benefits, or health care."
[more inside]posted by saulgoodman at 7:20 PM PST - 76 comments
"We were wondering if you would petition to be emancipated," he said in his lawyer voice. "What does that mean?" I asked, picking at the mauve paint on my hands. I later discovered that for most kids, declaring emancipation is an extreme measure -- something you do if your parents are crack addicts or deadbeats.
"You would need to become financially independent," he said. "You could work for me at my law firm and pay rent to live here."
This was my moment of truth as an objectivist. If I believed in the glory of the individual, I would've signed the petition papers then and there. But as much as Rand's novels had taught me to believe in meritocracy, they had not prepared me to go it alone financially and emotionally. I began to cry and refused.
posted by fernabelle at 6:10 PM PST - 102 comments
Founded in 2004 as a place to catalog LiveJournal drama rejected from Wikipedia,
Encyclopedia Dramatica rapidly became the premier site on the web for all manner of
lulz. Intended
"in the spirit of Ambrose Bierce's The Devil's Dictionary," ED grew into a sprawling crowdsourced compendium of memes, subcultures, communities, personalities, and the endless feuds and controversies spawned by
4chan and
other anonymous imageboards. While comprehensive, the site developed a reputation for nastiness -- full of "ironic" (?) racism, gratuitous porn, organized attacks on other sites, and disturbingly thorough dossiers on perceived enemies, all dripping with vicious snark (just check out
their entry on MetaFilter). But now, after more than six years, it appears the troll has become the trolled. Founder Sherrod "Girlvinyl" DeGrippo, allegedly
disillusioned by the site's
legal woes and
nihilistic trajectory, has
permanently shuttered the site and replaced it with
OhInternet, a slicker, cleaner, Web 2.0 effort modeled after more respectable internet guides like
Know Your Meme (which recently sold to
Cheezburger Networks for a cool
$N million, discussed
here).
Backups and mirrors abound, but as for the source? Pool's closed...
forever.
posted by Rhaomi at 3:27 PM PST - 85 comments
Wanderlust:
GOOD Magazine, in collaboration with Graham Roberts, maps the most famous journeys in history - some fiction, some non-fiction. Wanderlust includes trips like Around the World in 80 Days and Journey to the Center of the Earth to the voyages of Marco Polo and Charles Lindbergh's transatlantic flight. However, it's not just a map with journey lines on it; Wanderlust is a history lesson. Select a trip for a summary and explore highlights of the journey.posted by nickyskye at 2:34 PM PST - 3 comments
April 14
BBC Human Planet: The Douche For a few weeks, the BBC film crew had the opportunity to follow a unique specimen, they were able to observe and record its mannerisms, rituals and way of life. The result of this is BBC Human Planet: The Douche.
posted by Fizz at 8:30 PM PST - 49 comments
A
postmortem at gamasutra on the independently developed game
Super Meat Boy. On their design philosophy that in part makes the game so popular: "It was vital for us to bring back the difficulty of the retro age, but also reinvent the idea of what difficulty meant. Frustration was the biggest part of retro difficulty and something we felt needed to be removed at all costs, in order to give the player a sense of accomplishment without discouraging them to the point of quitting. At its core, this idea was quite basic: Remove lives, reduce respawn time, keep the levels short and keep the goal always in sight. On top of these refinements, we added constant positive feedback, and even death became something to enjoy when you knew that upon completing the level you would be rewarded with an epic showing of all your past deaths. The replay feature was a way to remind the player that they were getting better through their own actions and reinforce that feeling of accomplishment of doing something difficult and succeeding."
posted by SpacemanStix at 4:47 PM PST - 18 comments
A very eloquent and tranquil performance of a young chap from Sweden playing C418's
"Sweden" that you may have heard from Minecraft on classical guitar (SLYT)
posted by Cogentesque at 3:52 PM PST - 6 comments
Zoopreme Court Ever wanted to remember all the justices of the Supreme Court, past and present? Well it's a whole lot easier if they are animals. Dan Schofield and Alice DuBois are illustrating all 112 justices as various critters, as well as several landmark cases.
posted by melissam at 10:54 AM PST - 17 comments
I'd like to welcome you all lords and ladies, gentlemen, ladies, time-ladies, time-lords, aliens and those of you in the cheap seats to a documentary produced and aired by WYES-TV New Orleans in 1986, focusing on Panopticon, the first US Doctor Who convention. (
1,
2,
3) (MLYT, in authentic multi-copy VHS fuzz-o-vision!)
[more inside]posted by fearfulsymmetry at 10:25 AM PST - 17 comments
Hand drawn 3D comics lettering:
Stone Type. Classic front page lettering from Superman, The Spirit, Sgt. Rock, La Garage Hermetique, The Incredible Hulk &c.
posted by Tom-B at 10:09 AM PST - 14 comments
Out of thin air? "Have you ever said something like 'Let me buy you a beer next week'? I'm sure you have. We all issue promises of this sort. And we frequently use such promises as a form of currency... I have just described a simple credit exchange. Societies rely heavily on promising-making and promise-keeping. It is the foundation of all financial markets. I'd like to point out something about the promises you make. They are made 'out of thin air.' "
[more inside]posted by kliuless at 9:41 AM PST - 47 comments
Benjamin Darvill, a.k.a.
Son of Dave, is a one-man band of sorts, combining harmonica, vocals, beat-boxing, a rattle and foot-stomping to create his own infectious form of blues. Darvill, a Canadian formerly with Crash Test Dummies, has released four albums to date as Son of Dave, his latest and best being 'Shake A Bone', recorded and mixed by Steve Albini in Chicago, the title track used briefly in an episode of Breaking Bad.
