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May 2008 Archives
May 31
Christopher Tarnovsky, smartcard programmer,
gives a fascinating insider account of his years in the cloak-and-dagger world of satellite TV piracy. Tarnovsky began as a satellite pirate himself before being hired by a DirecTV contractor to develop anti-piracy electronic countermeasures; he was allegedly responsible for the
"Black Sunday" attack on DirecTV pirates.
posted by whir at 6:33 PM PST - 13 comments
HowISpentMyStimulus.com
In January, Congress approved $152 billion in economic stimulus checks for millions of American households, intended to boost the economy and avert a recession. Just how this money will be spent remains to be seen. We hope this website helps shed some light on where the stimulus money is going.
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 5:35 PM PST - 77 comments
When King James VII of Scotland died in 1700, Louis XIV of France gave his word and his support to the cause of his son, James VIII, or the "pretender" as he was known to his enemies. One of history's most famous lost causes, the story contains smaller tragedies, like the downfall of the Radclyffe family of Cumbria. An almost embarrassingly romantic tale, it includes
a "murdered" (actually executed) Earl (sound), a
haunting (and some say haunted ruin), an
"incorruptible" corpse, a daring
prison escape and, according to at least
one novelist, a possible American connection.
posted by nax at 7:20 AM PST - 11 comments
"...the aspiring speaker needs no knowledge of the truth about what is right or good... In courts of justice no attention is paid whatever to the truth about such topics; all that matters is plausibility..." A
Glossary of Rhetorical Terms with examples.
posted by sluglicker at 1:34 AM PST - 7 comments
May 30
Open House, Home Turned Upsidedown
"This house at 15 S. Putnam has stood victim to the elements – it’s been vandalized, looted, and its leaking roof has made it uninhabitable. In June 2006, the structure was condemned by the city due to structural problems, destined for demo.
But now – thanks to cooperation between the University of Buffalo School of Architecture, Harvey Garrett, and home owner Dennetta Stikkel – new, and decidedly unique, life will be breathed into the otherwise abandoned house. Under the direction of Professors
Frank Fantauzzi and Brad Wales, the project architect, 14 graduate students will be working creatively to revitalize the structure. It is a unique opportunity for the students to use their classroom architecture training in a real-life application."
Quoted from
Buffalo Rising Story
Longer story on the completed project at
Artvoice.
posted by doug3505 at 10:18 PM PST - 5 comments
The Atlantic has an
interesting article about the high probability of "space rocks" hitting the earth, possibly as high as a 1 in 10 chance of a major catastrophe each century. Not a new theme, but the article has some new developments suggesting it is more common than once thought. Includes a 10 minute video.
posted by stbalbach at 7:33 PM PST - 19 comments
Leave the planet to travel into the largest structures of the universe, then plunge into the tiniest. Forty two orders of magnitude in thirty six minutes....
Cosmic Voyage. (single link Google video
via)
posted by Kronos_to_Earth at 7:07 PM PST - 11 comments
Fearless Fightin' Flash Fun for Friday:
Robokill is a demo that recalls the overhead action of
SMASH TV - though this time, you're placed in the metal shoes of a lowly salvage bot, sent to decimate your mechanical brethren who commandeered an orbital outpost. As you clear the halls for the benefit of some lazy humans, you can trade supplies and armaments with an alien merchant who mistakes
you for one of Earth's fleshbags. It's a thankless job, sure, but you're supposed to be a remorseless machine...
[via]
posted by Smart Dalek at 2:07 PM PST - 33 comments
Assemble a rocket from main engine to payload fairing.
Rocket Science 101 shows the basic parts of the launch vehicle, how they are configured, and how they work together to launch a NASA spacecraft. More Friday Flash Fun.
posted by netbros at 2:02 PM PST - 8 comments
Friday Flash Fun: Caravaneer is a game where you are a caravan leader in a post-apocalyptic world where towns and cities have formed around oases in the desert.
posted by schyler523 at 12:41 PM PST - 10 comments
Want to know how government spending and taxation levels have gone up or down over the last 20 years, and how they compare with other countries? The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development has a handy set of tables (
Excel,
HTML-ized by Google): total spending, total revenues, fiscal surplus or deficit (
Norway's surplus is 17% of GDP). Part of the
statistical tables for the semi-annual
OECD Outlook.
posted by russilwvong at 12:18 PM PST - 6 comments
ReBoot's back! A new online comic book is now
available*, and three feature-length films are in development. Remarkably, the comic was developed as a
combined effort between producers and fans; fans voted on five different stories and even contributed art.
ReBoot was one of the first TV shows to feature 100% digital animation and has a warm place in the hearts of many children of the 90s.
* sign-up required and their web-viewer is a pain, be warned.
posted by PercussivePaul at 10:28 AM PST - 28 comments
You may have heard that reading is in a slow decline (
previously). We now know that such reports were either exaggerated, or at least
statistically questionable. On the flip-side of all this is the fact that reading as an activity has never been
more accessible (or thrifty!) considering the number of reputable
book swap programs available on the internet. There's no excuse now!
posted by tybeet at 5:44 AM PST - 48 comments
Peculiar corpses: "
Incorruptibles remaining free of decomposition have baffled scientists to this day. These bodies are discovered in many different environments, including environments that would typically cause an accidental or deliberately preserved corpse to decompose rapidly." The photographed examples seem to all be associated with Christian faith. Hmm. "[At Oratorio di San Lorenzo] in Palermo, however, corpses are treated as characters in a play":
The Museum of the Dead, reassuringly less preserved.
posted by nthdegx at 4:25 AM PST - 67 comments
"People are talking, but no one is really listening. For all the fun and fantasy that can be had following this election on the internet, the overriding impression it gives after a while is of tuning into thousands of people as they sit in their cars and complain about the traffic."
David Runciman on "The Cattle-Prod Election."
posted by nasreddin at 12:56 AM PST - 52 comments
May 29
Come, take a
ride and
look at some of the
Islamic Art of the past. Or, you could call it
Art of the
Islamic World if you're so inclined. If not, then how about taking into account some of the
major milestones of
Islam throughout the
centuries, from
past till
present (
more examples here), including the
art of
Calligraphy and
Architecture. Not to mention the
Arab world's contribution to
music, both
old and
new. [
Previously mentioned,
here,
here,
here, and
here, with a
wonderful comment from
nickyskye as usual]
posted by hadjiboy at 10:03 PM PST - 28 comments
The military judge presiding over child solider
Omar Khadr's case has been
replaced. Khadr's lawyer claims the judge, Colonel Peter Brownback, was fired because he “threatened to suspend proceedings in the case of Omar Khadr if prosecutors continued to withhold key evidence from Omar's lawyers.” Defence officials claim Brownback was planning to retire.
Although Khadr was only 15 when he was captured, and is the only Western citizen still being held at Guantanamo Bay, Canada's Conservative government has refused to seek extradition or repatriation for him.
posted by cdmckay at 8:08 PM PST - 72 comments
On April 3, The Memphis Flyer
ran a story describing a town hall meeting in Shelby County in which citizens were instructed on the art of finding a potential terrorist. Among the 'qualifications' are having a camera and taking pictures of well known or important structures.
posted by theichibun at 5:27 PM PST - 52 comments
"Skin painted bright red, heads partially shaved, arrows drawn back in the longbows and aimed square at the aircraft buzzing overhead. The gesture is unmistakable: Stay Away. The apparent aggression shown by these people is quite understandable, for they are members of one of Earth's last uncontacted tribes."
posted by Rhaomi at 5:18 PM PST - 88 comments
This past weekend the St. Paul Saints, Minnesota's minor league baseball team, did away with the traditional "bobblehead" giveaway day. Instead they handed out "
bobble foot"
dolls in honor of Idaho Senator Larry "I am not gay" Craig who was busted for soliciting sex in an MSP International airport bathroom while waiting to change planes for Idaho. "The
baseball team [
said] the promotion, which coincide[d] with National Tap Dance Day, is 'in tribute to all their toe-tapping friends and fans from around the nation who may ever have set foot in Minneapolis-St. Paul… even for just a change of planes." As
reported on CNN [video | 2:18], people were lined up at 10 a.m. for a 7p.m. game so they could get one of these unique mementos.
posted by ericb at 5:09 PM PST - 18 comments
Overlooked or ignored for far too long by the medical establishment,
twisty balloon dog anatomy and
gummi bear anatomy are just two of the crucial areas that
Moist Production's
Jason Freeny is working to bring wider attention to. He's also to be commended for his tireless efforts in raising awareness of Disney character suicide and death by unexplainable circumstance. And there's free downloadable desktops, kids!
