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May 2010 Archives
May 31
Leaves giant sinkhole. At least 115 people have died after a tropical storm battered Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador over the weekend, officials in those countries reported.
posted by pallen123 at 6:54 PM PST - 84 comments
Open air sports stadiums often have issues with
birds,
insects, and other wildlife. Common preventative measures include
ultrasonic devices and bird
netting. But Nelson Mandela Bay Stadium - one of the venues for the 2010 World Cup - has taken an all-natural approach. It is working with the Urban Raptor Project to install
raptors, bats, and owls to
patrol the stadium for various pests, while a
trained peregrine falcon chases away crows. This is not a new technique -
Millennium Stadium in Wales has long used a
Harris Hawk for bird control. But according to the NMB stadium manager, it "is the only stadium with a programme like this in place as a pest deterrent".
posted by gemmy at 3:42 PM PST - 12 comments
Rene Fleming pulls a reverse-Sting and enters a "parallel universe" of sound. Brings up interesting issues in the different ways people in the pop and classical realm define the "natural" vocie, as well acknowledges that in our completely shattered, niche market this cross-over record has no more or less validity then any other album being released today.
posted by The3rdMan at 3:42 PM PST - 52 comments
Sprocket Rocket is a physics game whose goal is to collect sprockets to unlock argumentations to your egg shaped rocket ship
(and school you about IP law but you can ignore that part).
[more inside]posted by Mitheral at 10:34 AM PST - 41 comments
“Let us acknowledge the measure of their sacrifice by honoring them as brave women, and by honoring them as women who served without thought of glory which we accord to heroes of battle. The service pilot faces the risk of death without the emotional inspiration of combat. Men who battle in the sky have the grim, triumphant knowledge that their bombs and bullets are destroying the enemy, and their courage is sustained by the emotions of conflict.
These women have given their lives in the performance of arduous and exacting duties without being able to see and feel the final results of their work under the quickening influence of aerial action. They have demonstrated a courage which is sustained not by the fevers of combat, but the steady heartbeat of faith—a faith in the rightness of our cause, and a faith in the importance of their work to the men who do go into combat.
Let us pay tribute to these women by honoring their memory . . . Let us treasure their memory as women whose sacrifice has brought honor not only to their country, but also to their organization.
We shall not forget the accomplishments of our women fliers and their contributions to the fulfillment of our mission. And we shall always keep and remember the brave heritage of the women who gave their lives. It is the heritage of faith in victory and faith in the ultimate freedom of humanity.” [more inside]posted by caddis at 8:17 AM PST - 9 comments
May 30
Ray Kurzweil: That Singularity Guy In the year 2050, if Ray Kurzweil is right, nanoscopic robots will be zooming throughout our capillaries, transforming us into nonbiological humans.
Ray Answers the following questions & more:
Are we going to look like humans forever, or will we eventually just become ghosts in the machine while our physical bodies devolve into dwarves with lobster hands?
Is the ultimate goal to transcend biology and choose how long we would like to live?
posted by Fizz at 9:46 AM PST - 102 comments
"Bryn the pygmy rabbit died in 2008, marking the end of her genetic line. This subpopulation lost its sagebrush habitat as the land was developed for agriculture ... In an off-exhibit room at the Oregon Zoo, the staff was quiet, even reverent, as they brought in Bryn. She was one of two Columbia Basin pygmy rabbits left, and since both were old females, this was a solemn occasion."
Rare: Portraits of America’s Endangered Speciesposted by melissam at 7:50 AM PST - 16 comments
Large-scale color photographs from 2005 to 2006 reflect the ritual adornment and spirituality of masquerade in Nigeria, Benin and Burkina Faso in West Africa. These portraits of masqueraders build on Galembo's work of the past twenty years photographing the rituals and religious culture in Nigeria, Brazil, Cuba, Jamaica and Haiti, as well as the homegrown custom of Halloween in the United States. West African Masquerade.
[more inside]posted by Rinku at 6:33 AM PST - 5 comments
Leigh Brackett's original script for
Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back was leaked online some time in the past couple of months. This isn't the more widely circulated
Kasdan treatment, but apparently the original, original draft submitted to George Lucas. Brackett died of cancer shortly thereafter. Ice castles, Wampa raids, transport guilds, Lando clones, Minch the Jedi master, a disturbing lack of incest and no, that's not your father, why do you ask?
[more inside]posted by obiwanwasabi at 2:16 AM PST - 51 comments
May 29
...The development sector, just like any other business, needs revenue to survive. Too frequently, this quest for funding uses these kind of dehumanizing images to draw pity, charity, and eventually donations from a largely unsuspecting public...
This is not to say that people do not struggle, far from it, but the photos I was seeing only told part of the story. I thought that these images were robbing people of their dignity, and I felt that the rest of the story should be told as well.
Duncan McNicholl, a Canadian volunteer with
Engineers Without Borders, is embarking on a photography project in which he photographs low-income rural Malawians as they'd be seen by Westerners, and as they prefer to see themselves.
posted by emilyd22222 at 10:42 AM PST - 19 comments
May 28
He's a philosopher; wore a super hero cape to premote civic values; mooned at students and admits he has Pakinsons disease.
Colombians, tired of corruption and human rights violations, could be about to bring in a radical new leader:
Antanas Mockus, the
green candidate whose
super citizen’s past could help make him president.
One view of
what is at stake.
And this is the first time we are really deciding over matters of national interest and not matters of fear. Issues such as health, education, international affairs. These are the central points of this election.
posted by adamvasco at 11:19 AM PST - 8 comments
A Love Letter to a G.I. "This is in memory of an anniversary – the anniversary of October 27th, 1943, when I first heard you singing in North Africa. That song brings memories of the happiest times I’ve ever known." The most romantic argument against Don't Ask, Don't Tell yet.
posted by roger ackroyd at 10:30 AM PST - 44 comments
Ten days ago, Slate Magazine conducted
an experiment modeled on the
Ministry of Truth in George Orwell's 1984: they asked readers to look at eight photographs of notable political moments from the past decade and share their memories about each. Over 5,000 people participated in the first three days, but what they didn’t know was that four of the pictures were significantly doctored, and one was totally fabricated.
[more inside]posted by mondaygreens at 12:12 AM PST - 67 comments
May 27
In the late 1950s, psychologist Milton Rokeach was gripped by an eccentric plan. He gathered three psychiatric patients, each with the delusion that they were Jesus Christ, to live together for two years in Ypsilanti State Hospital to see if their beliefs would change. Vaughan Bell
tells the story of one of the weirdest experiments in the history of psychology. (
via)
posted by The Mouthchew at 10:03 AM PST - 57 comments
Sure, you've played
Final Fantasy VII, but what about
Final Fantasy Extreme? You've played
EarthBound, but what about
Earth Bound (two words). You know all about
Dragon Quest VIII, but are you familiar with
Dragon Quest: Young Yangus and the Mystery Dungeon? There's a whole world of forgotten, canceled games out there just waiting to be discovered. Let 1UP's Jeremy Parish and Frank Cifaldi be your guides in an exploration of
The Best Games That Never Were.
(Previously)posted by Servo5678 at 8:12 AM PST - 30 comments
Joshua Glenn and anti-middlebrow blog
Hilobrow present their generational periodization scheme: from the
Prometheans born in 1844-53 and the technologically transformative
Plutonians born in 1854-63, to the hiply earnest
Revivalists (those who were teenagers in the 90s) and the
Throwbacks (my generation, and an article that horrifyingly includes pictures of tweens and the Mickey Mouse Club).
[more inside]posted by The Devil Tesla at 6:17 AM PST - 67 comments
Norway's penal system has gathered some attention recently, as the new
Halden prison just opened. The $217 million facility will house 252 prisoners, some long-term and some short. The new prison is notable for, among other things, use of armoured glass instead of bars on windows,
natural lighting and single-inmate cells with private showers, TVs and access to a gym and a sound studio. There was also an art budget, and Norwegian street artist
Dolk was commisioned to decorate some of the walls. The Norwegian penal system is similar to the other Scandinavian countries', with no death penalty, and a "life" sentence of 21 years. In Norway there are no privately run incarceration facilities, and the opening of the rather plush-seeming Halden prison spurred some discussion, but garnered no big controversy.
[more inside]posted by Harald74 at 2:38 AM PST - 111 comments
May 26
...and there was just rope everywhere--it went around the whales mouth, around the whale's head, across her eye, over her back wrapped around the pectoral fins, all the way down to its tail. I thought there was no hope, there was no chance, we're looking at a dead whale, the whale just doesn't know it yet--but I knew that I had to try. ...It was a very surreal moment looking down and seeing the 20 crab traps and buoys just disappear into the abyss... And just like that, the whale was gone. ...I'm spinning around, where'd she go, where'd she go ? ...Now here's where the story takes a pretty startling turn. ...Next thing I know there's this fifty ton whale coming right at me...
From about 4:00 to 14:30 in nearly 23 minutes of the segment,
Animal Blessings--in
mp3 here, all 20 megs of it. Or you can try the podcast at
RadioLab: Animal Minds. Either way, you are in for a most truly awesome anecdote. And listen to the whole program to have some back and forth science dropped on you in regards to what we think we know about what and how animals think.