[more inside]posted by bwg at 8:06 AM PST - 3 comments
Galileo Lectures In 2009, to mark the 400th anniversary of Galileo first turning a telescope skywards, Radio New Zealand National, in partnership with the Royal Society of New Zealand, released this kickin' series of five lectures spanning the evolution of cosmology, extra-solar planets, near-earth objects, the nascent field of neutrino astronomy and prospects for the future as the Square Kilometre Array radio telescope comes online early in the next decade. It's a great listen and best of all, it's free to download as MP3 or Ogg Vorbis!
posted by treyka at 6:04 AM PST - 4 comments
April 13
Solarized is the mother of all colour schemes. "Solarized is a sixteen color palette (eight monotones, eight accent colors) designed for use with terminal and gui applications. It has several unique properties. I designed this colorscheme with both precise CIELAB lightness relationships and a refined set of hues based on fixed color wheel relationships. It has been tested extensively in real world use on color calibrated displays (as well as uncalibrated/intentionally miscalibrated displays) and in a variety of lighting conditions."
posted by chunking express at 7:07 PM PST - 95 comments
The candy cigarette has found a rightful heir. KidZania, an international chain of family entertainment centers, invites children to be the adults in a simulated city-state. It claims to teach children about work and money, but its critics say that KidZania, full of sponsored and branded activities, is an early introduction to corporate consumerism.
(via)posted by domnit at 2:00 PM PST - 47 comments
Shit Harper Did Does exactly what it says on the can. Example: "Canadian PM Stephen Harper weakened regulations so that more pesticide residue could be left on your fruits and vegetables." "Harper decorated the government lobby in parliament with photos of just himself, instead of the traditional portraits of former Prime Ministers." And much more.
posted by Fizz at 12:54 PM PST - 96 comments
Quickish is a new site offering "real-time-ish" short-form sports news and analysis links, gathered and recommended by the site's proprietor, Dan Shanoff. Link suggestions from readers are welcome.
NiemanLab interviews Shanoff. If his name sounds familiar, it's because he used to do the
Daily Quickie on ESPN.com.
posted by beagle at 12:31 PM PST - 4 comments
802 Prisoners attempted escape from Auschwitz. 144 were successful. Kazimierz Piechowski, a Polish boy scout, was one of them. Today, at age 91,
he tells his story.
[more inside]posted by zarq at 12:21 PM PST - 30 comments
Two weeks ago, the "
Stupid Man Commercials. Why?" post on MeFi front page drew a heap of interest. Today, courtesy of the
Leo Burnett ad agency, and on behalf of their client, Manwich, we present "
Girly Men." Six days after the start of the campaign,
the ads have been pulled. (Unlike Amalgamated's campaign for Mike's Hard Lemonade, who mocked girly-man-
Joey-the-intern for a whole year back in 2008.)
Should we be surprised that the Manwich campaign would come from an ad shop whose tagline reads: "Big ideas come out of Big Pencils"?
posted by wensink at 9:07 AM PST - 141 comments
April 12
Covering Tohoku The Foreign Correspondent's Club of Japan (
FCCJ) has posted a special edition of its
No. 1 Shimbun covering the Tohoku Earthquake:
FCCJ members, many of them freelancers, were the first on the scene after the quake and have led coverage since. Weeks after the global media pack left, they're still here. There's articles by veteran Japan reporters such as
Charles Pomeroy who recently retired to Otsuchi after covering Japan for 50 years, to newer stringers such as
Gavin Blair who worked as a "fixer" for foreign prima-donna journos dashing in and out of the disaster zone. There is a photo by photographer
Rob Gilhooly who recently made
a heartbreaking trip into the exclusion zone near the plants. Although not included in No 1 Shimbun, freelancer
Yas Idei provides a Japanese perspective (in English) about the multiple disasters.
Idei's piece about Rokkashomura is pretty enlightening, frightening, and depressing.
posted by KokuRyu at 11:18 PM PST - 23 comments
David Byrne Takes On The Man. Good ole Charlie [Crist], used Bryne's (Talking Heads) song,
Road to Nowhere, during Crist's failed run for Senator of FL in 2010, without permission, without licenses.
The lawsuit that was filed was settled this week, which culminated in Crist issuing a
YouTube apology.
Crist also told the Associated Press that Byrne "couldn't have been more of a gentlemen" when the two met to settle the case.
posted by edgeways at 9:16 PM PST - 54 comments
The IOWEYOU project. You can't go to a shop and buy these clothes. Because each textile is unique they have an
app that allows you to trace your garment right back through the production process to the actual weaver that hand-wove the fabric. You can see some of the
delightful people involved in the project at their
YouTube channel.
posted by unliteral at 6:03 PM PST - 18 comments
Following on the heels of NASA's
announcement of the final resting places of the various space shuttles, NASA, in conjunction with William Shatner, released a final
video commemorating the program. (SLYT)
posted by Heliochrome85 at 3:59 PM PST - 25 comments
An Ode to Paul Simon's Graceland, now 25. "Here is Simon proving that he could be divorced and soft in the middle and still make an album that put him back on the playing field, and as a center forward. This, too, is why I think the album has been such a mainstay of so many station wagons since the late 80s: It said to those rear ends planted in those drivers’ seats, “Our idols have aged and proven human. They have turned into yuppies like us who smoke weed only occasionally and in comfortable living rooms with Persian rugs and who have kids who play soccer, and that’s okay." Don't miss the covers and rare editions at the the end of the article. Unfortunately they miss
Tangoterje's amazing "Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes" dub edit. Obligatory,
the Zimbabwe concert.