[1 or 2 of the pages at Moist maybe NSFW]
posted by flapjax at midnite at 4:46 PM PST - 7 comments
The Devil's Tramping Ground is a barren circle in the forest in North Carolina. As a result of nothing having grown within the circle for at least the last hundred years, it has become the subject of some of that state's oldest legends. John Harden, a journalist, newspaper editor and author said of that place
"... the story is that the Devil goes there to walk in circles as he thinks up new means of causing trouble for humanity. There sometimes during the dark of night, the Majesty of the Underworld of Evil silently tramps around that bare circle; thinking, plotting, and planning against good, and in behalf of wrong. So far as is known, no person has ever spent the night there to disprove this is what happens.". No person until you came along and played
this neat interactive flash movie, that is.
posted by Effigy2000 at 4:28 PM PST - 21 comments
How To Clean Stuff.
From kitchen and bath, to flooring and carpets. Indoors, outdoors, your car, dog, colon and bong. More than 800 cleaning tips in all. Submit your best ideas. Each one that gets published, the site will contribute to the
Clean Water Fund.
posted by netbros at 12:50 PM PST - 5 comments
As Moscow changes, so does its population of stray dogs. During Soviet times, Moscow's stray dogs foraged for food and avoided humans, since there wasn't much to be gained from begging. As the city became increasingly affluent, the dogs' behavior changed radically. Some recent adaptations include passive subway begging, observing stoplights, and a food scam called the "come-from-behind ambush." The stray dogs, whose population is estimated at 26,000, have even ceased some of their interpack warfare. Observe the Moscow subway dog
here.
posted by Afroblanco at 11:15 AM PST - 26 comments
As Close as Any Brother - Ali Hameed, an Iraqi NYT employee, writes about PCs in daily life in Iraq.
Once a mortar fell near to our house. Everyone stopped what they were doing, I mean if it was eating, watching TV, sleeping — except Rana. She kept on typing and typing. I yelled at her: "Rana leave the PC and come here, you are sitting near the glass!" She told me, "Just a minute, I want to talk to my friend, she is online and it has been a long time since I connected with her." From NYT's
Baghdad Bureau blog.
posted by russilwvong at 10:42 AM PST - 4 comments
May 28
State of decay
:"Over the years, Boston artist
Rosamond Purcell has photographed goliath beetles and translucent bats culled from the backrooms of natural history museums; a collection of teeth pulled by Peter the Great; moles flayed by naturalist Willem Cornelis van Heurn; and scores of worn and weathered objects, like termite-eaten books and fish skeletons."
posted by dhruva at 10:36 PM PST - 6 comments
A poem that builds upon itself and grows as the world wide web grows.
The Apostrophe Engine is a website operated by Bill Kenney and Darren Wershler-Henry. It is the source of the poems in
apostrophe, a book published by ECW Press in 2006.
The home page of the Apostrophe Engine site presents the full text of a poem called "apostrophe", written by Bill in 1993. In this digital version of the poem, each line is now a hyperlink.
How it works.
posted by Fizz at 9:29 PM PST - 29 comments
Among European countries, Spain has been
hit particularly badly by the global credit crisis. Miguel Marina, a recently unemployed real estate agent (what else?) has been one of its victims. Unable to keep up with his mortgage payments or to find a buyer for his home, he has found an original solution: he's
raffling his
apartment at 5€ a ticket.
posted by Skeptic at 12:19 PM PST - 20 comments
CPU Filter: You know what they say about idle hands... What about
idle FLOPs? Distributed computing (a.k.a. grid computing / a.k.a. cloud computing) has come a long way in the past years, and most people probably don't know the vast number of projects they can put their idle CPUs to work on - it's not just
aliens and
genomes anymore. There are more than
one hundred projects ranging from
3D rendering to
climate prediction to saving the world with
nutritious rice to
neurons and
nanobots. Why not lend an idle hand?
posted by tybeet at 8:38 AM PST - 39 comments
Intense debate about weighty issues like racism, abortion, and immigration... between animals in funny hats! This is the silly punditry of
Scenario: Dog v. Cat:
Round 1,
round 2,
round 3.
posted by hjo3 at 2:12 AM PST - 7 comments
May 27
Soulful, funky and blues-inflected jazz organist Jimmy McGriff
passed away over the weekend.
McGriff (wiki) belonged (along with Jimmy Smith, Charles Earland, Lonnie Smith, Melvin Rhyne, John Patton, and others) to that select group of Hammond B-3 players who defined that instrument for jazz and related music--he played in small
soul jazz combos that owed their greasy, riff-based sound as much to R&B as to bebop. Here's a
small taste of McGriff's music.
posted by ornate insect at 8:50 PM PST - 13 comments
True Romance: 15 years later.
Maxim article (hence slightly NSFW ads) with interviews with Christian Slater, Tony Scott, Quinten Tarantino, etc. If you're a fan of behind-the-scenes gossip, or the film -- or both -- it's an interesting read.
posted by zardoz at 6:27 PM PST - 46 comments
Each year, people around the world spend billions of hours playing computer games. What if all this time and energy could be channeled into useful work? What if people playing computer games could, without consciously doing so, simultaneously solve large-scale problems?
GWAP is
Luis van Ahn's answer [PDF, HTML cache] to these questions, a collection of easy and engaging games that make computers smarter.
posted by carsonb at 4:45 PM PST - 27 comments
Meet Joules the climate change-sceptic robot.
Joules is employed to teach 8-14 year-old school children in the UK about energy use. Joules
says: "oil and gas could be in short supply in about 50 years time. The earth is believed to be getting warmer and sea levels apper to be rising. Energy Chest is funded in part by the world's biggest oil company:
ExxonMobil.
posted by MrMerlot at 4:03 PM PST - 45 comments
Auroville
Funded by Governments all over the world, the city of
Auroville is an ongoing experiment 'whose stated purpose is to realize human unity in diversity' through yoga. Unfortunately, it seems the 'rule free' society has attracted some of the least welcome of humanity's outliers, namely
child sex tourists.
posted by asok at 11:17 AM PST - 16 comments
Waggish Reads Proust
Reading
In Search of Lost Time, or Remembrance of Things Past, is quite the daunting task. Whether you've read Proust, or are considering reading Proust for the first time, a helpful summary & guide, that examines significant passages for your own discussion.
posted by Fizz at 9:30 AM PST - 46 comments
May 26
Fascinating account
(w/ pix) of a motorcycle journey through Angola. Stumbled onto this from the Black Flag forums and have not been able to stop reading it.
posted by jcruelty at 9:29 PM PST - 40 comments
the Prince "Come Together" bootleg
... from Coachella 2008 that's popping up suddenly on many indie mp3 blogs now .
..Incidentally.. the Beatles wrote this as an unofficial Presidential campaign song for Timothy Leary (incarcerated at the time) .
A progressively intense audience engagning performance ... if they ever do a career spanning Prince box set they'll put this on.
posted by celerystick at 7:40 PM PST - 37 comments
Article in UK newspaper The Independent about two members of Nottingham University, U.K., Rizwaan Sabir and Hicham Yezza, who were arrested last week on terrorism charges and held for six days before being released without charge. The reason was that they had downloaded a terrorist manual from a US government website, which MA student Sabir needed for his research into terrorism, and which was approved by his supervisor. His friend Hicham Yezza, former student and current administrator at the university was arrested for helping to print out the 1500 page document. On release Yezza was then immediately rearrested on immigration charges and now faces imminent deportation, despite being a resident of the UK for 13 years and currently in the process of applying for citizenship. A
campaign is currently underway to prevent this.
posted by leibniz at 1:29 PM PST - 84 comments
Efforts to save China's endangered giant pandas suffered another setback after the Sichuan earthquake. Less than 1600 pandas are thought to remain in the wild, with 249 pandas in breeding programs around the country. The
Wolong Nature Reserve, subject of National Geographic's adorable
Panda Nursery documentary and just 19 miles from the epicenter of the earthquake, was badly damaged. Five staffers were killed, and several pandas are still missing. Search teams have been sent out to locate the missing pandas, and several injured pandas have been
evacuated to the nearby Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding as well as to zoos around the country. Though they now have enough water to give the pandas, local officials have said that they are short on food. "We are in urgent need of bamboos and apples."
Pandas International is
collecting donations for relief efforts at Wolong.
posted by arnicae at 11:43 AM PST - 15 comments
May 25
Monday got you stressed? Tired of all the politicking?