[more inside]posted by y2karl at 9:10 PM PST - 69 comments
Robert King spent decades battling for his release from the 'hell-hole' of America's notorious Angola Prison. Now free, he's still crusading for its inmates.
The late Anita Roddick was the powerhouse behind the making of the Documentary
In Land of the Free.
Herman Wallace, Albert Woodfox, and Robert King were charged with murders they did not commit and encarcerated in solitary confinement, for nearly 37 years. Robert was freed in 2001, but Herman and Albert remain behind bars.
Angola not only has solitary confinement it has the prison within solitary confinement –
The Hole [more inside]posted by adamvasco at 3:32 PM PST - 33 comments
Attenborough's Pitcher, an "Udderly Weird Yam," a two-inch phallic mushroom already immortalized on
Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me, and the "Bombardier Worm" ("Chaff worm" would seem a more accurate name) are just four of the newly described species making the International Institute for Species Exploration's totally arbitrary
Top 10 New Species list.
[more inside]posted by dust of the stars at 11:16 AM PST - 6 comments
Lesbian Hipster Chic "I represent a small community of high fashion dykes, and I’m not talking about femmes or lipstick lesbians, to use the terms so popularized in culture today. We are often mistaken for straight fashionistas. We are the women who popularized chic undercuts, skinny jeans with patent leather wingtips, sexy flannel, fitted motorcycle jackets, Doc Martens and James Dean vibes minus the James. We are grrls, we are bois, we are young women with a taste for rock n’ roll, a penchant for sex appeal and an undying love for Alexander McQueen, may he rest in peace... It is our duty, as (NSFW)
model lesbians, lesbian models, (NSFW)
hipster dykes and purveyors of lesbian chic to establish ourselves as a force within the canon of high fashion... We’re fashion fagettes and we’re taking over the runways of New York, London, Milan and Paris. So let’s wrangle the model lesbians like
Freja,
Cat McNeil,
Milou,
Myf,
Nimue editors like
Kate Lanphear... and show fashion that as gay ladies, we not only epitomize the high fashion street style that has taken the world by storm, but we invented it."
[more inside]posted by Suparnova at 7:05 AM PST - 155 comments
Popular Unrest is a multi-episode drama by Melanie Gilligan (of
Crisis in the Credit System) set in a future much like the present. Here, however, all exchange transactions and social interactions are overseen by a system called ‘the Spirit’. A rash of unexplained killings have broken out across the globe. They often take place in public but witnesses never see an assailant. Just as mysteriously, groups of unrelated people are suddenly coming together everywhere, amassing new members rapidly. Unaccountably, they feel a deep and persistent sense of connection to one another. (
via)
posted by anotherpanacea at 5:56 AM PST - 3 comments
May 25
The Mandolin & Unicycle Project is a thesis project from
Matt Manos.
"I have always wanted to learn how to ride a unicycle, and I have always wanted to learn how to play the mandolin, so the most logical conclusion I came to was to learn how to play the mandolin while riding the unicycle. In one month." The project blog starts
here.
posted by unliteral at 7:33 PM PST - 23 comments
Six Degrees of Musical Separation. Billie Holiday linked to Jello Biafra? Check. Clyde McPhatter to Moby? They're connected. (Well, the site allows more than six degrees, and it cheats a little by connecting songs, but it's still a neat way to associate one musician or group to a completely different one.)
posted by John of Michigan at 6:55 PM PST - 99 comments
AdViews is the newest of Duke University's digitized advertising archives (see
previously). Unlike the earlier sites, devoted to print advertising, AdViews is all about American TV commercials--several thousand of them, to be exact, from the agency Benton & Bowles (later D'Arcy Masius Benton & Bowles). Viewing the commercials requires ITunes.
[more inside]posted by thomas j wise at 6:52 PM PST - 9 comments
Lately, the organizations that make up the American Republican Party/GOP have been experimenting with
going online. The House Republicans have created
America Speaking Out, a website for the people to give their ideas to "an arrogant congress." There, visitors can upload ideas they would like the government to carry out.
posted by mccarty.tim at 3:51 PM PST - 191 comments
Great groove. The first track from Airs' Moon Safari
album, accompanied by scenes from a video
shot from a streetcar traveling down Market Street in San Francisco in 1905. (SLYT)
posted by shockingbluamp at 1:47 PM PST - 30 comments
Mag3737 (Tom Magliery) is a prolific flickr user with over 19,444 items uploaded. He
categorized his photographs into sets (right now there are about
350 of them), and into larger collections. See for example, the
Squircles (squared circle), the
Monochromatic squircles, the
Backsides and underthings page,
numbers,
letters,
colors, many more. Since he once heard that there were
37 holes in the mouthpiece of the old-fashion telephone, he used to collect fascinating factoids about the
number 37. Numerous other detours inside,
Flower genitelia,
Paul Bunyan's balls, etc. His
old-fashioned website is here.
posted by growabrain at 11:24 AM PST - 21 comments
On March 26, 2010, the ROKS Cheonan, a South Korean navy ship,
exploded and sunk, killing at least forty sailors. On May 19, an international investigation team concluded that a North Korean torpedo sunk the Cheonan.
What does this mean for the Koreas and the world? It's not clear, but
Ask a Korean provides a brief, yet historically contextualized
dossier on this issue.
[more inside]posted by ignignokt at 9:14 AM PST - 86 comments
After a long and terrifying absence, the webcomic
NOBODY SCORES! Returns! Reacquaint yourself with
BBolt's style with
home decor,
internets!,
origin stories,
police states,
Kittn 2.0,
SPACESHIPS,
Scott McCloud,
Art,
Wishes,
Alternate Universes,
Government Slash Fic,
Time Travel ,
Class Struggle,
True Love,
Cartoonists!,
Social Media,
MEN,
cuddle-ness,
Augmented Reality ,
snorgling,
Rule 34 ,and
moreposted by The Whelk at 5:32 AM PST - 21 comments
"Immediately after an attack by Israel, and even with no Iranian response, the United States is likely to begin significant defensive deployments to the region. Its attempts over a period of a year to negotiate with the Iranians make the Obama Administration more vulnerable to domestic pressures to be strong in its reaction to an Israeli strike.
At an early stage after an Israeli attack, the United States would be faced with deciding whether to passively await casualties or to attack Iranian military capabilities on its own. The United States would probably decide to finish the job on Iranian nuclear facilities and destroy as much as possible of Iran’s capability to project combat power."
The Israeli Threat: An Analysis of the Consequences of an Israeli Strike on Iranian Nuclear Facilities [PDF].
[more inside]posted by klue at 2:29 AM PST - 127 comments
May 24
TV serials, says Richard Beck, self-consciously set out from the very beginning to get us to take them seriously. From
Hill Street Blues to
The West Wing to
The Sopranos and
The Wire,
how the television series convinced us that it was art — and now, why
Lost's achievement of success via casual genre mixing and narrative derangement might signal that there's no future creative ground left within the old limits of serial drama.
posted by hat at 10:26 PM PST - 120 comments
Pigeon: Impossible is the tale of Walter, a rookie secret agent faced with a problem seldom covered in basic training: what to do when a curious pigeon gets trapped inside your multi-million dollar, government-issued nuclear briefcase.
posted by netbros at 5:26 PM PST - 18 comments
The Beatles Complete on Ukulele is a surreal collaboration between Roger and Dave, some ukuleles, 185 other artists (many yet unknown!), and The Beatles. New tune and essay every Tuesday through July 2012.
posted by carsonb at 1:46 PM PST - 19 comments
Whoopsy! Beefcake wardrobe malfunctions! Columbus, Ohio artist Paul “
Paulypants” Richmond paints lovingly detailed and luminous and saucy portraits of gay demicelebrities with their britches falling apart or otherwise depantsed or underclothed. As Richmond
describes it with the juice and vim of a ’50s tattler magazine, “It intrigues me that it was almost exclusively women who were depicted as hapless victims of comical wardrobe malfuncions in early pin-up art. Those ladies couldn't even walk down the street without their skirts blowing up or their underwear falling down (or both!)”
[more inside]posted by joeclark at 10:14 AM PST - 29 comments
May 23
On the cusp of the long-awaited series finale of
Lost, people are understandably confused. Fortunately there are plenty of ways to catch up, from the fan compendium
Lostpedia to the 2-hour ABC recap tonight at 7:00 EST to YouTube summaries of Seasons 1-5
from ABC (in 8:15) and
from costumed fans (in five minutes). As for longtime fans, why not reminisce by revisiting the show's infamous bookends -- the artfully inscrutable scenes which introduce or conclude each season? Look inside for these and more, along with a cavalcade of interesting fan videos and other fun stuff. [
Warning: Spoilers (for everything but the series finale) inside]
[more inside]posted by Rhaomi at 12:36 PM PST - 1195 comments
May 22
"When on holiday, I ask him if he enjoys it, but he always
misses his marbles. And it's difficult take that marble alley with us on holiday."
posted by pashdown at 10:40 PM PST - 76 comments
"I am a Gaga supporter. I’m Team Gaga. She’s my girl. My pop Arsenal; my dance Red Sox; my fashion England." Accompanying her from her back stage dressing room to a Berlin sex club, Caitlin Moran
interviews Lady Gaga. And yes we do get an answer to THAT question.