posted by geoff. at 12:39 PM PST - 198 comments
Put another way, the company that owns The Washington Post is almost entirely at the mercy of the Federal Government and the Obama administration -- the entities which its newspaper ostensibly checks and holds accountable. "By the end of 2010, more than 90 percent of revenue at Kaplan’s biggest division and nearly a third of The Post Co.’s revenue overall came from the U.S. government." The Post Co.'s reliance on the Federal Government extends beyond the source of its revenue; because the industry is so heavily regulated, any animosity from the Government could single-handedly doom the Post Co.'s business... --
Glenn Greenwald examines WaPo's entanglement with for-profit educationposted by hippybear at 10:38 AM PST - 27 comments
According to
Science Daily a
New Study (done on mice) found drinking alcohol primes certain areas of our brain to learn and remember better. When we drink alcohol our subconscious is learning to consume more. But it doesn't stop there. We become more receptive to forming subsconscious memories and habits with respect to food, music, even people and social situations.
[more inside]posted by Blake at 8:25 AM PST - 41 comments
Have you been keeping up with research on the inflammation theory of depression and mental illness? If you'd like to explore the pathology if inflammatory cytokines in the development of depression,
this paper breaks it down.
[more inside]posted by xarnop at 8:08 AM PST - 51 comments
Imagine this: you live in a fairly remote place and need emergency eye surgery to save your sight that very same day. you get onto a plane but mid-trip
your flight gets cancelled because of a technical problem. flying with most airlines we know would mean you'd miss your surgery and be in a pretty tough spot.
but not when you're flying SAS. instead of leaving you stranded with a voucher, the airline found a replacement aircraft at another airport,
flew it over to the passenger and got her to her surgery on time (
original article). there is a lot going wrong in the airline industry these days but in my book that's pretty awesome.
posted by krautland at 2:29 AM PST - 76 comments
April 11
The veteran recording engineer and seven-time grammy winner
Roger Nichols lost his battle with pancreatic cancer and
passed away April 9th at age 66. Though not a household name, you've undoubtedly heard at least one album he did the sound for. Some of the artists he engineered recordings for were Stevie Wonder, Bela Fleck & the Flecktones, Frank Zappa, Donald Fagen, John Denver, the Beach Boys, Crosby Stills & Nash, Al Di Meola, Roy Orbison, Andy Laverne, Plácido Domingo, Gloria Estefan, Diana Ross, Rickie Lee Jones, Kenny Loggins, Mark Knopfler, Michael McDonald, and Toots Thielemans, among others. He also invented the first functional drum sampling machine
WENDL (.pdf file), first used on the 1979 "Gaucho" album.
He is likely best known for the amazing pristine sound he achieved for every album done by Mssrs. Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, aka
Steely Dan. He was a giant in his field,
a real innovator, and it is a sad loss for the industry.
posted by Seekerofsplendor at 10:45 PM PST - 28 comments
The mayor of Washington DC has been arrested, along with 6 of the 12 members of its city council, during a protest today near a US Senate office building, objecting to the city's use as a bargaining chip while negotiating the
7th Continuing Resolution to avoid a government shutdown last Friday. The bill prohibits the District of Columbia from locally funding abortion services, and imposes a locally-unpopular school voucher program. Had the government shutdown taken place, the DC government would have also had to suspend most of its operations including
trash pickup. For those of you keeping track, Vince Gray is the 3rd (of 6) DC mayor to be arrested while in office.
[more inside]posted by schmod at 6:50 PM PST - 93 comments
Years after its final broadcast, the award-winning, pond-hopping, cult comedy hit
Whose Line is it Anyway? is returning to television! Sort of! Tonight in just a few minutes,
Drew Carey's Improv-A-Ganza (
promo,
sample segment) makes its debut on GSN, reuniting Carey with popular "Whosers" Ryan Stiles, Colin Mochrie, Greg Proops, Brad Sherwood, Wayne Brady, and
many more. Though the show will air every weekday, you don't have to wait around for new episodes to get your improv fix -- in spite of the lack of DVD box sets, there's a veritable treasure trove of past content available free from multiple online sources, including
the complete run of the American Whose Line on both YouTube and
fansite WatchWLIIA along with
every episode of the original UK run from Channel4's official YouTube channel and
their streaming video site 4oD. Too much content? Look inside for selections of the show's most hilarious moments as sampled from
the show's burgeoning TVTropes entry. See also:
Fan guide -
American episode guide (
UK version) -
List of game types [more inside]posted by Rhaomi at 5:00 PM PST - 49 comments
The recently retired Manny Ramirez was one of the most inscrutable players in recent history. Ben McGrath of the New Yorker attempted to figure out Ramirez's motivations in
this 2007 piece.
posted by reenum at 4:34 PM PST - 32 comments
Free Darko calls it quits. Contributors to the irreverent basketball writing site that Brian Philips describes as "a vintage record shop that radiation turned into a grad student" talk about what Free Darko meant to them. Also,
an interview with Free Darko writer and illustrator Bethlehem Shoals and Jacob Weinstein.
posted by AceRock at 4:24 PM PST - 19 comments
Photographer Nate Bolt, on a overnight San Francisco to Paris flight, set up a time lapse camera to record the journey (with permission), and found midflight that he was shooting
an aurora borealis.