Here's something to help you relax. Remember, just like real life, yellow is good, purple is gooder and red is bad.
posted by oxford blue at 11:46 PM PST - 32 comments
The opening shots of 1920s New York City are wonderful, then you get a zany high-speed Harold Lloyd blazing down the avenues, and that's fun to watch, but the real killer is the horse-drawn trolley absolutely
tearing-ass through lower Manhattan, full gallop. Ends badly. Then it's over to San Francisco for one last bit of homicidal vehicular activity with a bus. Well, they sure don't drive
like they used to!
posted by flapjax at midnite at 6:53 PM PST - 37 comments
The best thing about WIRED Magazine's 15th Anniversary celebration is it's not all self-congratulatory. Of course, any media entity involved in the rapidly-changing but well-archived internet is going to sometimes do silly things that we all can see - forever. In one area, at least, WIRED is owning up to its bad judgment with the Lamest (their word) Gear Ever Highlighted in their 'Fetish' Feature.
1993-1995.
1996-1998.
1999-2006.
It's not that there are less lame items in recent years; they're just waiting for history to confirm what smart readers saw all along. My favorites - and why some of them may not be so lame:
posted by wendell at 4:38 PM PST - 43 comments
How to ruin a joke.
A concise and surprisingly astute explanation of how referential humor works on the web and why it kinda sucks. (Warning: somethingawful.com)
posted by es_de_bah at 10:12 AM PST - 68 comments
Hello Kitty becomes Japan's ambassador to China. The little half-Japanese, half-English cat has become so globally recognisable that it is,
perhaps, inevitable that the Japanese board of tourism has appointed her their official tourism ambassador to China and Hong Kong. This is
not the first time the world has looked to Hello Kitty to perform an ambassadorial role; she has been United States children's ambassador for Unicef since 1983.
posted by infini at 8:55 AM PST - 18 comments
May 24
The
Phillips Machine, also known as the
Moniac, is a early analog computer for economic modeling with an unusual twist: all of the computation is done by water flowing through its pipes. The flows represent taxes, income, and so on, and the
chambers represent balances held by various bodies. Floats attached to pens can provide graphical output such things as GDP and interest rates, and valves can be opened and shut to change the state of the system in real time. You can listen to a
BBC radio segment on the origin of Phillips machine, or
see a demonstration of one of the only extant working models at the University of Cambridge.
posted by Upton O'Good at 10:46 PM PST - 12 comments
Jack Chick and his cracktasticness has certainly
been covered on Metafilter before. However, in one fell swoop, his cracktasticness has not only squared but cubed. Chick's pamphlet,
Lisa (curiously absent from the
tracts on his site), features a father who gave herpes to his little daughter and then pimps his daughter out to his similarly pedophilic neighbor (who thinks the "pretty juicy gossip" is "pretty kinky") in exchange for the neighbor's silence. Two months of abuse later, the family doctor discovers Lisa's herpes, and does not report the father to the police, because ... well, you'll see. (Makes
the Old Ones look better and better.)
posted by WCityMike at 8:06 PM PST - 49 comments
Developers Helm, Fuzzpilz, Ptoing, DarkStalkey, Lackey and Ghormak formed indie game development team,
Umlautgames, around the 85% completion mark of
Thrustburst. A stylish and beautiful take on an old game called
UrthWurm (scroll down), Thrustburst is now complete.
posted by pancreas at 5:07 PM PST - 4 comments
Fifty Thousand Shirts.
Creative guy Steve Paterson has teamed up with a number of other partners (and is still looking for more) to sell 50,000 t-shirts in memory of the more than 50,000 people who died in China's recent 7.9 magnitude earthquake in order to raise $1,000,000.
posted by djspicerack at 12:55 PM PST - 11 comments
The highest recorded skydive was performed in 1960 by Joe Kittinger from
102,800 feet. That record may not stand any longer. After twenty years of planning and attempts, almost twenty million dollars, and a two hour ascent on May 26th, Michel Fournier, wearing only space suit and parachute, will step out of the gondola of a 650 foot helium balloon at
130,000 feet....
The Great Leap.
posted by Kronos_to_Earth at 12:47 PM PST - 29 comments
The editors of the Chinese lifestyle magazine
New Travel Weekly thought it might be a good idea to shoot
a fashion spread in the rubble of the Sichuan earthquake. The editors
have now been sacked and the magazine is undergoing rectification.
posted by Sitegeist at 8:11 AM PST - 30 comments
One fine old day in old LA, in the year of nineteen and sixty, one Frederick Usher met
Eddie "One String" Jones, heard him lay down some deep blues on his
diddley bow, and was so taken with Jones'
monochord masterpieces that he ran home, grabbed his tape recorder and recorded Jones in the alley. One other recording session ensued soon thereafter, which was
released as an LP in 1964. By that time, however, the mysterious Eddie Jones (if that was even his real name) was long gone, and was never heard from again.
[NOTE: see hoverovers for link descriptions]
posted by flapjax at midnite at 12:09 AM PST - 22 comments
May 23
The Future Without IPv6
"...imagine you're in the business of squatting on domain names today. It's pretty easy to see that a market is going to be opening up soon allowing you to speculate on the future value of IPv4 address allocations. What would you do? You'd be trying to eat up as much of that free pool as you can before it's all gone."
posted by gsb at 11:59 PM PST - 29 comments
Propaganda is now officially hip.
Barack Obama's presidential campaign has
struck a
palette with those interested in good, effective design.
Shepard Fairey was recently given the opportunity to create a
screenprinted poster for Obama's campaign, which sold out quite quickly. Next, his campaign turns to artist Scott Hansen, aka
ISO50 for his visual art and
Tycho for his music. Mr. Hansen's
poster employs his idealistic and nostalgic style, yet more direct than his typical dreamy work. It's quite lovely.
posted by blastrid at 11:36 PM PST - 64 comments
"This might be a weird request, but I just want to cuddle,"
Nevada Sagebrush columnist Jordan Butler decided to do something for his last column (before graduating college) that he hadn't done before. He decided to solicit a brothel. Here's the catch: he wasn't interested in paying for sex. He just wanted something to write about for his last column. The result is half after school special and half Twilight Zone episode, but it's all funny.
posted by ZachsMind at 8:52 PM PST - 55 comments
In 1989, Lieutenant William “Mad Dog” Rizer was called before the Senate Military Investigations Committee to discuss his statements regarding the effectiveness of military operations in response to the Red Falcon invasion of the previous year. The following is a transcript of his testimony before Congress.
The Contra Hearings.
posted by Sailormom at 5:32 PM PST - 14 comments
Missing: four left feet or some number of bodies. Another severed right foot has been found in British Columbia.
Another severed human foot has been discovered washed ashore on Canada's Pacific coast, but police are no closer to solving the gruesome mystery on where they are coming from. The shoe-clad foot was discovered on Thursday on a small uninhabited island south of Vancouver in the Strait of Georgia, and is the fourth discovered in the region in the past 10 months. All four cases involved right feet, and each was found on a different island. The earlier feet were also still in shoes. Previously
1,
2.
posted by jokeefe at 3:54 PM PST - 69 comments
Logólogos
makes mathematical equations out of the 'creative' process of logo design.
also a good example of "you don't need to speak the same language" blogging
posted by wendell at 2:21 PM PST - 31 comments
You may have
elbow germs and not even know it.
Eeeww! "The crook of your elbow is not just a plain patch of skin. It is a piece of highly coveted real estate, a special ecosystem, a bountiful home to no fewer than six tribes of bacteria. Even after you have washed the skin clean, there are still one million bacteria in every square centimeter." Beware some of these germs may be on your
hockey equipment.
posted by Xurando at 2:08 PM PST - 22 comments
According to an
audit released today by the DoD's IG, there has been virtually
no oversight of over $8 billion paid by the Defense Department to contractors in Iraq. The report confirms a similar finding back in 2005 that over
$9 billion in Iraq war funds were unaccounted for. As a factual and non-polemical matter, this
spectacular waste of taxpayer money has undoubtedly
lined the pockets of more than a few
war profiteers. To say the Iraq war has been plagued with rampant
corruption, fraud and fiscal mismanagement is not an editorial position or overstatement: even lawmakers have begun
to acknowledge this.
posted by ornate insect at 9:09 AM PST - 67 comments
The Hole in the Wall
[via mefi projects] is our own
interrobang's surrealistic cat story now being serialized at
Top Shelf Comics as part of their new Webcomics section, and it's definitely something special - pen & ink & watercolor adventures of two cats exploring a mysterious and dangerous underground landscape. More comics like this will be posted there depending on the popularity of this one, so if you love art, great comics, or cats, you
will want to check it out. This was a part of interrobang's
Year in Comics project, so if you fall in love with the Hole in the Wall kittehs (you will!), go have look at his other stuff, as well.
posted by taz at 7:09 AM PST - 30 comments
HistoryWorld
is a general-knowledge website, designed for anyone above the age of about twelve with an interest in history. I found the site searching for
dance history, but it includes 400 broad topics with more added all the time. It approaches history as a narrative, making full use of
chronology. This is for the student as well as the researcher.
posted by netbros at 5:36 AM PST - 15 comments
"You people bring matches for Mikey?"