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 3:12 PM PST - 133 comments
The Swinger is a bit of python code that takes any song and makes it swing. It does this be taking each beat and time-stretching the first half of each beat while time-shrinking the second half.
posted by Obscure Reference at 8:48 AM PST - 90 comments
May 21
A lion stalks the plains. It spots an antelope. His lunch, it would seem, is assured, except for one thing. This antelope... can
TRANSFORM!
It's another incredibly bizarre and awesome EYEZMAZE game. Click on the various parts of the antelope to make things happen, until he's safe from the predator's attack. [more inside]posted by JHarris at 6:38 PM PST - 42 comments
Mr, KIng
So
Raymond Hamilton never killed anybody. If he can make a jury believe that I8m willing to come in and be tryed my self. Why dont you ask Ray about those two policemen that got killed near
Grapevine? And while you are at it better talk it over with his girl friend.
Bonnie and me were in missouri when that happened but where was Ray? coming back from the West bankjob wasn't he? Redhot too wasn8t he? I got it straight. And ask him about that escape at
Eastham farm where that gard was killed. Giess he claims he doesn't know fire any shots there don8t ge? Well if he wasnt too dum to know how tp put a clip in a automatic he'd hace fired a lot more shots and some of the rest of the gards would got killed too. He wrote his lawyer he was too good for me and didnt go my pace, well it makes a me sick to see a yellow punk like that playing baby ad making a jury cry over him either/ He stuck his
fingerprint on a letter so heres mine too just to let you know
thjis is on the leve;
X Clydeposted by mrducts at 12:30 PM PST - 21 comments
On Monday the
SCOTUS said juveniles who commit crimes in which no one is killed may not be sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Thomas, ever the
orginalist,
apparently said they should only consider practices at the time the Bill of Rights was adopted. Stevens, however, noted people as young as 7 were put to death in the 18th century. "Knowledge accumulates," he wrote. "We learn, sometimes, from our mistakes." So, did they
really put kids that young to death? Well,
Probably Not. A look back at all the death sentences handed down for children under age fourteen by a well documented court in London found in every case (over 100 in all) the initial death sentence was eventually changed to transportation, imprisonment, and/or whipping. No child criminal was actually put to death.
posted by Blake at 8:05 AM PST - 37 comments
HEIST: Paintings by Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Henri Matisse, Amedeo Modigliani and Fernand Léger, worth ~$100 million, stolen! (Washington Post link)
[more inside]posted by OmieWise at 4:44 AM PST - 54 comments
May 20
I've considered myself a
fanboy on occasion in the past, but it never occurred to me to investigate the history of the term. Technologizer's Harry McCracken (god I love that name) has a *far* more detailed and interesting
look into the history of the term than I would ever have considered undertaking.
[more inside]posted by antifuse at 11:43 AM PST - 26 comments
Death to the spoiler police! Salon's Mary Elizabeth Williams takes a stand against people who insist on spoiler alerts: "[O]nce a work enters the pop culture vernacular, it is not society's responsibility to provide you with earmuffs until you finally get around to experiencing it. ... But for the love of God, if you really don't want to know about a book/movie/television show, do the rest of the world a favor and stop hanging out in the online discussion groups about it." Via
Roger Ebert.
posted by mcwetboy at 10:46 AM PST - 151 comments
America at Work, America at Leisure - "Work, school, and leisure activities in the United States from 1894 to 1915 are featured in this presentation of 150 motion pictures." [Library of Congress Youtube playlist]
posted by peacay at 1:26 AM PST - 5 comments
May 19
As the shuttle program winds down, astrophotographers like Thierry Legault are taking advantage of these last opportunities to capture absolutely incredible shots like
this one, showing Atlantis' transit in front of the sun as it performs its inspection backflip before docking with the ISS. His other photography includes
this magnificent series of the launch of
STS-125.
[more inside]posted by disillusioned at 4:01 PM PST - 16 comments
Kodachrome
They give us those nice bright colors
They give us the greens of summers
Makes you think all the world's a sunny day, Oh yeah
[another great find at Postroad's blog (NSFW)] posted by caddis at 3:20 PM PST - 21 comments
A mining town in Kentucky hoping to build a different kind of future. One of the last three Negro League stadiums. A 34-acre ranch owned and run one of California's earliest entreprenuers and rare early female landowners. The "cathedral of African Methodism" which saw the funerals of Frederick Douglass and Rosa Parks. Otherwordly sand dunes in Michigan, mysterious freshwater caves in Guam, the Wilderness Battlefield...and the Merritt Parkway. These and more sites are on the (US) NAtional Trust's 2010 roster of the
11 Most Endangered Places.
posted by Miko at 1:39 PM PST - 14 comments
In an alternate universe, where steampunk is the norm at the court in Versailles, the Sun King has gone missing. Welcome to the world of the
Puppet Makers, an online comic from the imagination of MeFi's own The Whelk and his familiar illustrator/partner Molly Crabapple. [Flash interface]
[more inside]posted by hippybear at 12:55 PM PST - 49 comments
The joy of Bourbon drinking is not the pharmacological effect of C(2)H(5)OH on the cortex but rather the instant of the whiskey being knocked back and the little
explosion of Kentucky U.S.A. sunshine in the cavity of the nasopharynx and
the hot bosky bite of Tennessee summertime--aesthetic considerations to
which the effect of the alcohol is, if not dispensable, at least secondary.
Bourbon, an essay by Walker Percy. A warning: "Not only should connoisseurs of Bourbon not read this article, neither should persons preoccupied with the perils of alcoholism, cirrhosis, esophageal hemorrhage, cancer of the palate, and so forth..."
[more inside]posted by a.steele at 12:55 PM PST - 77 comments
Joeurt Puk (aka Joe Cook) is the father of Cambodian baseball. In
this feature by ESPN, Patrick Hruby looks into Cook's background and finds that Cook may not be the tireless philanthropist he claims to be.
[more inside]posted by reenum at 11:13 AM PST - 6 comments
Joe Mozingo had always been told that his family name was "maybe Italian." In a
three-part article in the L.A. Times, the "blue-eyed, surfing son of a dentist" journalist discovers that the Mozingo name actually traces back to an African slave freed in 1672.
[more inside]posted by infinitywaltz at 10:13 AM PST - 41 comments
Aman
da Walther and Shei
la Carabine became friends in Canadian high school band. They now make up
Dala, an accoustic folk pop duo who sing songs like the cutesy pop song
Levi Blues,
Alive about a hellish New Years Eve in an old cabin,
Marilyn Monroe about coming of age, and the more serious
Horses, a song dedicated to a paraplegic teenager. They have opened for Neko Case, Tom Cochrane, and Matthew Good and covered
Neil Young.posted by mccarty.tim at 9:48 AM PST - 9 comments
The Guardian has
an article on Pimm's, a traditional gin-based English summer drink. Invented by one James Pimm in London in 1840, Pimm's soon became associated with upper-class institutions and the British Empire; its popularity declined somewhat in the decades following World War 2 (apart from a few revivals as part of ironic constructions of "Britishness"), though it has recently experienced a resurgence in popularity. Recipes for serving Pimm's vary, though they typically involve mixing it with lemonade and/or ginger beer in a jug and adding oranges, strawberries, sliced cucumber and mint. While the formula remains a secret, knockoffs do exist (both Sainsbury's and Aldi sell their own substitutes, though Sainsbury's
had to change the label on its to look less like the original), or you could try
making your own.
posted by acb at 3:19 AM PST - 151 comments
May 18
Patrick Adams: The king of
underground disco. With over 30 gold records to his name and 30 plus years in the music business, Patrick Adams has worked with everyone from Gladys Knight and Salt 'n Pepa, to Eric B. and Rakim and Rick James. But his early, harder to find, pioneering (and moogtastic) sounds from the mid-seventies, with his group
Cloud One, and tracks produced for The Universal Robot Band, Queen Constance, Musique and Phreek is where the magic lies. If the sounds of
Atmosphere Strut or
Disco Juice don't make you want to shake your groove thing, you may not have a soul :(
[more inside]posted by puny human at 2:30 PM PST - 12 comments
"Former Harvard student Adam Wheeler
was indicted [yesterday] on multiple counts of identity fraud and larceny. According to the
Boston Globe, Wheeler allegedly built a 'fraudulent life history that led to his admission to Harvard, and for using forged academic materials from Harvard when he applied for the prestigious Rhodes and Fulbright scholarships.'"
* In his transfer student application to Harvard "...Wheeler claimed he got a perfect score on the SAT, straight A's at prestigious prep school Phillips Academy Andover and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology...In reality, he had never attended either school..."
* He
has plead not guilty to the charges.