[more inside]posted by ZeusHumms at 3:32 PM PST - 16 comments
Photos of Auto Buds. "Auto Buds are two cars of the same make, model, color, or as identical as possible, that are parked right next to each other or in close proximity."
posted by geoff. at 12:18 PM PST - 73 comments
Tama River Film: Tama River by Anders Edström & Karen Langley.
Music: Yoko Ono, Let’s Go On Flying.
Model: Ai Tominaga
posted by puny human at 9:10 AM PST - 8 comments
After completing it's
final mission in March, Space Shuttle Discovery has been returned to the Kennedy Space Center's Orbiter Processing Facility, where it is being dissembled for cleaning and decommissioning. Spaceflight Now has
pictures of the process.
posted by helloknitty at 6:34 AM PST - 49 comments
April 10
"This is the story of Walter and Ina…" "It begins before they met, when he was taking aerial photographs of occupied France from a Sopwith A2, and she was looking for work in rural Texas and worrying about the boys “over there.” They continued on separate paths until 1924." I'm a sucker for a good love story, and one that elicits nostalgia through historical documents is even better. Here is one such story. Although I have only just now begun to read the correspondence myself, I immediately thought that MeFi was a good place to share it. The curator of these letters is
Dr. Alan Dove, a
virologist and podcaster. Walter and Ina were his grandparents.
posted by Moody834 at 7:37 PM PST - 4 comments
“The flapper movement is not a craze, but something that will stay,” the author maintained. “Many of the phrases now employed by members of this order will eventually find a way into common usage and be accepted as good English.” [more inside]posted by timory at 6:05 PM PST - 83 comments
WWII German soldiers speak about their experiences. 'The myth that the Nazi-era German armed forces, the Wehrmacht, was not involved in war crimes persisted for decades after the war. Now two German researchers have destroyed it once and for all. Newly published conversations between German prisoners of war, secretly recorded by the Allies, reveal horrifying details of violence against civilians, rape and genocide.''What already seems hardly feasible for current military operations like the war in Afghanistan is nearly impossible when it comes to an event that happened so long ago as World War II. Nevertheless, two German historians have managed to produce precisely such a documentary of perceptions of the war using live historical recordings.'
[more inside]posted by VikingSword at 5:25 PM PST - 41 comments
A Tragedy of Errors. On Feb. 21, 2010, a convoy of vehicles carrying civilians headed down a mountain in central Afghanistan and American eyes in the sky were watching. "The Americans were using some of the most
sophisticated tools in the history of war, technological marvels of surveillance and intelligence gathering that allowed them to see into once-inaccessible corners of the battlefield. But the high-tech wizardry would
fail in its most elemental purpose: to tell the difference between friend and foe."
FOIA-obtained
transcripts of US cockpit and radio conversations and
an interactive feature provide a more in-depth understanding of what happened.
posted by zarq at 4:23 PM PST - 59 comments
April 9
Recent research on children. (1) Brothers and sisters who argue a lot can improve their language, social skills and outcomes:
Guardian article;
paper on part of the research (pdf). (2) First findings from
Understanding Society. Conclusions include: the unhappiness of children’s mothers with their partners affect children’s happiness, but this is not the case if children’s fathers are unhappy in their relationships; having older brothers or sisters doesn’t appear to affect children’s happiness, but having younger brothers or sisters is associated with less happiness; not living with both natural parents has a greater negative impact on a young person’s life satisfaction than their material situation. (3) A longitudinal study on people now in their forties has found that for these people reading is linked to career success, though not necessarily to better pay, whilst playing computer games and doing no other activities was associated with less likelihood of going to university. In particular, those who owned a ZX Spectrum or Commodore C64 were less likely to go to university.
thinq interview with researcher.
Guardian article.
Telegraph article. (4) Poll about children’s attitudes to losing in sport.
Press release.
Data from children’s survey.
Data from parents’ survey. (All three are PDFs.)
posted by paduasoy at 3:52 AM PST - 30 comments
The Ward (
Part 1 -
Part 2 -
Part 3) is a silly little Lovecraftian sitcom from the folks who bring us the H.P. Lovecraft Literary Podcast. (previously:
1,
2,
3,
4) The guys Lackey and Fifer are also writing a graphic horror novel set in the Jazz Age,
Deadbeats.
posted by JHarris at 1:46 AM PST - 11 comments
April 8
"In November 1855, the Great Ansei Earthquake struck the city of Edo (now Tokyo), claiming 7,000 lives and inflicting widespread damage. Within days, a new type of
color woodblock print known as namazu-e (lit. "catfish pictures") became popular among the residents of the shaken city. These prints featured depictions of mythical giant catfish (namazu) who, according to popular legend, caused earthquakes by thrashing about in their underground lairs. In addition to providing humor and social commentary, many prints claimed to offer protection from future earthquakes."
posted by madamjujujive at 5:19 PM PST - 19 comments
The Village Voice released its Comics Issue on April 6. Its editorial "
If Cartoons Are So Big, Why Don't They Pay?" focused on the financial straits many influential and popular cartoonists find themselves in even in the midst of wide-spread popularity and new respect. Although interesting in itself, the editorial created a splash in
comics communities for a different reason. Its decision to not pay the artists whose work was featured in that issue. The Voice had intended to offer only attribution, but no money. It has since
recanted.
posted by gilrain at 3:43 PM PST - 30 comments
Archived Baseball photos from 1917-1956 Today, the
Boston Public Library will publish on the Internet the
first 100 of a trove of nearly 3,000 rarely seen baseball photographs taken by
Leslie Jones, who worked for the Boston Herald and the Boston Traveler from 1917 to 1956. Moments preserved by the shutter and squirreled away in his Dorchester basement, where he kept tens of thousands of images. The Boston Globe has
a selection published here. The first batch of snapshots was released to coincide with today’s Opening Day at Fenway Park. Library staff plan to upload several dozen more images each week until all 2,881 photos are online.