When people fondly remember TV's
Mystery Science Theater 3000 they commonly focus on the film riffing part of the show, but some of the best comedy to come out of the Satellite of Love involves the host segments that provided a break from the movie. MSTies over at Satellite News have spent the past ten weeks discussing the best host segments from each season of the show, analyzing what makes some segments work while others fall flat.
posted by Servo5678 at 5:03 AM PST - 66 comments
Blonde Zombies
-
So NSFW, unless your work is cool with trashy Mexican comics, space vixens, pulp paperback covers, and the like.
posted by jtron at 1:48 AM PST - 30 comments
May 22
Not another fine myth.
I've read
Robert Asprin's Myth books from the beginning, and still re-read them every couple of years. You may also know him for co-creating the
Thieves' World shared universe books. RIP Mr. Asprin, Skeeve, Aahz, Tananda, and the rest of the gang. (Now I have to go and dig up the graphic novels he did with
Phil Foglio.)
posted by wenat at 10:12 PM PST - 66 comments
In the 17th century Dutch painters began to create informal paintings that focused on the features and/or expressions of anonymous people. These were called tronies. Although a tronie showed a person’s face, it wasn’t considered a portrait. [...] In 1995 Dutch photographer Hendrik Kerstens began a series of tronies featuring his daughter Paula. some images NSFW
posted by xod at 1:24 PM PST - 35 comments
BestFriendsAgain.com
The Best Friends Again program, sponsored by
BioArts International, is a limited commercial dog cloning program. BioArts is the only entity in the world with both the know-how and the legal right to practice commercial dog and cat cloning. We are auctioning off 5 dog cloning service slots to the general public. We may or may not perform any additional commercial dog cloning services after this auction.
posted by psmealey at 8:18 AM PST - 53 comments
It's no secret that
amateur radio operators, or hams, often build their own equipment. Especially with the aid of antenna tuners, most anything can be used as an antenna. One group of hams took this to the extreme, using
ladders and shopping carts as antennas as they started an annual competition that would eventually see
trucks,
train tracks, a
tree, and even a pair of
exercise machines and
a football stadium used. I stumbled across the site last night, and it turns out that this year's competition is
this weekend! Ham radio, by the way, no longer requires a
Morse code exam, just a set of questions on electrical and operations theory. Those curious can take
practice tests online, since the FCC releases the question pools.
posted by fogster at 7:23 AM PST - 23 comments
The "a few bad eggs" theory crushed
- ACLU summarizes the Justice Department Inspector General's report. "This new report should become exhibit A at the next congressional hearing on the Bush administration's use of torture," said Christopher Anders, Senior Legislative Counsel to the ACLU. ... "The questions are who did what and what crimes were committed. This Justice Department report helps answer both questions."
posted by Kirth Gerson at 7:00 AM PST - 32 comments
May 21
Immediately, Herson spotted an offense—a second-floor awning outside a tarot shop that advertised "Energy Stone's." They climbed the stairs to the second floor and approached a middle-age women with a quizzical expression. "We happened to notice the sign for energy stones," Deck said, "and there happens to be an extra apostrophe. 'Stone's' doesn't need the apostrophe."
"And?" she asked, her voice flat with annoyance.
"And we wanted to bring it to your attention," Deck said.
A look inside the daring lives of Jeff Deck and Benjamin Herson, vanguards of the
Typo Eradication Advancement League.
posted by Rhaomi at 9:54 PM PST - 84 comments
With Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull restarting a franchise from the 80s, this is the perfect time to consider how to ruthlessly pillage the treasured movies of our youth. So, on that note, presenting:
Back to the Sequels
posted by bove at 4:16 PM PST - 25 comments
Canadian author Lesley Choyce and his family share their extended encounter with a surfeit of skunks in a short documentary, avaible on YouTube
in three parts.
posted by CKmtl at 2:10 PM PST - 3 comments
A 15-year-old in London is being
prosecuted for
holding a sign calling Scientology a "cult", during a
peaceful demonstration (0:55-1:40).
The teenager refused to back down, quoting a 1984 high court ruling from Mr Justice Latey, in which he described the Church of Scientology as a "cult" ... The City of London police came under fire two years ago when it emerged that more than 20 officers, ranging from constable to chief superintendent, had accepted gifts worth thousands of pounds from the Church of Scientology. The City of London Chief Superintendent, Kevin Hurley, praised Scientology for "raising the spiritual wealth of society" during the opening of its headquarters in 2006. Last year a video praising Scientology emerged featuring Ken Stewart, another of the City of London's chief superintendents via
posted by East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabaddi Champion '94 at 7:12 AM PST - 128 comments
YouTomb
MIT project that tracks youtube file deletions for aledged copyright infringement. They do not host the deleted files, fyi.
via wired
posted by asok at 5:43 AM PST - 16 comments
Geohashing:
"As you may have noticed, today’s
comic contains an algorithm for converting dates into local coordinates. For a given day, you can calculate what that day’s coordinate is for your region. Dan has put together a
tool for calculating a day’s coordinates and show it using Google Maps."
posted by Anything at 12:04 AM PST - 29 comments
May 20
Michael Bluejay:
...... Who says he almost always rides a bike, tried to expose the cult he was born into, (Aesthetic Realism), is concerned about pedophiles in the nudist community, played with the Ben Folds Five, and can tell you really really effective ways to save electricity? Why, its some guy called Micheal Blue Jay and his densly information packed web site of practical millenial knowledge and other fascinating factoids. Kind of Ben Franklinesque.
posted by celerystick at 6:31 PM PST - 20 comments
Mehdi Kazemi is granted asylum in the UK.
Mehdi, now 20, was studying in the UK when Parham (his boyfriend) was arrested for the crime of homosexuality by the Iranian government. Mehdi was named by his boyfriend and warned he was liable to arrest on his planned return. The UK Home Office denied him asylum [
despite a thoughtful campaign by human rights campaigners] - because it was said he had overstayed his student visa and was therefore not seen as genuinely seeking asylum. So he escaped to the Netherlands. That's where it gets complicated.
posted by dash_slot- at 1:43 PM PST - 17 comments
Edward Kennedy has malignant brain tumor
A cancerous brain tumor caused the seizure Sen. Edward M. Kennedy suffered over the weekend, doctors said Tuesday in a grim diagnosis for one of American politics' most enduring figures. "He remains in good spirits and full of energy," the doctors for the 76-year-old Massachusetts Democrat said in a statement.
posted by photodegas at 12:19 PM PST - 98 comments
The rapid growth of electronic trading
since 1976 has benefited equity market participants by improving competition, reducing cost and increasing liquidity while insuring better pricing.
One unexpected side effect has been the recent emergence of
"dark pools of liquidity", or the secret stock market.
posted by Mutant at 10:14 AM PST - 21 comments
Ever notice how some words just sound like what they mean? Like how a distant star really does seem to
sparkle. Words like
mumble,
twist, and
squeamish.
Jospeh Bottum describes them well: "They taste good in the mouth, and they seem to resound with their own verbal truthfulness... More like proper nouns than mere words, they match the objects they describe.
Pickle, gloomy, portly, curmudgeon--sounds that loop back on themselves to close the circle of meaning. They're perfect, in their way." But he tries to coin a new term for them when some already exist.
posted by AceRock at 8:45 AM PST - 57 comments
When programmers kill.
[pdf] In 1982, Atomic Energy Canada, Limited, introduced the now-infamous Therac-25, a solely software-driven successor to its earlier medical linear accelerators.
Six patients received massive amounts of radiation, and three died, before AECL was compelled to supplement the (faulty) software-only error-checking with hardware interlocks to prevent overexposure.
posted by enn at 7:55 AM PST - 18 comments
Do you like Berlin? The hippest city on the planet has some interesting video blogs. My personal favorite is
First We Take Berlin which is pretty off-beat and covers a lot of not so hip areas of the city. In their current episode they go to the annual may riots in Kreuzberg (after a weird little mouse story). Then there is
Mayda3000 which is the longest running video blog about Berlin.