[more inside]posted by ericb at 2:18 PM PST - 164 comments
On May 18th, 1980, thirty years ago today, at 8:32 a.m., the ground shook beneath Mount St. Helens in Washington state as a magnitude 5.1 earthquake struck, setting off one of the largest landslides in recorded history - the entire north slope of the volcano slid away. As the land moved, it exposed the superheated core of the volcano setting off gigantic explosions and eruptions of steam, ash and rock debris. The blast was heard hundreds of miles away, the pressure wave flattened entire forests, the heat melted glaciers and set off destructive mudflows, and 57 people lost their lives. A photo-essay.
posted by Nothing... and like it at 12:29 PM PST - 76 comments
This Book is Overdue (link to a PDF of the first chapter from the author’s site:
here) is a non-fiction
work published in February of 2010. It’s a study of the modern library, and by extension,
the modern librarian. Primarily the place that each of these things has in a world that is
increasingly moving to a world of
digital
information. The book is divided into a few different sections...
[more inside]posted by codacorolla at 12:14 PM PST - 22 comments
Serein v4. Online UK label Serein's
last redesign saw a number of ambient and experimental albums released for free. They've redesigned again with a slightly more realistic business model, and in addition to the
two releases out so far, they've put out three free "
forecasts" so far, mixtapes of a sort, arranged by the artists.
Three is the latest, and by halfway through I knew it would likely be appreciated here.
posted by BlackLeotardFront at 12:07 PM PST - 4 comments
"I have kinds of mortars; most convenient and easy to carry; and with these I can fling small stones almost resembling a storm; and with the smoke of these cause great terror to the enemy, to his great detriment and confusion. [...] I have means by secret and tortuous mines and ways, made without noise, to reach a designated spot, even if it were needed to pass under a trench or a river. I will make covered chariots, safe and unattackable, which, entering among the enemy with their artillery, there is no body of men so great but they would break them. And behind these, infantry could follow quite unhurt and without any hindrance."
Leonardo da Vinci's cocky, violent resumeposted by not_the_water at 11:19 AM PST - 27 comments
Among American Jews today, there are a great many Zionists, especially in the Orthodox world, people deeply devoted to the State of Israel. And there are a great many liberals, especially in the secular Jewish world, people deeply devoted to human rights for all people, Palestinians included. But the two groups are increasingly distinct. Particularly in the younger generations, fewer and fewer American Jewish liberals are Zionists; fewer and fewer American Jewish Zionists are liberal. One reason is that the leading institutions of American Jewry have refused to foster—indeed, have actively opposed—a Zionism that challenges Israel’s behavior in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and toward its own Arab citizens.
The Failure of the American Jewish Establishmentposted by y2karl at 9:35 AM PST - 105 comments
How to be cool? How to stay calm? How to have better conversations? How to make love last?
The School of Life is a place to step back and think intelligently about these and other concerns.
[more inside]posted by jonesor at 3:20 AM PST - 12 comments
May 17
Just an ordinary Wednesday morning in April 2010 at around 8.30 am. In Utrecht (Netherlands), a third of all trips are by bicycle. This is one of the busiest junctions in Utrecht a city with a population of 300,000. No less than 18,000 bicycles and 2,500 buses pass here every day. And yet Google Street View missed it. Because private motorized traffic is restricted here. (Video is 4 times faster than reality, 8 minutes condensed to 2.)
posted by Obscure Reference at 5:13 PM PST - 107 comments
Charles Cawley's
Medieval Lands is an encyclopedia of every major European noble family (and most minor ones) from AD 500 to 1500. Even as a work in progress, its scale is staggering.
posted by Iridic at 3:12 PM PST - 27 comments
Plummeting Marijuana prices cause panic in CA. In 1983, the Reagan administration launched a massive air and ground campaign to eradicate pot and lock up growers in northern California. Charley Custer, a writer and community activist, had just arrived to Humboldt County from Chicago. With the Reagan crackdown, Custer recalls, wholesale prices shot up — to as high as $5,000 a pound. That sudden and ironic windfall for those growers willing to risk prison time transformed the community.... Prices are now much less than $2,000 a pound, according to interviews with more than a dozen growers and dealers. Mendocino County Sheriff Tom Allman says some growers can't get rid of their processed pot at any price.posted by caddis at 1:56 PM PST - 106 comments
Do you like vintage needlework? The
Antique Pattern Library is a collection of scanned craft books that are in the public domain. They contain patterns for crochet, knitting, tatting, netting, embroidery, needle lace, beading, and other crafts. See also
Home Work, a Choice Collection of Useful Designs for the Crochet and Knitting Needle, and
Beeton's Book of Needlework.
If vintage instructions aren't your thing, try
lace edgings from 1846 updated for the modern knitter.
posted by bewilderbeast at 1:15 PM PST - 12 comments
"Why? Philosophical Discussions" about everyday life may be the world's first call-in philosophy show. Its mission is to create a large-scale conversation between philosophical professionals and the general public.
WHY? radio, from the University of North Dakota's
Institute for Philosophy in Public Life, is a monthly, call-in radio show hosted by philosophy professor Jack Russell Weinstein.
"...the show was created to illustrate how day-to-day life is steeped in deep philosophical commitments and to provide a venue for exploration of those same commitments." Shows feature notable guests such as
Martha Nussbaum, Amelie Rorty, and
Amartya Sen.posted by Lutoslawski at 12:12 PM PST - 12 comments
A Six Mile Inquiry Light rail is coming to Saint Paul and will change a significant stretch of a major urban street. An artist is using six miles of the street to showcase photography of local subjects.
[more inside]posted by ShadePlant at 8:11 AM PST - 13 comments
"The Cellar Tapes" (1982) (
part 1,
part 2,
part 3,
part 4 and
part 5) is a televised version of the
revue show originally performed in 1981 by the
Footlights - a
group of comic writers-performers at the University of Cambridge. It is performed by Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, Emma Thompson, Tony Slattery, Paul Shearer and Penny Dwyer.
posted by severiina at 3:52 AM PST - 11 comments
On the heels of the highly publicized Missouri raid that ended in the death of a corgi (
previously), a seven year-old girl has been
killed in a
no-knock raid in Detroit. According to one of Radley Balko's
commenters, the family may have been targeted because they shared a two-family duplex with the target of the raid.
posted by lalex at 1:29 AM PST - 183 comments
May 16
The 12th-century English chronicler
Ralph of Coggeshall relates a
strange story: two lost and distressed children appeared in a local village, speaking a language no-one could understand, and, most strikingly, with strangely green-coloured skin.
[more inside]posted by Catseye at 5:18 PM PST - 41 comments
Sure, you've heard of
Burning Man, that art festival/intentional community/temporary autonomous zone thing in the desert, but did you know that it has spawned a host of events called
regional burns? As the name implies, these are smaller and mainly draw a local crowd; they operate under a charter from the Burning Man organization and all abide by its
Ten Principles. Most are in North America, but they have crossed the pond with
Nowhere in Spain.
[more inside]posted by adamrice at 6:44 AM PST - 46 comments
May 15
Steve Durnin's D-Drive is a fascinating new infinitely-variable transmission that doesn't use friction components or a clutch of any kind. Video of a prototype with detailed explanations is included.
posted by odinsdream at 8:31 PM PST - 44 comments
Kuky just wants to go
home. Directed by Academy Award
winning Czech director
Jan Sverak, this yet to be released film is loosely based on stories of the flooding of
Bohemia in 2002. With design elements reminiscent of the
beautiful flash games created by
Amanita Design, it is visually stunning. No word on any North American distribution (boo), but opening on May 20 in the Czech Republic (yaay!).
posted by Ohdemah at 3:14 PM PST - 10 comments
Maybe Microsoft is trading in London at a penny less than it's trading at the same moment in New York. A high-frequency trader will buy shares in London and wait for them to rise. Since the discrepancy lasts a mere fraction of a second, speed is key. [Tradework CEO] M. Narang boasts it takes only 15 millionth of a second for his computers to place a buy or sell order after detecting an opportunity. Or, as he puts it, "If you try to pick up the penny, we'll probably beat you to it." [more inside]posted by HP LaserJet P10006 at 3:11 PM PST - 62 comments
Two articles about successful clothes retailers -
Uniqlo and
Abercrombie & Fitch - that are both full of interesting tidbits ("Uniqlo is a company that prescribes, records, and analyzes every activity undertaken by every employee, from folding technique to the way advisers return charge cards to customers. Japanese style, with two hands and full eye contact").
In addition, the two articles have a lot to say about branding and what companies place importance on - with A&F coming across as a typical fashion retailer, aggressively selling and marketing a very specific look, and Uniqlo seeming to be doing something quite different and contrary to received wisdom.
[more inside]posted by Sifter at 9:52 AM PST - 44 comments
French artist
Anthony Geoffrey makes fantastic celebrity caricatures. The site uses flash and is in French but it loads fast and the navigation is simple. The caricatures are in the Portfolio. I particularly enjoyed his Ash from
Evil Dead and his House MD. These are
not the same as the ones you find in the mall by some poor guy trying to scratch out a living.