The project is part of a broader initiative by the library to give the public unfettered access to Jones’s entire archive of tens of thousands of images. He photographed
car wrecks and ice-crusted fishing trawlers; shot luminaries like Albert Einstein and
Amelia Earhart; and the
people of Boston.
posted by Gungho at 6:11 AM PST - 18 comments
In 1981, 27-year-old
Joseph Paul Jernigan shot and stabbed the man who discovered him stealing a microwave oven. Jernigan was sentenced to death, and a prison chaplain convinced him to donate his body to
science.
Thirty years on, 1871 slices of his body are animated on a laptop screen and photographed on a long exposure in various dark locations, reconstructing Jernigan as the subject of a
haunting new project.
posted by creeky at 4:25 AM PST - 48 comments
Oranges and Sunshine is a film by Jim Loach, son of
Ken, telling the story of Margaret Humphreys, a social worker who helped uncover a British
Stolen Generation, children taken from often-living parents and shipped overseas. The Guardian
interviews Harold Haig, one of the victims of the policy:
She was the first to raise the possibility that Haig had been told a terrible untruth – that he might not be an orphan after all. "I didn't think anyone would be so cruel to tell you that sort of a lie," he says. [His mother] had died just a year before he first visited Britain.
posted by rodgerd at 12:42 AM PST - 10 comments
April 7
For All Mankind "Al Reinert’s documentary For All Mankind is the story of the twenty-four men who traveled to the moon, told in their words, in their voices, using the images of their experiences. Forty years after the first moon landing, it remains the most radical, visually dazzling work of cinema yet made about this earthshaking event." "For All Mankind is irreplaceable: one of a kind and likely to remain so. It is, formally, among the most radical American films of the past quarter century and, emotionally, among the most powerfully affecting. It makes its impossible title stick. In For All Mankind, we all lift off together, and we all come home the same way, and few movies have captured so well the rhapsodic absurdity of our common voyage."
1 ::
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3 ::
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8posted by puny human at 6:10 PM PST - 35 comments
Waukeshocker! After Tuesday's painfully close, still undecided Supreme Court race between JoAnne Kloppenburg and David Prosser, Republicans warned that partisan election officials in certain municipalities might conveniently find bushels of extra uncounted votes after the fact.
It has come to pass -- but the extra votes were found in deep-red Waukesha County, represnting the entire city of Brookfield, and give GOP favorite David Prosser a probably insurmountable 50.2%/48.8% lead. Waukesha County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus's policy of storing election returns on a personal computer in her office with no backup
was criticized last August. Nate Silver says
the new numbers look reasonable.
posted by escabeche at 4:01 PM PST - 255 comments
TheFix.com is a new site targeting the more than 40 million Americans who are recovering from drug and/or alcohol addiction. It features Ask-An-Expert
videos, news, editorials and thorough
reviews of rehab facilities based on Zagat's system.
Founded by Maer Roshan, one of the founders of Radar Magazine.
(Via) [more inside]posted by zarq at 12:12 PM PST - 36 comments
Lula's Brazil - "Compared with his predecessors, he had the imagination, born of social identification, to see that the Brazilian state could afford to be more generous to the least well-off, in ways that have made a substantial difference to their lives. But these concessions have come at no cost to the rich or comfortably-off, who in any absolute reckoning have done even better – far better – during these years. Does that really matter, it can be asked: isn't this just the definition of the most desirable of all economic outcomes, a Pareto optimum?" (
via via)
posted by kliuless at 11:00 AM PST - 16 comments
The Ship Captain’s Medical Guide. The Ship Captain’s Medical Guide is intended primarily for use on ships where no doctor is carried and it is necessary for laymen to assess and treat injuries and to diagnose and treat ill health. The Guide can also be recommended for use in other situations where professional medical advice is not readily available, for example on expeditions.
posted by leigh1 at 8:42 AM PST - 35 comments
My Student, the 'Terrorist' If this were a movie, the story might end with a triumphal courtroom scene, or an intrepid Washington Post reporter breaking the story. It might have a sentimental ending, with a conservative Muslim family and community locking arms with Christians and Jews and atheists and turning the country back to its commitment to civil rights. The government, shamed, would reform its practices.
But this is not a movie, and inhumane treatment is well protected in post-9/11 America. [more inside]posted by bardophile at 4:43 AM PST - 56 comments
April 6
Illustrator
Nate Simpson was a longtime veteran of the video game and concept art industries. Back in 2009, he opted to take a year off from work to work on
Gordon and the Stareater, his first attempt at sequential art.This week, Simpson's first major-publisher creator-owned comics project,
Nonplayer, hit the stands courtesy of the folks at Image. How'd the experiment work out?
[more inside]posted by fairytale of los angeles at 10:33 PM PST - 17 comments
The dark red
fishing shack on Bearskin Neck wharf in the artists' colony
Rockport, Massachusetts "is one of the most famous buildings in the world and instantly recognizable to any student of art or art history."
America's most-painted building received its name in an impulsive exclamation by famed illustrator, etcher and art teacher Lester Hornby. Its name?