Watch Berlin is a sort of compilation of many different video blogs most of which are in german but there are some are in english as well. And last but not least there's
Verbundstoff which is in german only and takes a look at the very underground Berlin electronic music scene.
posted by namagomi at 1:55 AM PST - 47 comments
May 19
Leslie Low
is an indie improv-based musician singer/songwriter. This site has songs from his two solo albums,
Volcanoes, moody instrumental music mixing striking melodies, organic sounds, odd rhythm structures and laptop noise elements; and
Worms, with solo guitar and voice delivering haunting intense acoustic numbers about death, retreating from the world and seeking refuge in a quiet place behind the woods.
posted by netbros at 11:21 PM PST - 10 comments
16% of US science teachers believe human beings have been created by God within the last 10,000 years. 25% of science teachers spend some time teaching about creationism or intelligent design. 12.5% teach it as a "valid, scientific alternative to Darwinian explanations for the origin of species". 2% say they do not cover evolution at all. Teachers who have taken more science courses themselves devote more time to evolution - "This may be because better-prepared teachers are more confident in dealing with students' questions about a sensitive subject."
posted by Artw at 9:09 PM PST - 205 comments
IBM's
the next 5 in 5 "forecasts the five innovations that will change the way that we live, work and play in the next five years."
posted by dobie at 5:26 PM PST - 60 comments
Favrd
is a list of the best Twitter posts, based on a few simple principles, the most interesting of which is probably "by any means necessary, web-strategy, social-media, online-marketing webcocks - unaware as they are of how toxic their presence is in the arenas they cannot shut up about - must and shall be filtered out of view." That filter results in a surprisingly entertaining subsection of Twitter, a sort of super-short story collection.
Original announcement from creator Dean Allen.
posted by scottreynen at 4:11 PM PST - 48 comments
Gyminee
is a truly excellent web app that lets you track workouts, nutrition and fitness goals. Prints grocery lists, lets you find workout buddies, etc. Very aesthetically pleasing, too. Considerably easier to use than
Fitday, which a lot of people swear by.
posted by jbickers at 1:49 PM PST - 15 comments
If you've ever wanted to peel back the corners of your browser window again and again to reveal different colors, then
colorflip is for you.
posted by hydrophonic at 11:31 AM PST - 29 comments
Too pissed to drive?
("An interactive urinary experience - not to be mistaken with the Wii.") Those naughty but practical Germans have come up with a way to discourage men from driving drunk using a video game embedded in a urinal. I don't know how successful it's been in the real world, but it did win a silver
Clio award for
Innovative Use of Technology. If you don't plan to be in a Frankfurt bar any time soon, or if you lack the necessary
equipment to play, you can try the wee-free simulation
here.
posted by maudlin at 10:55 AM PST - 11 comments
Three of the giants of Brazilian guitar were Laurindo Almeida (1917-1995; wiki
here), Luiz Bonfa (1922-2001; wiki
here), and Baden Powell (1937-2000; wiki
here). Here is Laurindo Almeida w/the MJQ playing
One Note Samba; here is Luiz Bonfa playing the theme from
Black Orpheus (which he composed); and here is Baden Powell playing
Samba Triste.
posted by ornate insect at 10:54 AM PST - 17 comments
Chinese Poems
is a simple, no frills site with over 200 classical Chinese poems, mostly from the Tang period. The poems are presented in traditional and simplified chinese characters, pinyin and English translation, both literal and literary. Here's Du Mu's
Drinking Alone:
Outside the window, wind and snow blow straight,
I clutch the stove and open a flask of wine.
Just like a fishing boat in the rain,
Sail down, asleep on the autumn river.
Among other poets featured are
Li Bai (a.k.a. Li Po),
Du Fu and
Wang Wei. As a bonus, here's the entire text of Ezra Pound's
Cathay, most of whom are from Li Bai originals.
posted by Kattullus at 9:16 AM PST - 15 comments
Tens of millions of
brittlestars have been
discovered inhabiting the peak of a sea mount in the Macquarie Ridge south of New Zealand. Strong currents are believed to be responsible for sweeping their predators away, more or less recreating their
home 300 million years
gone....
posted by Kronos_to_Earth at 5:58 AM PST - 21 comments
May 18
15x15
is viewable artwork consisting of 15 individual screens displaying a random video clip stored within the database for 15 seconds. Anyone can contribute, from the banal to the bizarre.
posted by netbros at 10:47 PM PST - 13 comments
Original Rush drummer is John Rutsey dead at 55.
Rush was one of the most successful prog rock acts of the 70s and 80s. Much of this success can be attributed to Neil Peart, whose airy, transcendent lyrics and virtuoso drumming in large part defined the band. But there was another drummer--more in the heavy style of John Bonham--who gripped the rhythmic helm on their first album: one
John Rutsey. Mr Rutsey left the band early after a diagnosis of diabetes. This month he succumbed to a heart attack, a common complication. Unfortunately, a discursive look at youtube revealed no live footage of Mr Rutsey in action.
Here is a pic from his heyday.
posted by zorro astor at 9:17 PM PST - 22 comments
The Doll Games emerged in Berkeley, California, at a time when race, gender, politics, and sexuality were fiercely and publicly debated... The Doll Games held up a funhouse mirror to their times, and what survives of them are historical documents of a wobbly, comical sort. But the Doll Games transcend their epoch. Intricate, obsessional, moral, violent and sexual, funny and tragic... Obedient to no rules except those its practitioners invented for themselves, completely collaborative, the Doll Games defined a truly interactive art form. In this theater of two, every audience member was a co-creator. [some text and pics NSFW]
posted by amyms at 8:26 PM PST - 24 comments
We've all seen scary mugshots on
The Smoking Gun, but who cares about the famous and infamous when we can celebrate mugshots of the average joe?
As the author of
21 Best Mugshots Evar wrote:
"When you go to jail, remember that your mugshot belongs to the ages. And in today's world, once you get it taken, it belongs to the Internets. Be sure to make it one worth remembering."
I'll keep that in mind should I ever be arrested. So sit back, ignore the screwed-up numbering layout, titles and comments (though a few are amusing), and <>enjoy the mugshots as is.
posted by bwg at 4:07 PM PST - 64 comments
May 17
Paper Critters
is an online application for creating and sharing paper toys. Make your own, or view an interactive gallery of the competition. Uses the open source
Papervision3D engine.
posted by netbros at 10:19 PM PST - 1 comments
It's that time of year again, folks... don't forget to put in your
vote for the World's Ugliest Dog.
posted by miss lynnster at 7:03 PM PST - 22 comments
Exercising your brain makes you smarter, and there is no better gym for it than the
MentatWiki.
posted by splice at 11:47 AM PST - 16 comments
Well, young folk, there was a time, y'know, when bands would put their band name on the kick drum head, so the audience could see the name of the band, y'see? Why, best as I can recall, the
The Yardbirds did it, and
The Zombies, too. And
The Hollies. Oh, and did I mention
The Yardbirds? Well, my memory's not what it used to be... oh, and there was those boys from Liverpool, used to sing about
Kansas Cty so well, why, you'd think they'd actually
been there! Now, there was this one band called themselves the
Spencer Davis Group, but I never could figure out why, cause it was that little Winwood fella just outta knee pants who was the star of
that show!
posted by flapjax at midnite at 8:08 AM PST - 18 comments
May 16
On May 13, security advisories published by
Debian and
Ubuntu revealed that, for over a year, their OpenSSL libraries have had a major flaw in their
CSPRNG, which is used by
key generation functions in many widely-used applications, which caused the "random" numbers produced to be extremely predictable.
[lolcat summary]
posted by finite at 10:01 PM PST - 81 comments
A very, very funny
Bill Murray guest stars on the first episode of Late Night with David Letterman -- 1982
posted by vronsky at 8:56 PM PST - 43 comments
The end of Rice-Boy.
T.O.E, Angel Eye, Calbash (alas we hardly knew ye) and Rice-Boy have ended their adventure. 2 years 1 month and two weeks after the start.
Evan Dahm produced one of the most engaging and beautiful webcomics over the past two years and it has concluded. A moment of silence.........
Ok now, the good news. Rice-Boy is done, but further Overside stories are likely. YAY.
posted by edgeways at 8:49 PM PST - 13 comments
Beyond the Torture Debate
On May 6th the American Strategy Program hosted an event with Philippe Sands, Professor of International Law at University College London and Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, former Chief of Staff for Colon Powell. Mr. Sands was in DC to testify to the House Judiciary Committee about the findings in his new book, Torture Team, which examines the legal implications of the Bush administration's policy of torture. Col. Wilkerson was on hand for commentary on the subject. The event was moderated by Patrick Doherty, deputy director of the American Strategy program.