[more inside]posted by bwg at 3:51 AM PST - 11 comments
May 14
What I find chiefly offensive about them is not that they are skeptics or atheists; rather, it is that they are not skeptics at all and have purchased their atheism cheaply, with the sort of boorish arrogance that might make a man believe himself a great strategist because his tanks overwhelmed a town of unarmed peasants, or a great lover because he can afford the price of admission to a brothel.
Christian writer Dan Hart wonders if
New Atheism might just be a
passing fad.
[more inside]posted by circular at 10:59 PM PST - 539 comments
Public Image Live in Concert - Streaming Audio from NPR Worth a listen! This was one of the best concerts I have ever attended - and I have been to a lot of shows in my life. "Public Image Ltd. was frequently overlooked when it originally formed and released a string of records in the 1980s and early '90s, or maybe it was looked at for the wrong reasons. The band is the creative vision of John Lydon, not the angry punk he called "Johnny Rotten" in The Sex Pistols. When The Sex Pistols broke up, it was expected that any new band Lydon fronted would be a punk group. In fact, the first single from Public Image Ltd. pretty much was. It was called "Public Image," and was straight out of The Sex Pistols' bag of tricks. Lydon, in fact, wrote the song back in the day, but everything that came after that cut was so different: The music was slower, more open and groove-based. The poetry and the subject matter was all different, while the singing — though distinctly Lydon — was more spacious. It was still in your face, but it wasn't ugly. "
posted by lucysun at 7:06 PM PST - 50 comments
Last August (2009), the "ephemeral artists" of
Nothing Happened Here staged a
mobile public reading event,
meandering around the town of San Luis Obispo, CA with
The Reading Chair, and a group of folks reading
a variety of stories, poems and tales. The group has planned
Typing in Public to take place tomorrow (May 15, 2010), in the same little town. The event is primarily focused on
people writing on typewriters around town, but people can also share comments via
Twitter,
Flickr, or texting the event coordinators. To spark some inspiration, the group has received submissions from a variety of people, including
Gerald Casale for
Devo,
Paul Frommer writing in
Na'vi (with translation to English),
Dr. James J. Duderstadt, President Emeritus, University Professor of Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan, writing on
the library as the poster child of the it revolution, and plenty more.
[more inside]posted by filthy light thief at 12:35 PM PST - 8 comments
Six Simple Ways to Fix Wall Street. "Elements of our Six Simple Steps are in the pending legislation. If they're part of what's adopted, we may get true and lasting reform. If they're not, it won't be long before Wall Street is back to business -- and bailouts -- as usual."
posted by storybored at 12:18 PM PST - 43 comments
Find the
Angry Video Game Nerd a bit obnoxious? Hey Ash, What'cha Playin', AKA HAWP, may be more your speed as far as video game comedy series go. See a pair of siblings (and sometimes their
dad) take on games such as
Trauma Center,
Animal Crossing,
text adventures,
Persona 3, the
best overlooked games,
Professor Layton,
Sleep is Death, and
more.
posted by mccarty.tim at 9:57 AM PST - 58 comments
Amari's
video for their song Tiger is a voyage through some vintage 80's scifi.
posted by euphorb at 9:18 AM PST - 22 comments
Jane Graham in the Guardian on the
new wave of fan films, with links to notable examples. "... fan films have come a long way from two fat blokes with beards running through a forest waving pound-shop light sabres."
posted by nthdegx at 7:41 AM PST - 12 comments
If you buy it,
people will come. The property from the movie
The Field of Dreams is
for sale. You could own a 193 acre farm, along with a baseball field, and a tourist destination that gets approximately 65,000 visitors annually. The current owners even have permission from Universal to sell memorabilia. Along with ownership of the property comes ownership of the
Field of Dreams site. The asking price is $5.4 million.
via.
posted by bove at 7:39 AM PST - 44 comments
The First Great Radio Hoax: London, January 16, 1926 Twelve years BEFORE Orson Welles’ infamous War of the Worlds hoax, BBC radio put out a fake news programme of its own. Ronald Knox’s Broadcasting the Barricades convinced thousands of British listeners that London had been attacked by Communist rioters, Big Ben flattened by mortars, the Savoy Hotel bombed to rubble and a Government minister lynched in the street. [via
mefi projects]
[more inside]posted by seanyboy at 6:48 AM PST - 10 comments
May 13
Cul-de-sac is a new independent film (
trailer, briefly NSFW) by London-based directors
Ramin Goudarzi Nejad & Mahshad Torkan. It tells the story of Kiana Firouz, a filmmaker, actress, and lesbian activist who fled Iran after authorities learned of her attempt to make an underground documentary about the lives of
Iranian gays and lesbians. According to
this interview, Firouz didn't write the film, but plays herself. Earlier this month, her asylum petition was allegedly
denied. The denial shouldn't have been surprising according to statistics in a
report (pdf) by the
UK Lesbian and Gay Immigration Group, which states that the refusal rate for lesbians and gay men is as high as 98-99%. Although the Home Office claims it takes the sexual orientation of asylum seekers into consideration, laws which permit deportation of gay and lesbian asylum seekers have recently been
challenged in the supreme court.
posted by treepour at 9:06 PM PST - 10 comments
The “LSER” is a response to longstanding requests from subscription holders for a faster mode of self-ejection from the concert hall...The LSER will be a particularly comforting addition to the concert-going experience for patrons anxious about contemporary music, as in the case next month when music director Alan Gilbert will present “Le Grand Macabre” by the twentieth century master György Ligeti.
NY Philharmonic to install new Speedy Exit Ramp. via
Hell Mouth, the blog of
John Adams.
[more inside]posted by Lutoslawski at 4:41 PM PST - 22 comments
French website Le Cargo has a long-running series of live performance videos by alternative musicians,
all of which can be watched on their YouTube channel. Here are a few that I liked:
Erin McKeown - Put the Fun Back in the Funeral,
Kings of Convenience - Mrs. Cold,
Soltero - I'll Be a Writer,
The Concretes - Military Madness,
My Brightest Diamond - Be My Husband,
Jose Gonzalez - The Nest,
Jaymay - Lonely Men Build Lonely Cities,
Vic Chestnutt - Supernatural,
Metric - Gimme Sympathy,
Françoiz Breut - Les jeunes pousses,
Bowerbirds - Moonshiner,
Joseph Arthur - A Smile That Explodes,
Lambchop - You're a Big Girl Now,
Alela Diane - The Rifle,
Ane Brun - The Puzzle,
Matt Elliott - Broken Bones and
Fredo Viola - Sad Song. There are roughly 600 more videos.
posted by Kattullus at 3:16 PM PST - 6 comments
Halation can interfere with your brain making out the shapes of distorted words, such as on
passing highway signs. Banned from advertising in F1 racing, a major tobacco company that sponsors a team came up with a
novel design solution that may play on this visual effect to an opposite, suggestive effect, depending on the observer. European officials were
not amused, going so far as to call the design "subliminal". Ferrari responded by
removing traces of the design from its cars.
Judas Priest could not be reached for comment. [
via]
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 12:19 PM PST - 53 comments
Project Iceworm was part of an investigation into the feasibility of storing nuclear missiles under Greenland's ice sheet, in the event that the Cold War turned Hot. In 1960 the US Air Force took it upon themselves to bury a city, called "Camp Century" in the ice sheet, and see how life went there. There's an excellent
documentary (parts
2,
3,
4) on YouTube about its construction and installation of various facilities, including the first portable modular
nuclear power plant.
[more inside]posted by Xoder at 8:53 AM PST - 16 comments
Who would have thought it? The UK has
withdrawn the
500 Euro note after an investigation by
SOCA discovered that 90% of the notes in circulation were linked to crime. Nicknames the ‘
Bin Laden’ (you know its out there somewhere) the purple note worth $630 is a favourite of the criminally minded due to its ultra-portability and acceptance throughout mainland Europe.
Drug investigations in Latin America time and time again turn up large amounts of currency in this form.