Motif No. 1 "One day when a student brought for criticism a pencil drawing of the house, Hornby exclaimed, 'What-Motif No 1 again!' It has been that ever since."
[more inside]posted by ericb at 8:40 PM PST - 24 comments
NuProject is the ongoing project of Minneapolis-based photographer
Matt Blum. He describes it as "a series of nudes of normal people." The rules: no models, no makeup and no glamour. He has been working on it since 2005.
posted by Rudy Gerner at 4:05 PM PST - 98 comments
Joseph Stiglitz in May's Vanity Fair ;
Inequality: Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%
Americans have been watching protests against oppressive regimes that concentrate massive wealth in the hands of an elite few. Yet in our own democracy, 1 percent of the people take nearly a quarter of the nation’s income—an inequality even the wealthy will come to regret. (
via)
posted by adamvasco at 1:21 PM PST - 85 comments
Udderly Amazing. [SLYT] 15-year-old German girl could not have a horse, so she trained one of her family's cows to become a show jumper. Luna the cow has come to navigate the pasture with equine ease.
posted by Fizz at 12:07 PM PST - 45 comments
"This is an exploration of your brain's affective response system. Nonverbal, emotional reactions to shape tableau will target the portion of your brain that is intuitive and pre-lingual. The associated questions should be answered without tying theses shapes to any narrative or storyline.... There are 20 questions. Your answers will be tabulated at the end and your responses measured against our reference group.
Take the test." [warning: blinky]
posted by filthy light thief at 11:28 AM PST - 187 comments
Bottle, a lovely stop-motion film by animator
Kirsten Lepore [NSFW], explores a long-distance relationship fueled by communication via not-so-instant message. [Kirsten Lepore
previously, kinda]
posted by bayani at 11:15 AM PST - 18 comments
Dr. Fuchs’s Donald was no ordinary comic creation. He was a bird of arts and letters, and many Germans credit him with having initiated them into the language of the literary classics. The German comics are peppered with fancy quotations. In one story Donald’s nephews steal famous lines from Friedrich Schiller’s play “William Tell”; Donald garbles a classic Schiller poem, “The Bell,” in another. Other lines are straight out of Goethe, Hölderlin and even Wagner (whose words are put in the mouth of a singing cat). The great books later sounded like old friends when readers encountered them at school. As the German Donald points out, “Reading is educational! We learn so much from the works of our poets and thinkers.” [more inside]posted by cgc373 at 5:37 AM PST - 16 comments
Mapping Petersburg "..explores the everyday life and the material, political, and literary culture of St. Petersburg
[..] at the beginning of the twentieth century. It maps eleven itineraries through the city with the purpose of creating a palpable sense of life in Russia's late imperial capital on the eve of the 1917 revolution and during the subsequent decade." [
About] [
via]
[more inside]posted by peacay at 2:00 AM PST - 8 comments
You say potato, Valve say... potato.
Just over a year after the
Portal 2 announcement ARG (previously) had people dialing up a mysterious BBS, on April 1st Valve pushed out updates to
thirteen indie games through Steam, under the tag #potatofoolsday. Some of the games
got a
little starchy straight away, but more interesting was the appearance of
cryptic glyphs, which seemed to link to other games in the set, and
nonsense phrases. Alongside a
cheeky coded shoutout to members of the
Facepunch forums, a hidden frame in the latest Aperture Science Investment Opportunity video
(1, 2, 3) appeared to confirm there are 16 glyph-and-letter sets, and 13 phrases to be found in and around the games.
But what to do with them even when the set's complete? And what of the uplifted
talking raccoon and the
blogger whose
boss's
brother has been kidnapped by
sentient potatoes?
[more inside]posted by emmtee at 1:53 AM PST - 115 comments
April 5
Forget
Adam Sandler. Over the past few years, there has been a proliferation of Jewish take-offs of popular songs. The Fountainheads have produced
Purim and
Pesach (Passover) covers. The Maccabeats had a good amount of exposure with their
Hanukkah and put out a
Purim, too.
Of course,
not all of these songs are covers.
posted by dzkalman at 6:49 PM PST - 8 comments
"One day a little boy came up, he must have been about four and he saw me taking off my (prosthetic) legs and he started with the 'why' questions, you know, 'why haven't you got any legs', etc. And I said 'have you heard of The Little Mermaid?' and he said 'yes' and I said 'I'm a mermaid' and he got this look on his face and he said 'wow that's cool' and ran off to tell his dad.
I'll have to turn up to that beach again sometime with my tail - just in case he's there."
Weta Digital are the special effects team behind the costumes, weapons and creatures of the
Lord of the Rings movies,
Avatar and even
a sonic screwdriver prop that could be making an appearance on the next season of Doctor Who. In 2009, they
created a fully functional mermaid tail pro bono for Nadya Vessey,
an Auckland woman who is a double leg amputee. Video News Report:
1,
2.
posted by zarq at 4:18 PM PST - 37 comments
We have heard how the officer – who had been expected to remain stationed by his van – strayed from his post after grappling with a protester he tried to arrest for spraying graffiti on a colleague's vehicle.
He then swung a coat at another protester, pulled a BBC cameraman to the ground, used a palm strike against a man trying to get through a cordon and finally pushed a man he said was threatening a dog handler.
Harwood said he was confused, isolated and fearful of his life, and was dealing with a "very hostile" crowd.
When we resume in the next few minutes, we should hear finally about his encounter with Tomlinson.