The event was recorded and posted by the New America Foundation to YouTube.
It is 1 hr 31 minutes long, but well worth it.
posted by dougzilla at 7:08 PM PST - 16 comments
Some readers will appreciate their typographic form, while others will see further strategies at work — informational, strategic, philosophical, literary. There are odd, even anachronistic cultural references, gestures that date these books in a manner oddly soothing.The Next Page: Thirty Tables of Contents
posted by carsonb at 12:09 PM PST - 16 comments
With a pickup mounted on the body of the instrument just below the strings,
Revathy Krishna,
KP Sarada and Sivanandam and
Jayanthi Kumaresh get an unexpectedly fat sound out of their
veena. Rocking! The instrument is more often amplified with a microphone, in which case it sounds more like this performance by
D. Balakrishna, who, as you'll hear, ain't no slouch, neither. And here
Pichumani gets his
groove on, no doubt about it. So, hey, two more raags for the road, courtesy of
Rajeswari Padmanabhan. The second tune on her clip, by the way, has got some
deep blues in it, so I'm thinking maybe Rajeswari might've been down to the crossroads at midnight...
[NOTE: see hoverovers for link descriptions]
posted by flapjax at midnite at 1:24 AM PST - 28 comments
May 15
Kim Neely has enjoyed a very rich professional life already. A writer for Rolling Stone for fifteen years, she also penned the
Pearl Jam biography. These days find Kim involved in an entirely different pursuit.
Lampworking is a type of glass work that uses a gas fueled torch to melt rods and tubes of clear and colored glass. At her mom's unused workshop Kim created
Bluff Road Art Glass.
posted by netbros at 9:32 PM PST - 7 comments
We're all used to animal cams at the
zoo. You can watch animals in the
wild or in
captivity. But how about a live animal cam at...the
library!
posted by nax at 9:08 AM PST - 12 comments
120 years of Billboard data.
Eternally curious blogger Andy Baio starts a three-day analysis of the data in the Whitburn Project, "a huge undertaking to preserve and share high-quality recordings of every popular song since the 1890s. To assist their efforts, they've created a spreadsheet of 37,000 songs and 112 columns of raw data, including each song's duration, beats-per-minute, songwriters, label, and week-by-week chart position." It all happens on good ol' Usenet--
here's a FAQ.
posted by dbarefoot at 9:06 AM PST - 19 comments
Let's Pretend With Uncle Russ. From 1948 to 1952, kids at American military bases all over the world tuned in to
Let's Pretend with Uncle Russ on Saturday mornings to hear a variety show of stories and music. Although the majority of listeners were the children of U.S. military personnel who received the program through the
Armed Forces Radio Service, "Uncle Russ" also had a worldwide fan club of listeners from faraway places who tuned in to hone their English skills. The site is maintained by "Uncle Russ" himself, Russ Thompson, who wrote, directed and produced the 30-minute show, as well as providing character voices. The site features
photos,
fan letters (the most popular reason for writing was to join the "Around the World Safety Club"),
celebrity guests and more from the show's run.
posted by amyms at 12:15 AM PST - 2 comments
May 14
Buried in a beer can.
As an appealing bonus, the coffin doubles as a beer cooler before it's needed for the stiff. With baby boomers getting ready to pop their clogs, many are looking to alternative ways to
recycle their remains. A book and radio interview on
green burials and some
interesting figures on the quantities of wood, steel, copper, bronze and embalming fluid buried each year in the US in conventional funerals.
posted by binturong at 4:25 PM PST - 22 comments
100 Must-Read Books (for dudes)
Men just have different ... needs ... than women, so apparently they need to read different books as well. However (as a chick myself) I tend to check this sort of thing out in a futile but ongoing attempt to figure out men. Hmmph. Men. Go figure ....
posted by kd at 1:29 PM PST - 89 comments
Emory University English Professor
Mark Bauerlein's
new book,
The Dumbest Generation:
How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future posits that "[t]he dawn of the digital age once aroused our hopes: the Internet, e-mail, blogs, and interactive and ultra-realistic video games promised to yield a generation of sharper, more aware, and intellectually sophisticated children....we assumed that teens would use their know-how and understanding of technology to form the vanguard of this new, hyper-informed era. That was the promise. But the enlightenment didn’t happen. The technology that was supposed to make young adults more astute, diversify their tastes, and improve their minds had the opposite effect."
Some beg to differ. An
interview with Mark Bauerlein; Bauerlein on
CBS News.
posted by ericb at 9:09 AM PST - 112 comments
Ladies, before you go searching for love from one of those online matchmaking sites, be sure to tally up your merits and demerits on this
Marital Rating Scale.
posted by Dave Faris at 8:17 AM PST - 70 comments
May 13
It stands as one of the more unusual turning points of the Cold War, thanks mostly to the surprise appearance of several naked middle-aged women. Taking The Cure: How a group of British Columbian anarchists inspired democracy in Russia.
posted by amyms at 11:25 PM PST - 7 comments
The Chroma Upsampling Error.
This incredibly detailed explanation of a common bug in DVD players will likely either bore you to tears or be gripping and utterly fascinating.
posted by 31d1 at 8:01 PM PST - 43 comments
OS X as music video.
(SLYT) Dennis Liu's interpretation of "Again and Again" by the Bird and the Bee, using a particular operating system as inspiration. It does feel kind of like an Apple ad, but it's quite creative.
posted by fungible at 7:59 PM PST - 33 comments
Worldwide disdain of Bush
used to sell everything from newspapers to marmite to adhesive tape to cars to Scrabble, plus lots of advocacy ads for not-for-profit organizations.
posted by brookeb at 4:35 PM PST - 32 comments
Bush interview with Politico: "For the first time, Bush revealed a personal way in which he has tried to acknowledge the sacrifice of soldiers and their families:
He has given up golf."
posted by CunningLinguist at 4:13 PM PST - 121 comments
Chronotron is a Flash game in the same vein as the earlier
Cursor*10, which was deliberately triple-posted. (Sadly, the mods didn't see the humor value....) This is a very clever game mechanic, in which you cooperate with
yourself to try to solve puzzles. Lots of fun.
(I also found it slightly depressing to realize just how predictable I am.) [via]
posted by Malor at 4:04 PM PST - 14 comments
Do You Want To Know RIGHT NOW How You Can Drive Around Using
WATER as FUEL and Laugh At Rising Gas Costs, While Reducing Emissions and Preventing Global Warming?
posted by jonson at 1:18 PM PST - 109 comments
May 12
Airphoto North America
? Jim Wark is an aerial photographer who specializes in capturing unusual landscape and cultural images of North and Central America. The plane used is a small high-wing, bush type (an Aviat Husky) with a large side opening for unobstructed shooting, and with the capability of operating out of small rough areas. A full complement of camping gear and provisions are always on board so that remote sites can be used as operating bases.
posted by netbros at 9:12 PM PST - 13 comments
A woman walks into a bar and asks the bartender for a double entendre, so he gave it to her.
Ba-dum dum.
What's green and has wheels? Grass. I lied about the wheels.
Ba-dum dum. A baby seal walks into a club.
(pause) Ba-dum dum. How many kids with ADD does it take to change a lightbulb? LET'S GO RIDE BIKES!
Ba-dum dum. A priest, a rabbi, and a minister walk into a bar. The bartender says, "What is this, some kind of joke?"
Ba-dum dum. Instant Rimshot. For all those times you need a big red Flash button that'll give you a well-timed rimshot.
(Jokes courtesy of Ask Mefi.)
posted by WCityMike at 7:10 PM PST - 249 comments
Selections of Arabic, Persian, and Ottoman Calligraphy
from the collection of The Library of Congress. 373 individual pieces from ranging in time from the 9th to the 19th Century, all explained and some translated. A few personal favorites (note that very high quality scans can be viewed by clicking the appropriate link after clicking thumbnail):
marriage decree,
verses on tragic love,
practice sheet,
verses 10-11 of the 48th chapter of the Qur'an,
poetic verses offering advice,
frontispiece of Qur'anic exegesis and
quatrain by Rumi. There are also four special presentations:
Calligraphers of the Persian Tradition,
Ottoman Calligraphers and Their Works,
Qur’anic Fragments and
Noteworthy Items. This last presentation also features representational art, for instance images of
The battle of Mazandaran and
the Persian king Bahram Gur hunting.
posted by Kattullus at 5:21 PM PST - 11 comments
Among industrialized nations,
Japan has a pretty low rate of violent crime, a relatively high number of police, and a virtually non-existent acquittal rate. Yet, somehow
the Yakuza persists.
posted by absalom at 4:45 PM PST - 54 comments
Phil Schaap
has hosted a jazz program for the past twenty-seven years on
WKCR, Columbia University’s radio station with unapologetic passion and a depth of familiarity that comes, in part, from the personal relationships he had with the musicians themselves.
posted by semmi at 2:42 PM PST - 27 comments
"We were treated like rock stars. I was told there were female Trekkies who kept lists of all the cast members with whom they'd slept. I was told this!"