According to Columbian financial regulators 234K Euros was legally imported and declared into the country but trails of 600M Euros being exported were discovered. Whilst money laundering and fraud relating to the Euro is
nothing new the decision to put into circulation such a high note must now be being questioned at the highest levels.
posted by numberstation at 3:16 AM PST - 95 comments
Larry King questions Stephen Hawking's
recent argument - that we should not try to talk to aliens - and other matters extraterrestrial with the physicist Michio Kaku, Seth Shostak of SETI, the science fiction writer and astronomer David Brin and the actor Dan Aykroyd (
1,
2,
3) (
Previous,
previous)
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 1:31 AM PST - 120 comments
May 12
If politicians were mathematicians. "I would like to suggest two systems for parliamentary votes, one that would weaken the party system but without killing it off entirely, and one that would protect large minorities. Neither has the slightest chance of being adopted, because they are both too complicated to be taken seriously. But mathematicians wouldn’t find them complicated at all — hence the title of this post." Fields medalist Tim Gowers messes around with political axioms.
posted by escabeche at 6:00 PM PST - 18 comments
May 11
Tzvia Greenfield is
the first ultra-Orthodox woman to serve in Knesset, the Israeli legislature, representing the left-wing party
Meretz. Her 2001 book
Hem Mefahadim ("They are afraid,") an attack on rightism and insularity among the ultra-Orthodox, drew death threats. Despite her sharp criticism of the religious community ("The big issue here is a very delicate one. That is children. Large families thirty years ago was six children; now there's 13 or 14 - from one wife. I believes the glorification of bringing as many children as possible is a definite way of ensuring women can't bring their advantages into effect - subjugation.")
she still lives an observant life in the ultra-Orthodox community of
Har Nof. "They disagree with my ideas but they know me as religious and halachic person. They cannot see any blemish in my practice except for one thing-
we have a dog." At least one haredi
denies that Greenfield is Orthodox at all. (The dog comes up.)
posted by escabeche at 5:50 PM PST - 56 comments
"Starting Friday, Walgreens' shoppers can buy an over-the-counter
genetics test from
Pathway Genomics at 7,500 stores across the country. Priced at $20 to $30,
the kit claims to offer information on users' possibility of developing conditions like Alzheimer's disease, breast cancer, or diabetes. Access to the scientific analysis online, however, costs another $79 to $179"
* [
video | 02:31]. "But doctors and geneticists fear the worst for this new over-the-counter access to genetic testing. With no physician to interpret the results of the test, and no FDA regulation of how results are processed or delivered, there is the potential for consumers to misinterpret what their risk really means for their health and their lifestyle."
* [more inside]posted by ericb at 5:25 PM PST - 47 comments
Although they admit a mutual fondness for a
good burger and fries now and then, the President and First Lady Michelle Obama try to
emphasize healthy eating at the White House. In 2009, the White House had its first
vegetable garden since Eleanor Roosevelt’s World War II
victory garden. This is quite a change to the meal President Eisenhower sat down to a little more than 50 years ago at the USDA's Beltsville Research Station. Eisenhower's
own method of cooking a steak was not on the menu, as the showcase meal featured 22 “
new and improved” foods, including modified milk containing increased nonfat milk solids and decreased butter, dehydrofrozen peas, orange juice reconstituted from a dehydrated powder, beef and pork grown with newly discovered hormones and antibiotics added, and “butter prepared, presumably, by the usual methods.” Our national conversation about food goes on and the White House will likely
continue be at the center of it. Hopefully, we don’t end up with President Garfield's
last meal as a White House canteen staple [
recipe, including tip on getting rid of the “troublesome little bones.”]
Bon Appetit!posted by webhund at 12:23 PM PST - 34 comments
Conan@Google A 45 minute Q&A session Conan O'Brien at Google HQ. If thought the 60 minutes interview (
previously) wasn't funny enough, this is definitely for you.
posted by delmoi at 10:24 AM PST - 67 comments
Born in Big Sandy, Texas in 1874,
Henry Thomas was one of the oldest black musician who ever recorded for the phonograph companies of the 1920′s and his music represents a rare opportunity to hear what American black folk music must have sounded like in the last decade of the 19th century.
[more inside]posted by flapjax at midnite at 1:21 AM PST - 21 comments
May 10
The average human eye has three types of cone cells, each of which is sensitive to a different wavelength range of visible light. The difference in the relative signal from the three cones allows us to distinguish colors. Unfortunately, since these sensitivity ranges overlap, there are some combinations of signals from the cones that can't be created by light emitted from a real object. These are the so-called "
imaginary colors". However, by
selectively overstimulating one or more types of cone, we can still perceive these colors; this is the principle behind the
Eclipse of Titan, an optical illusion which produces both a green and a cyan that don't otherwise appear in nature. (Similar effects can be seen in the Eclipses of
Mars,
Neptune, and
Triton.)
[more inside]posted by Upton O'Good at 9:01 PM PST - 64 comments
"A growing body of evidence suggests that humans have a
rudimentary moral sense from the very start of life... Some sense of good and evil seems to be bred in the bone... [But] the sense of right and wrong that [babies] naturally possess diverges in important ways from what we adults would want it to be."
posted by AceRock at 9:58 AM PST - 91 comments
"We’re living in a disposable world. It’s just not worth it to repair things; it’s not worth it to build things from scratch. The magic of that seems to have passed.” The
death of Radio Shack.
[more inside]posted by woodjockey at 9:50 AM PST - 123 comments
I'm just not sure that "happiness" is supposed to be the stable human condition, and I think it's punishing that we're constantly being pushed to achieve it. Screw Happiness, an essay on the folly of using happiness as a measure to define women's lives.
posted by desjardins at 8:18 AM PST - 84 comments
"There was a hobbit, who didn't even know how to return home. He lived in a hole in the ground, and didn't know where he came from or where he was going to. He even didn't know why he had become a hobbit. This was Hogwartz School of Witchcraft and Wizardry 5th year apprentice Harry Potter. "
11 fake Harry Potter books from China.posted by Bulgaroktonos at 5:52 AM PST - 37 comments
The
tree of Ténéré was the most isolated tree in the world. Standing
there in the Sahara Desert, it had once been part of a
lush and populated forest, but as fortunes changed and other trees disappeared, it stood alone in a barren desert, 120 miles from any other tree, an isolated landmark for caravan routes for hundreds for years (
1,
2,
3,
4).
Until...
[more inside]posted by twoleftfeet at 4:26 AM PST - 38 comments
Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. In a few hours, I will destroy the Greek economy. Unless, that is, you give me the sum of...
one trillion dollars!
(SLNYT, but with this much money I can afford to look frumpy)
posted by anigbrowl at 12:11 AM PST - 61 comments
May 9
The Inglehart Values Map , based on the World Values Survey, visualizes the strong correlation of values in different cultures. Countries are clustered in a remarkably predictable way, with great cultural continuity across the English-speaking world.
posted by ms.codex at 11:59 PM PST - 21 comments
Salo has been discussed
before here in the blue, but last week the
Australian Classification Review Board determined that the DVD release can be classified R18+ (available, but with sale restricted to adults), if it includes 3 hours of additional material proposed by the potential distributor,
Shock. In the decision, the Board notes that the additional material "facilitates wider consideration of the context of the film."
While this decision is a win for anti-censorship campaigners and film buffs, it may not be the final chapter. The film has had a
checkered history in Australia.
The Board's media release is
here (PDF).
posted by Artaud at 8:19 PM PST - 32 comments
Forclosure? This evening 60 Minutes did a
segment on "walking away" from your underwater home... They featured a web site
Youwalkaway.com (
previously) which, this evening, is suffering from an overload of hits.
Are we going to see an uptick in folks who have said enough...
posted by HuronBob at 5:48 PM PST - 145 comments
Marble Hornets (
previously) started out as Alex Kralie’s movie project. However after Alex became more paranoid the movie was aborted and he planned on burning the tapes. Jay (or "J") then convinced Alex to give him the raw footage instead. J began watching the tapes and noticing several odd things about them when suddenly things started happening to him.
After almost a year, the popular
alternate reality game Marble Hornets has
completed Part 1. (link to credits)
[more inside]posted by Deflagro at 5:02 PM PST - 41 comments
Facebook's Gone Rogue; It's Time for an Open Alternative [I]n December, with the help of newly hired Beltway privacy experts, it reneged on its privacy promises and made much of your profile information public by default. That includes the city that you live in, your name, your photo, the names of your friends and the causes you’ve signed onto.
This spring Facebook took that even further. All the items you list as things you like must become public and linked to public profile pages. If you don’t want them linked and made public, then you don’t get them — though Facebook nicely hangs onto them in its database in order to let advertisers target you.posted by mecran01 at 11:03 AM PST - 218 comments
The Whatsisname Collection. A number of years ago there was a place called A&S Magazines on 40th Street behind the Port Authority, which sold used magazines. One week I went in there and they had this particular collection of magazines, boxes and boxes of them, which they were selling quite cheap, because they had all been defaced. A gentleman in Connecticut had been buying magazines - mostly men’s magazines - for several decades, from the forties to the early seventies - and deconstructing them. He would take them apart, and then he would make a new magazine from the remnants of several, arranging the pages to highlight certain stories and downplay others. He would staple the pages back into the cover, and then he would cross out whatever stories weren’t in his version with a wax pencil. Finally he would stamp his name on the cover and number the whole thing, presumably for his "library." Even though vintage, these oddly shaped, crude reassemblages really wouldn’t appeal to many people. Obviously I bought as many as I could. Michael Kupperman's Whatsisname Collection --
Part 1 //
Part 2.posted by (Arsenio) Hall and (Warren) Oates at 10:27 AM PST - 15 comments
We are two women from different worlds with very different experiences. I, Annie, have performed in, directed and produced pornography for twenty five years. Mae Tyme has been anti-pornography for equally as long. We met at a lesbian video night several years ago. You might think that we'd be enemies, because we have such different viewpoints. Could we come together to
record a conversation, share our ideas, and show that women of desparate [sic] backgrounds and beliefs can communicate and collaborate?
posted by internet fraud detective squad, station number 9 at 10:11 AM PST - 81 comments
25 years after the siege at the MOVE house in Philadelphia ended with the police dropping a bomb on the house from a helicopter, killing 11 and destroying a city block, the Philadelphia Inquirer looks back on the events with contemporary footage and interviews with participants and those affected. The failure to rebuild adequately the houses that were devastated in the siege and fire remains an enduring scandal in Philadelphia.
posted by carter at 8:57 AM PST - 48 comments
When you think of African music, flutes may not be the first instruments that come to mind, but across West Africa there are some flute traditions that often involve a unique combination of vocalizing and blowing into the instrument, resulting in some amazing music that's a hella lotta fun to listen to. There are some nice examples on YouTube
here,
here,
here and
here.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 2:09 AM PST - 16 comments
May 8
The Brookings Institution’s
Metropolitan Policy Program (led by
Bruce Katz) has just released its
The State of Metropolitan America report (full
pdf). The report builds on eight years of the Census Bureau’s
American Community Surveys; and includes a spiffy
State of Metropolitan America Indicator Map of changes in population indicators at state, metropolitan, and suburban levels.160;160;
Some interesting
findings:
- America's suburbs are now more likely to be home to minorities, the poor and a rapidly growing older population as many younger, educated whites move to cities for jobs and shorter commutes.