Liveblogging the Ian Tomlinson inquest: Police Constable
Simon Harwood explains his alleged attack on
Ian Tomlinsonposted by orthogonality at 2:16 PM PST - 77 comments
Scaffoldage. If you like construction, with particular reference to terrifyingly lashed-together metal or bamboo rods reaching dizzyingly up into the sky, then you've come to the right thread.
posted by The Discredited Ape at 2:15 PM PST - 23 comments
It's that time of year again! Time to vote for the
2011 Name of the Year! This year's contestants include such heavyweights as Col. Many-Bears Grinder, Ebenezer Noonoo, Yolanda Supersad, RexAchilles Imperial, and La'Peaches Pitts.
[more inside]posted by eugenen at 2:08 PM PST - 61 comments
[Antonioni] gave to three elderly Muslims the pictures he had taken of them. The eldest one as soon as he took a glance at the photos, immediately returned them with these words: "What is it good for, to stop the time?" Andrei Tarkovsky's Polaroidsposted by juv3nal at 11:48 AM PST - 19 comments
WANTED: Known as 'La Bête' but kills under three aliases. Reddish brown with dark ridged stripe down the back. Resembles wolf/hyena but big as a donkey. Long gaping jaw, 6 claws, pointy upright ears and supple furry tail - mobile like a cat's and can knock you over. Cry: more like horse neighing than wolf howling. Last seen by people mostly now dead.
Wolf, werewolf, hyena, baboon or mesonychid: In many respects the beast of Gévaudan was like other creatures in the annals of cryptozoology - but for one: historical records indicate that, over a 4 year span, it (or 'they')
killed around 100 people - eating most of them.
[more inside]posted by rongorongo at 9:18 AM PST - 42 comments
Winded - a journey to find out the real truth behind Wind Turbines [SLVimeo].
posted by scruss at 9:03 AM PST - 63 comments
Vs. Airman is kind of mind-blowing the first time you see it. It is not a PC or flash game, but a romhack that can run on a real NES. But which game is it a hack of?
[more inside]posted by JHarris at 1:46 AM PST - 17 comments
April 4
Ah wilderness! What better place to escape the stifling trappings of urban existence - overflowing inboxes, two-hour commutes, social-media addiction. And, of course, indoor plumbing. "Take off your shoes for a while, unzip your fly, piss hearty, dig your toes in the hot sand, feel that raw and rugged earth," the great Western author and curmudgeon Edward Abbey once exhorted car-bound city slickers. Contemplating the reasons for taking a trek down the Appalachian Trail (and aping Abbey-ish machismo), travel writer Bill Bryson mused, "I wanted a little of that swagger that comes with being able to gaze at a far horizon through eyes of chipped granite and say with a slow, manly sniff, 'Yeah, I've shit in the woods.'"posted by vidur at 10:50 PM PST - 36 comments
The Big Map Blog – Five-hundred enormous historical maps; all downloadable in their highest resolution. With a new map every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, and 1,700 to go!
[via mefi projects]posted by carsonb at 4:07 PM PST - 43 comments
"It was always about the intersection of creativity and chaos." So said Kirsha Kaechele, described at Wikipedia as an "American contemporary art curator, artist, and practitioner of sustainable architecture," of the avant-garde
Life is Art Foundation/KKProjects art happening that she carried out via Katrina flooding-devastated homes in the St. Roch area of New Orleans' Upper Ninth Ward. These homes now lie in ruins, as they did before. She owes back taxes on the homes, and city has placed tax liens worth $28,000 on two of them. While she can afford the back taxes, she says, the liens are beyond her means. A medicinal marijuana farm created to fund Life is Art failed to make enough money to fund the projects. In any case, she has spent the past five months in Tasmania with her boyfriend, professional gambler and art curator
David Walsh, where he has established something called the
Museum of New and Old Art. (Pause.) I believe that connects all the most relevant dots as succinctly as possible.
[more inside]posted by raysmj at 1:22 PM PST - 23 comments
The Xenotext Experiment is
Christian Bök's [
Previously],"nine-year long attempt to create an example of “living poetry.” I have been striving to write a short verse about language and genetics, whereupon I use a “chemical alphabet” to translate this poem into a sequence of DNA for subsequent implantation into the genome of a bacterium (in this case, a microbe called Deinococcus radiodurans—an extremophile, capable of surviving, without mutation, in even the most hostile milieus, including the vacuum of outer space)."
[Via] [more inside]posted by Fizz at 5:07 AM PST - 25 comments
"It is no mean achievement that IKEA has continued to embody in the public mind the modernist ideals of simplicity and minimalism yet all the while its total product range has been growing – to the point where, by 2010, it comprised some 12,000 items."
Decluttering with IKEA asks: What are we looking for as we wander through IKEA?
[more inside]posted by harriet vane at 3:09 AM PST - 167 comments
April 3
Some people have claimed that Barbie is really about giving girls the image of an empowered woman. There can be little doubt of empowerment when it comes to
Black Moses Barbie -
she fights for freedom and has all the coolest playsets and accessories.
posted by yeloson at 11:37 AM PST - 9 comments
Cory Doctorow's new science fiction story collection,
With A Little Help, is available in text and
audio. The stories range from an order of datamining monks to Google gone terrible wrong, and the readers include Neil Gaiman, Mur Lafferty, Mary Robinette Kowal and Wil Wheaton. The introduction is written by Jonathan Coulton.
posted by NoraReed at 10:35 AM PST - 97 comments
April 2
John Baez (mathematical physicist and master popularizer, former operator of This Week's Finds in Mathematical Physics, current promoter of the idea that
physicists should start pitching in on saving the world) interviews Eliezer Yudkowsky (singularitarian, author of
"Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality," promoter of the idea that human life faces a near-term existential threat from unfriendly artificial intelligence, and that people can live better lives by evading their cognitive biases) about the future, academia, rationality, altruism, expected utility, self-improvement by humans and machines, and the relative merit of battling climate change and developing friendly AIs that will forstall our otherwise inevitable doom.