Extracts from 'Up To Now', the autobiography of
William Shatner... from his time on
Star Trek, where he comes over as the colossal jerk of legend, to his poignant recollections of the death of his third wife.
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 8:43 AM PST - 75 comments
The "
Great Filter" is a hypothetical barrier to explain why civilisations are so unlikely to progress to the point of inter-stellar colonisation that we have not encountered any in 40 years of looking. Maybe humanity has already negotiated the filter - as some massive evolutionary improbability - or perhaps it lies in our future as an almost-certain threat to our existence?
We should hold our breath as we look for evidence of life on Mars.
posted by rongorongo at 8:11 AM PST - 85 comments
The story goes like this:
In the early 80's Madonna sat in with
Was (Not Was) to record backing vocals (to Ozzy Osbourne's main vox) for their track
Shake Your Head (Let's Go To Bed). Everything was peachy until Madonna's record label, Sire, refused to grant ZE Records permission to publish her recording. So other voices sang of things that cannot be done. Fast-forward ten years and the hits collection
Hello Dad, I'm In Jail included the track and, again, the Madonna vocal was not released for use. (This time
Kim Basinger's new backing track got the spot.) The new Basinger-backed single peaked at #4 on the UK charts and featured a b-side remix by producer
Steve 'Silk' Hurley. However, a glorious blunder resulted in a recall of the single: ZE had sent Hurley Madonna's background vocals. The mistake wasn't caught until after pressing and lo! a very few copies of the record made it out into the world. And so, music fans, for a cool G you can lay hands on your own copy of
Shake Your Head (Let's Go to Bed), featuring the b-side dub, the
rarest of Madonna recordings.
[Mouse over links for descriptions.]
posted by carsonb at 4:53 AM PST - 49 comments
If you can make it through the glacially paced intro and can put up with the typically clunky, often laughable and jingoistic fifties-style narration, this 1958 film from Chevrolet,
The American Look is worth viewing. Chock full of futuristic telephones, toasters, blenders, office machines, architecture and more, it's a mid-century design lover's dream. The film is visually striking and elegant, and presented in widescreen format. Here's part
2 and part
3. Or see it here in its
entirety.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 2:56 AM PST - 15 comments
May 11
Contrary to what you probably think you know about hypnosis, it can be done very quickly and can be used to convince someone to do something they normally wouldn't--like, say,
giving away their wallet, phone, and keys to a stranger (English mentalist
Derren Brown). What's happening here is known as a
handshake induction, a technique pioneered by American psychiatrist
Milton Erickson. There are
other methods of rapid induction hypnosis. These methods, along with techniques of verbal suggestion, are used by practitioners of
Neuro-linguistic programming, a field which some have associated with Mr. Brown's performances, though
he denies it. I wonder, though, how he manages to get a cashier at a dog track
to pay out on a losing ticket?
posted by flotson at 8:31 PM PST - 79 comments
Brand Tags
Tag a brand/logo and see what others have tagged it. Because "whatever it is they say a brand is, is what it is", depending on what your meaning of is is, I guess. Or
play the reverse tag game and identify brands by their tags.
And now, there's
Celeb Tags!
This will not wendell.
posted by wendell at 4:43 PM PST - 38 comments
But remember, talking to the dead can be dangerous.
"All peoples of earth posess this natural ability," says Nicole Zapruder, who has been communicating with the dead since she was 4 years old. People aren't disputing her ability to use the Grey Walter-Berger Neurophysical Construct for communicating with the dead. They're asking her not to share it online because the technique is too dangerous.
posted by destinyland at 12:53 PM PST - 69 comments
May 10
foldit
is a new computer game scientists have created that lets YOU help them make science!!
posted by Koko at 5:15 PM PST - 24 comments
The Heartbreak Campaign.
"Increasingly opposed to the Vietnam War, Robert F. Kennedy struggled over whether he should challenge his party’s incumbent president, Lyndon Johnson, in 1968. His younger brother, Teddy, was against it. His wife, Ethel, urged him on. Many feared he would be assassinated, like the older brother he mourned."
posted by kirkaracha at 2:27 PM PST - 28 comments
The $3 Trillion Shopping Spree.
"The occupation of Iraq will cost $3 trillion, America's most expensive conflict since WWII. Can YOU spend that money better? Here's your chance to go on a virtual $3 trillion shopping spree and prove it!"
[Via Gristmill.]
posted by homunculus at 12:40 PM PST - 66 comments
Look up any Zip Code
here, get lots of cool demographic data by entering it
here (make sure you enter a zip code, not just a town and keep scrolling down, down, down).
posted by Rafaelloello at 10:25 AM PST - 27 comments
May 9
Do-it-yourself film manufacturing.
"Can't buy the film you want any more? Just make the stuff!
In this set you will find random photos and information on a project a friend has undertaken - a machine to make his own camera film.
Plastic and goop go in one end, and camera film comes out the other end. This is not a trivial undertaking."
posted by ethel at 11:32 PM PST - 14 comments
NASA invites you to join this autumn's lunar exploration with the opportunity to send your name to the moon. Your name will be included in a database contained on a microchip and placed aboard the
Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (
LRO) spacecraft. Submit your name
here.
posted by ericb at 5:43 PM PST - 28 comments
Europeans Get Drunk to Have Sex.
The UK has one of the worst reputations for binge drinking and underage sex but there are striking similarities between countries, a study found. A third of 16 to 35-year-old men and 23% of women questioned said they drank to increase their chance of sex. The study - of 1,341 young people in nine countries including the UK - is published in
BMC Public Health. PDF available
here.
posted by psmealey at 2:39 PM PST - 130 comments
Introducing Project Pop (Formerly Indonesia's fourth most popular guitar-based digi-suling metal-dangdut-comedy folk sextet).
Their hit "
Dangdut is the music of my country" [youtube link--music starts at 0:58] code-switches between pop metal and dangdut, affectionately mocking the cheesy pop of their parents' generation.
Here is a great play-by-play translation of the details of the video.
posted by umbú at 1:55 PM PST - 12 comments
In a pilot project with Canada's National Film Board, Katerina Cizek is Filmmaker-in-Residence at Toronto's St. Michael's Hospital
(Flash site with videos). She directed
The Interventionists: Chronicles of a Mental Health Crisis Team, a film about a unique crisis team in downtown Toronto. A mental health nurse and a police officer ride the streets of the inner city together in an unmarked police car, responding to 911 calls involving "emotionally disturbed persons." The team is a partnership between St. Michael's Hospital and two downtown police divisions. Their mandate is to de-escalate crises and avoid unnecessary arrests and emergency room visits by providing referrals, services and resources within a patient's own community.
posted by heatherann at 1:35 PM PST - 12 comments
Reefer Madness.
The Kingwood teenager's story of decapitating a corpse and using the head to smoke marijuana was so outlandish that at first Houston Police Department senior police officer Jim Adkins did not believe it.
posted by three blind mice at 3:40 AM PST - 106 comments
May 8
Killing by the numbers.
"In 2007 elite U.S. snipers executed an unarmed Iraqi prisoner in cold blood. Have the insidious tactics that led to atrocities in Vietnam reemerged in Iraq?"
posted by homunculus at 10:25 PM PST - 46 comments
Harmanz ha haz b
bargan ahn za MMARBG
Ahban Bahb [
brahbazazzah ] ar zambahz. Zambahz haz AAGHZ g!bz gab azzar zambahz: a, b, g, h, m, n, r, z. Zambahz maz hab gab, za Zambahz zgrabbarh
Zamgrh, a gab grh a
gab bag,
a grammah, n
zhranzazzaz. Habganna
barbaga zaarz grh za
bra!nz?
posted by xthlc at 9:32 PM PST - 33 comments
With
Mother's Day fast approaching, you may want to consider a gift of
Orchidaceae. Orchids belong to the most diverse family of plants known to man. There are over 880 genera, 28,000 species and well over 300,000 registered cultivars currently documented. First,
choose one you would like to cultivate. Then, learn
how to buy your first orchid. Finally get the scoop on
growing them yourself. Mom will give you a hug, 'cause everyone needs a hug.
posted by netbros at 2:43 PM PST - 18 comments
"It was relatively quiet along the shores of the Big Island in Hawaii for quite some time. But since early March of this year, lava from the Kilauea Volcano flows down again to the coastal plains - which produces new land for the island - and makes the Big Island even bigger. Now when the red lava meets the Pacific Ocean, giant steam plumes rise high in the sky - this makes it so magnificent and absolutely unique to Hawaii. I
photographed the phenomenon from land, water and air. A white plume currently issues from the vent - and I was lucky enough to get some shots."