- Two-thirds of primary cities in large metropolitan areas grew from 2000 to 2008
- For the first time in several decades, the population is growing at a faster rate than households, due to delays in marriage, divorce and births as well as longer life spans. People living alone and nonmarried couple families are among the fastest-growing in suburbs.
[more inside]posted by stratastar at 10:51 PM PST - 12 comments
BBC World Service has over 500 audio documentaries you can download. The subject matter is incredibly wide ranging, for example,
internet cafés,
the influence of Islamic art on William Morris,
South African female AIDS activist Thembi Ngubane,
Yiddish,
the importance of cows,
novelist Chinua Achebe,
financial risk management,
Obama as an intellectual,
the physical and emotional effects of a car crash and many, many more. If the quantity and variety are overwhelming, you can subscribe to a
podcast, which delivers a new documentary to you every single day.
posted by Kattullus at 5:33 PM PST - 22 comments
Greetings, Programs! This is enough to make the hearts of every sci-fi geek everywhere go pitter and patter (yes and no, like a bit!). Space Paranoids was "invented" by a young programmer named Kevin Flynn back in 1982. Now it's finally come to life!
[more inside]posted by zooropa at 4:37 PM PST - 21 comments
Is a Woman's MBA Worth Less? $4,600.
That's how much less women made than men in their first post-MBA jobs, according to research by Nancy Carter and Christine Silva of Catalyst. And it's not because women tend to start at lower positions than men — though they do start at lower positions than men, on average, that's a separate problem. The research controls for job level and industry. What's more, the salary lines aren't parallel; men's salaries start higher, then rise faster. The gap widens over time, even after controlling for factors like having children or differing aspiration levels.
The pay just isn't equal. posted by infini at 1:23 PM PST - 96 comments
"What would be it like to go a day without spending any money? I've thought about this before but I've never considered actually trying it. I couldn't imagine going a day without spending a single penny -- is that even possible? How would I get from A to B? What about food? Turns out, a day of living expense free is possible and you'd be surprised by the overwhelming sense of satisfaction and feeling of elation that comes from it. "
The Huffington Post's Alexa van Tobel tells the astonishing and empowering tale of
How I Went 24 Hours Without Spending Any Money...In New York City.
Unfortunately, "this experiment is unsustainable for a long period of time."
posted by Legomancer at 10:04 AM PST - 158 comments
Most people don't realize that Betty White was
awesome nearly 60 years ago. In 1952, she was already TV's first female talk show host, and she became the first woman on TV to star AND co-produce her own sitcom (without being married to one of the other producers),
"Life With Elizabeth", and the show is (IMO) a Lost Classic. (less lost now, with the help of YouTube; MLYT follows...)
[more inside]posted by oneswellfoop at 1:48 AM PST - 24 comments
May 7
David Milch, creator of
Deadwood,
John From Cincinnati, and
NYPD Blue reads from Luck, his Michael Mann-directed
upcoming show for HBO. Following the reading there's a Q&A. (mp3)
posted by dobbs at 10:06 PM PST - 26 comments
The
American Academy of Pediatrics is proposing that
doctors be authorized to perform a “ritual nick” on the genitals of pre-pubescent girls in order to satisfy cultural requirements and hopefully stave off more invasive forms of Female Genital Cutting (FGC):
Most forms of FGC are decidedly harmful, and pediatricians should decline to perform them, even in the absence of any legal constraints. However, the ritual nick suggested by some pediatricians is not physically harmful and is much less extensive than routine newborn male genital cutting. There is reason to believe that offering such a compromise may build trust between hospitals and immigrant communities, save some girls from undergoing disfiguring and life-threatening procedures in their native countries, and play a role in the eventual eradication of FGC. It might be more effective if federal and state laws enabled pediatricians to reach out to families by offering a ritual nick as a possible compromise to avoid greater harm. (source: PDF; not safe for work, contains line drawings of female genitalia.)
posted by Rumple at 11:33 AM PST - 162 comments
Odds of Cooking the Grandkids:
"There is a horrible paper in this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which looks at how the limits of human physiology interact with upper-range global warming scenarios. The bottom line conclusion is that there is a small - of order 5% - risk of global warming creating a situation in which a large fraction of the planet was uninhabitable (in the sense that if you were outside for an extended period during the hottest days of the year, even in the shade with wet clothing, you would die)." [more inside]posted by symbollocks at 11:25 AM PST - 47 comments
For the first time ever, a look inside the most secure room in the world. Not Disney's
Club 33. Not the White House
Situation Room or the
Gold Vault at Fort Knox. Welcome to the
OT VIII Course Room aboard the Church of Scientology's flagship
MV Freewinds. This room is the only place (on this planet at least) where you can read an authorized copy of Scientology's highest level.
posted by scalefree at 9:41 AM PST - 62 comments
"
The multifunction folded shovle (sic) boasting a happy combination of a spade, pickax, trowel, hewing, knife, saw, scissors, hammer, operner
(sic), shield, anchor, and oar is perfect design and refined making, making a pioneer in tools family!" I can guarantee you that never before (or, likely, again) will you be
so inspired by a multifunction shovel commercial. The music is exhilarating! (PS: This shovel does freaking
everything.) (SLYT)
[more inside]posted by GatorDavid at 6:38 AM PST - 78 comments
Braille is facing extinction,
says Canadian newsweekly Maclean's, thanks to strained budgets, audiobooks and text-to-speech. "In the 1950s about half of all blind children learned Braille, says the U.S. National Federation of the Blind. Today, that number has fallen to 10 per cent -- and it's about the same in Canada. For some, like NFB director Mark Riccobono, that means we're letting blind children grow up as illiterate as Braille's 19th-century contemporaries. 'If only 10 per cent of sighted children were being taught [to read],' he told
Maclean's, 'that would be considered a crisis.'"
posted by mcwetboy at 5:30 AM PST - 67 comments
May 6
In 1969,
George Schlatter was riding high as the producer of the high ratings blockbuster,
Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In. So when Schlatter pitched a show to ABC that was like Laugh In only more so (with faster jokes, faster editing, and even more outrageous topical humor), ABC was willing to let Schlatter have free rein. The result was
Turn-On, a show that bombed so badly it was cancelled the very night it aired.
[more inside]posted by jonp72 at 3:26 PM PST - 43 comments
How a misunderstanding about Chinese characters has led many astray. The explication of the Chinese word for crisis as made up of two components signifying danger and opportunity is due partly to wishful thinking, but mainly to a fundamental misunderstanding about how terms are formed in Mandarin and other Sinitic languages... Among the most egregious of the radical errors in this statement is the use of the exotic term “Ideogram” to refer to Chinese characters. Linguists and writing theorists avoid “ideogram” as a descriptive referent for hanzi (Mandarin) / kanji (Japanese) / hanja (Korean) because only an exceedingly small proportion of them actually convey ideas directly through their shapes... [more inside]posted by KokuRyu at 11:23 AM PST - 83 comments
The
Soroban is recognisable to most in the West as an Abacus. Despite the prevalence of electronic calculators, the Soroban is still incredibly popular in Japan, with parents oft paying for private tutors to teach their children. The remarkable phenomenon of
Flash Anzan is observed after a few years of practice, when users no longer need a real Soroban and can work off an imaginary one.
posted by Biru at 9:23 AM PST - 38 comments
"Women and men drink together in a bar? Well, then, you have to have bathrooms for the women. That's the invention of the powder room. That's a phrase that actually comes from Prohibition. They could tuck a tiny little room with a toilet and a sink underneath a stairwell or in a corner. Table service in bars can also be traced to Prohibition, because men and women together, they're not bellying up the bar, but sitting at a table. And the dance band: if you have only men in a bar, you're never going to have a five-piece jazz band there; but you are going to if you have men and women who might dance together." Daniel Okrent and the history of Prohibition.