Part I.
Part II. Part III. [more inside]posted by escabeche at 8:43 PM PST - 47 comments
How Slavery Really Ended in America On May 23, 1861, little more than a month into the Civil War, three young black men rowed across the James River in Virginia and claimed asylum in a Union-held citadel.... [T]the laws of the United States were clear: all fugitives must be returned to their masters. The founding fathers enshrined this in the Constitution; Congress reinforced it in 1850 with the Fugitive Slave Act; and it was still the law of the land — including, as far as the federal government was concerned, within the so-called Confederate states. The war had done nothing to change it. Most important, noninterference with slavery was the very cornerstone of the Union’s war policy. President Abraham Lincoln had begun his inaugural address by making this clear, pointedly and repeatedly. “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it exists,” the president said. “I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.” [more inside]posted by caddis at 2:23 PM PST - 95 comments
I like urban art fun with a sense of humor:
OakOak is a french artist who likes to play with urban elements.
posted by Waslijn at 11:37 AM PST - 9 comments
April 1
"The New York Public Library launched a
website Friday to introduce a massive, smartphone-based scavenger hunt that will officially kick off May 20 with an invitation-only, all-night lock-in in New York City. The game, which will continue through 2011, works by getting players to download an app for their iPhone or Android-based smartphones and then head to the library's
Stephen A. Schwarzman building, which celebrates its centennial this year, to play (folks not near New York can play a digital version on the Web)."
* [more inside]posted by ericb at 1:05 PM PST - 12 comments
A cure for blocked screenwriters "Michels also told the writer to get an egg timer. Following Michels’s instructions, every day he set it for one minute, knelt in front of his computer in a posture of prayer, and begged the universe to help him write the worst sentence ever written. When the timer dinged, he would start typing. He told Michels that the exercise was stupid, pointless, and embarrassing, and it didn’t work. Michels told him to keep doing it."
posted by puny human at 12:46 PM PST - 43 comments
Welcome to a world where the drugs don't work - it's here, today. 'A new wave of "super superbugs" with a mutation called NDM 1, which first emerged in India, has now turned up all over the world, from Britain to New Zealand.''After Alexander Fleming's 1928 discovery of the first antibiotic, penicillin, we quickly came to assume we had the chemicals to beat bacteria. Sure, bugs evolve to develop resistance. But for decades scientists have managed to develop new medicines to stay at least one step ahead of an ever-mutating enemy. Now, though, we may be running out of road.'
[more inside]posted by VikingSword at 11:59 AM PST - 77 comments
"It is my wish to come very close, strikingly close, to the times in which we live, without submitting to artistic dogma...
I need the connection to the world of senses, the courage to portray ugliness, life as it comes."
Otto Dix best known for his Weimar era work such as the now lost
Street Fight.
Probably his most well know portraits are of the
uninhibited dancer
Anita Berber and of the
writer and poet
Sylvia von Harden.
Here are a
couple of Galleries of
his work and a six part video on Dix:
Postcards from the front 1;
2;
3;
4;
5;
6;
posted by adamvasco at 9:53 AM PST - 9 comments
Books2Barcodes is an ongoing effort to convert all the world's great books to QR codes (2D barcodes). Each work featured here is the entire text of a piece of classic literature translated into several thousand barcodes. With a mobile device equipped with a camera and a barcode-scanning app, you can experience the joy of a great book as read through 800-character fragments on your cellphone.posted by Wolfdog at 9:22 AM PST - 27 comments
It's
Hardcore History with Dan Carlin, arguably the most intense amateur history podcast you'll run across today. Catch the
Ghosts of the Ostfront series (
1234) before it slips behind the paywall, and indulge in the epic of the fall of Rome in
Death Throes of the Republic (
12345).
posted by klue at 8:21 AM PST - 52 comments
About:Blank can be considered an inevitability of one's online journeys, though many a virtual traveler can spend their time without ever encountering the phenomenon. Part of a vast
family (but not to be confused with
any other similarily named personages,
aliases,
objects,
paraphenalia,
bound published texts,
functions or
any imitations thereof), it has not been without its share of
jealous detractors. Its very reputation was
nearly besmirched, yet remained largely benign compared to
more terrifying finds. Indeed, it continues to persevere, even in
analog form.
posted by Smart Dalek at 5:57 AM PST - 14 comments
Freaky Friday Flash Fun, Flatting Flies:
Insectonator is a top-down shooter. Well, "shooter" is a stretch; this is more of "stomp, drop things, overkill with naplam" attack on pretty much every homeowner's nightmare: a bunch of crawly bugs in the dark that avoid the flashlight.
The bugs don't shoot back, so the game is just an endurance test by the player. And there are two awards for actually sticking around long enough. Weapons include a rock, your boot, various guns (including sniper rifles), rocket launchers, an anvil, naplam, and finally, a nuclear weapon.
Via the ever excellent
Jay Is Games.
posted by Old'n'Busted at 4:45 AM PST - 7 comments