-Josef Hoflehner
posted by notsnot at 10:45 AM PST - 16 comments
"The Daily Show is no doubt entertainment, but it is entertainment, measurably, with a substantive point. It is, in its own way, another kind of No Spin Zone." The Project for Excellence in Journalism discusses
what is and is not journalistic (PDF) about
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 9:51 AM PST - 122 comments
Here's a small representation of some of the culture that many Tibetan protesters hope to save from eradication in Tibet:
Heart Sutra, by Geshe Kunkhen.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 6:18 AM PST - 18 comments
May 7
"With most animals, males duke it out and the winner gets the girls," says Holekamp. "But with hyenas, females have 100 percent say." They decide when and under what conditions they will tolerate deferential sperm donors. At age 2 or 3 a male leaves his natal clan and wanders off to beg acceptance into another clan. After vicious rejections, he eventually succeeds and reaps his reward: brutal harassment as the clan's nadir, one of the last in line for food and sex. This probation, which biologists call "endurance rivalry," is a test, Holekamp explains: "The guy who can stick it out the longest wins." The trial lasts about two years, after which some females may grant him access. "You do not want to be a male hyena," Holekamp says.
-From an article in Smithsonian Magazine,
Who's Laughing Now? Professor Holekamp's
hyena site. Also,
hyena pictures and
The Hyena Pages, a fine site about this fascinating animal.
posted by Kattullus at 8:28 PM PST - 32 comments
FaceStat,
a new startup from
crowdsourcing consultants at
Delores Labs bills itself as "market research for the individual." You upload a photo of yourself, and "within a couple hours, you will have detailed statistics about how people feel about the picture you provide." Oh, and it's powered by creepers like you, using Amazon's
Mechanical Turk (previously posted about
here).
posted by thisjax at 7:20 PM PST - 37 comments
The Day the Music Died
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) [...] has also been warning anyone who would listen that they should not “purchase” encrypted music from these services, since if these services go under then all that “purchased” music will no longer… what’s the word… “play”. But mostly people ignored them (and me), because, you know, Microsoft was at the center of it all, and nobody ever got fired for “buying” from Microsoft.
posted by desjardins at 2:18 PM PST - 67 comments
Gmail Redesigned
is a really slick CSS makeover for - you guessed - Gmail. It uses the
Stylish Firefox add-on. (So yes, this is something you would need a computer, firefox, and gmail to care about.)
posted by Wolfdog at 1:45 PM PST - 64 comments
Federal and state government officials and border activists say the garbage dumped in the
Sonoran Desert by illegal immigrants and their smugglers is staggering. The cleanup is costing taxpayers millions. The
Southern Arizona Project(pdf) is a multi-year program setup by the Bureau of Land Management to mitigate the impacts to the ecology by illegal immigration and smuggling. In 2006 alone, more than 1.18 million pounds of trash was collected along the southern Arizona border.
posted by netbros at 1:17 PM PST - 22 comments
Gary Snyder,
sublime and
seminal poet of
ecological awareness and
activism [YouTube link], Zen
appreciation of "ordinary mind" and American speech,
shamanistic intimacy with the natural world, and
surviving member of the Beat Generation (West Coast posse) at age 78, has
won the $100,000 Ruth Lilly poetry prize. "
Gary Snyder is in essence a contemporary devotional poet, though he is not devoted to any one god or way of being so much as to Being itself,"
said Poetry magazine editor Christian Wiman. "His poetry is a testament to the sacredness of the natural world and our relation to it, and a prophecy of what we stand to lose if we forget that relation.” Previous recipients of the Lilly prize include
Adrienne Rich,
John Ashbery, and
W.S. Merwin. [Previously mentioned
here.]
posted by digaman at 9:15 AM PST - 43 comments
The Mediocre Samaritan
is a bittersweetly funny film fictionalization of an event that took place in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin on February 21, 2007. Produced by J. Elvis Weinstein of MST3K, Stinkburger Inc. and Cinematic Titanic fame.
(Event detailed previously on Metafilter. Also, NSFW for a couple seconds of pasty, naked male butt and tactfully censored footage of Casa de Culo.)
posted by cog_nate at 9:08 AM PST - 14 comments
I though documenting my early sex life would be a perfect reason to use Polaroids to do something other than take naked pictures, yet to still play on the sexual identity of the medium. I lived in Alexandria from 1980 to 1999. These were my formative years and they determined the way I dealt with women.
A guy documents the
spots in his old neighborhood (SFW) where he got kissed, dumped, laid or confused as a kid, and tries to work out "what went wrong." (
via,
via — both NSFW)
posted by nebulawindphone at 8:58 AM PST - 13 comments
May 6
In this way, Lu Yang became one of the "RMB gamers" she disdains. More than 10,000 RMB was quickly and nearly imperceptibly spent. In the game, the "queen" possessed fearsome power. She carried out vengeance for herself and her friends, she accepted entreaties, and she protected the caravans of the kingdom. At the same time, she went out with the heroes to invade other kingdoms. Her reputation spread far and wide. [...] "Long live the Queen!" People bowed to her in submission. That was the high point for Lu Yang on ZT Online, and for that one fleeting moment, she felt that the time and money she had spent was worth it.
The System is a translated Chinese article examining ZT Online, an MMORPG that has taken fleecing gamers to a new level.
posted by Kattullus at 7:40 PM PST - 34 comments
(Big) Newsfilter: FBI Searches Office of Special Counsel Building
"A multi-year investigation leads federal agents to search the Office of Special Counsel's building. Employees have alleged the agency was misused for political purposes. Neither Office of Special Counsel head Scott Bloch nor anyone else has officially been charged with a crime. But the FBI secured a separate subpoena for Bloch's home."
posted by spock at 10:07 AM PST - 79 comments
The iMac turns ten today. Unveiled on May 6, 1998 by a
button-down Steve Jobs, the iMac personal computer was Steve Jobs' antidote to the countless boring beige models in Apple's product line. Offering
"three easy steps to the Internet," the iMac proved to be a lightning rod for criticism (
small "hockey puck" mouse, no floppy drive, no SCSI, the debut of USB,
toy keyboard, no expansion possibilities), the first Bondi Blue iMac got people talking and sold by the truckload. Although the design may look a bit dated today, the candy-colored plastics
influenced consumer product design for the next several years. Even if you don't enjoy using an iMac, there's no denying its contributions to computing and popular culture.
posted by porn in the woods at 10:05 AM PST - 72 comments
Take my arm, my love. Don't write a check from a joint bank account. Hide all the photographs in your home and office which would identify you as a couple. Take off your wedding rings. Touch each other, and talk to each other, in public, in ways that could only be interpreted as you being "friends." A thoughtful post on "self-editing," homophobia, and the day-to-day experience of many LGBT folks, at
Shakesville (aka Shakespeare's Sister), by
Teh Portly Dyke.
posted by fiercecupcake at 7:40 AM PST - 177 comments
Rutgers professor of philosophy Jerry Fodor
created a bit of a stir last October when he wrote an article for the London Review of Books arguing that natural selection may not be such a great theory after all, and that a "major revision of evolutionary theory... is in the offing." Not many fellow
philosophers and academics agree, it seems. Fodor responds to his critics
here and
here. Six months later, it's still not entirely clear whether his argument is, as Justin E.H. Smith
put it, "irresponsible and stupid or so subtle that none of his adversaries, defending a status quo interpretation of the theory of natural selection, have been able to get it yet."
posted by decoherence at 7:08 AM PST - 142 comments
May 5
Martha Nussbaum
reviews three recent books on Shakespeare and philosophy. The essay offers an excellent analysis of love in
Antony and Cleopatra and
Othello, and an excellent discussion of the interaction between philosophy and literature.
posted by painquale at 6:38 PM PST - 17 comments
Give it up for
The Cramps and
The Gun Club. Two of the greatest bands to come out of the late 1970s/early 1980s punk scene, they (wikis
here and
here) shared a few things in common: guitarist
Kid Congo Powers as well as a penchant for re-invigorating the raucous, carnal, primal spirit of American popular music--i.e. early garage rock and rockabilly (what the Cramps dubbed "psychobilly") and blues. Start with
this screame