[more inside]posted by geoff. at 7:30 AM PST - 30 comments
Smories are free original stories for kids, read by kids.
posted by DU at 7:28 AM PST - 5 comments
Thursday flash fun:
Hue Shift -
an addictive endless action platformer. You are controlling a pixel that can shift its color to red, green and blue. Climb as high as you can by matching your hue to the color of the platforms. Beware, only platforms with your color are solid! (
via Rock, Paper, Shotgun)
posted by slimepuppy at 7:20 AM PST - 17 comments
Diseased Pariah News started in 1990 as "a patently offensive publication of, by, and for people with HIV disease (and their friends and loved ones). We are a forum for infected people to share their thoughts, feelings, art, writing and brownie recipes in an atmosphere free of teddy bears, magic rocks, and seronegative guilt." It ran for 11 issues over the next 9 years,
8 of which can be found here. (NSFW, irritating interface)
[more inside]posted by GenjiandProust at 6:07 AM PST - 4 comments
Two years ago, Police Officer
Adrian Schoolcraft, an officer in Brooklyn's 81st Precinct, became gravely concerned about how the public was being served. To document his concerns, he began carrying around a digital sound recorder, secretly recording his colleagues and superiors. Initially he carried the recorder to protect himself from the
civilian complaints that can result from street encounters. But then he began to document things happening in the precinct that bothered him. After he ran afoul of precinct politics, he recorded what he viewed as retaliation by his bosses. The
Village Voice is releasing portions of the tapes in batches and is also publishing several stories to deal with the issues that the recordings present.
In this week's installment, the Voice looks at the roll calls at the Bed-Stuy precinct and the conflicting instructions given to street cops, who must look busy at all times, while actually suppressing crime reports.
posted by anotherpanacea at 5:45 AM PST - 93 comments
World of Goo, Aquaria, Gish, Lugaru and Penumbra Overture are all included in this package. The best thing about the bundle? You can pay whatever you want (above 0 ofcourse), which you can choose to split between the developers and charity at any percentage you'd like. The bundle lasts for another five days and seven hours. All of the games work on Mac, Windows, and Linux so this is a great way to check out any of these popular indie titles if you haven't had a chance to play them yet.
posted by pancreas at 5:06 AM PST - 40 comments
May 5
Educational gamesmaker Preloaded has recently made two strategy games for English TV station Channel 4.
1066 is a mix of tactics, insult-typing, bowmanship, rhythm-game and narration by Ian Holm.
Trafalgar Origins is all Napoleonic high seas derringdo all the time, as you sail your English ship in real time against the damnable French and Spanish. Whether you want to hoist the sails or call your opponent a stench weasel, they are fun little games which have the added bonus of teaching you about British history. Both games can be played solo or multiplayer.
[via Rock Paper Shotgun, where they like those games quite a lot]posted by Kattullus at 7:12 PM PST - 14 comments
Cult Radio A-Go-Go. "Our radio crew, including your hosts Terry & Tiffany, Cragg our drive-in movie gargoyle and Wicked Kitty, welcomes you to our world of exploration into the very bizarre genre of ultra rare B - pop culture in comedy, parody. horror, sci-fi, exploitation, sexploitation, T.V., Old Time Radio & drive-in movies! We are stationed at the abandoned drive-in near death valley where we are broadcasting our pirate internet radio signal to you, for the audio pop culture junkies needing a fix!"
[more inside]posted by GrammarMoses at 2:45 PM PST - 1 comments
'American Able' intends to, through spoof, reveal the ways in which women with disabilities are invisibilized in advertising and mass media. I chose American Apparel not just for their notable style, but also for their claims that many of their models are just ‘every day’ women who are employees, friends and fans of the company. However, these women fit particular body types. Their campaigns are highly sexualized and feature women who are generally thin, and who appear to be able-bodied. Women with disabilities go unrepresented, not only in American Apparel advertising, but also in most of popular culture. Rarely, if ever, are women with disabilities portrayed in anything other than an asexual manner, for ‘disabled’ bodies are largely perceived as ‘undesirable.’ In a society where sexuality is created and performed over and over within popular culture, the invisibility of women with disabilities in many ways denies them the right to sexuality, particularly within a public context.
[more inside]posted by heatherann at 1:02 PM PST - 99 comments
“Vegetable, Vegetable or Vegetable” is an “intrusive and unpleasant game” featured on
Ouch, the hour-long monthly BBC
podcast talk show on disability. In it, the show’s hosts must figure out a caller’s disability by asking “fiendish” questions, to which the caller may answer only yes or no. (When it’s all over, Daleks holler out the answer.) This is only one of the many scabrous, puckish, and unskittish ways in which
Ouch covers life as a “crip,” a term the show uses unabashedly.
posted by joeclark at 11:01 AM PST - 39 comments
We Need a General Theory of Individuality : "One of the unspoken secrets in basic scientific research, from anthropology to zoology (with intervening stops at physiology, political science, psychology, psychiatry, and sociology) is that, nearly always, individuals turn out to be different from one another, and that—to an extent rarely admitted and virtually never pursued—scientific generalizations tend to hush up those differences"
posted by dhruva at 10:05 AM PST - 75 comments
Robert Rodriguez's
Machete, starring the great character actor Danny Trejo, started as a joke trailer in the movie
Grindhouse. Now it's a real movie with a (NSFW)
trailer of its own. Enjoy.
posted by Bookhouse at 8:14 AM PST - 115 comments
The porn industry has a long (no pun intended) history of making videos by messing with Hollywood film titles. And "A XXX Parody" has released its version of a MeFi favourite, which they didn't even bother to rename:
The Big Lebowski (trailer: NSFW). Sacrilege!
posted by bwg at 7:40 AM PST - 91 comments
Don't like those commercials that run before the movies in the theaters? Well, this weekend, Kraft Foods is introducing something new to screens across the U.S.,
"two- to three-minute branded-entertainment vignettes" that promise NOT to "knock you over the head with a bat as a brand commercial", but instead they... well... here's an example: Lunchables kids' meals present:
Alien Field Trip* (Warning: more artificially cheesy than Cheez Whiz). Kraft and other big advertisers are betting that
long-form ads will be "the Wave of the Future", and the perfect audience for them will be the folks who have already paid to see "Iron Man 2", "Sex and the City 2" or "Toy Story 3". What could possibly go wrong?
[more inside]posted by oneswellfoop at 3:59 AM PST - 74 comments
10 years ago yesterday, The
ILOVEYOU or LOVELETTER computer worm successfully attacked tens of millions of Windows computers in 2000 when it was sent as an attachment to an email message with the text "ILOVEYOU" in the subject line.
Mefi Was There that day when Onel De Guzman released a virus that he had proposed creating as part of his undergraduate thesis.
The BBC Looks Back. The key part of the virus was not any technical trick but the wording of the subject line - ILOVEYOU - and its attachment LOVE-LETTER-FOR-YOU.
posted by Blake at 3:34 AM PST - 28 comments
Dune, the motion picture was made in Mexico City, Mexico during the spring of 1983. I was there to witness David Lynch as the director and here's what really happened! (
via)
posted by The Mouthchew at 12:12 AM PST - 56 comments
May 4
Ozark Medieval Fortress – Thirty masons, carpenters and stone carvers authentically dressed, will work all year round for twenty years, the time required to build a fortress in the Middle Ages.
posted by tellurian at 9:50 PM PST - 74 comments
College, Inc. PBS's FrontLine investigates the rise of for-profit colleges. Dangling the promise of a degree that will attract a job, for-profit colleges have been consistent performers for Wall Street and have exploded in enrollment alongside their community college counterparts as a result of the down economy. Positioning themselves as an alternative to traditional schools for the working and adult student set, who benefits the most from this departure from the traditional college model?
posted by dr_dank at 7:33 PM PST - 64 comments
The IDEA - The Indian Documentary of Electronic Arts - Seven somewhat dated collections of essays, music, videos, and thought curated and designed by Shankar Barua, backed by totally awesome early Internet-era graphics, and hosted at
Laurie Spiegel's also-rad
retiary.org.
Please note that many individual pages of The IDEA gazettes are very-very heavily loaded, by [2001's] WWWeb standards, with images/audio/video. In other words, if you can get past ugly old broken HTML and auto-playing music, you may find a lot to like in here.posted by carsonb at 6:53 PM PST - 3 comments
The remains of a man from Africa who
lived and died in 13th-century England have been unearthed in Ipswich. Analysis of the skeleton shows that the individual originated in what is now Tunisia, but lived for at least a decade in England. This is not the only surprising recent information regarding African presence in pre-modern England. A paternally linked gene known from Mali, Senegal and Guinea-Bissau has been present in the
male lineage of a Yorkshire family for at least 250 years, and may reach back to the time of the Roman occupation.
[more inside]posted by Countess Elena at 4:54 PM PST - 46 comments
AlternativeTo finds substitutes to expensive and/or crappy desktop and mobile software. "Tell us what application you want to replace and we give you great alternatives, based on user recommendations."
posted by gman at 4:27 PM PST - 15 comments
It sprang to life sometime
in the 3rd millennium, outliviving the kingdoms of ancient Egypt, it survived six of the
seven wonders of the ancient world, and it's older than Judaism. It survived 5,000 years (give or take a few hundred), and was cut down in 1964 by
Donald Currey, a graduate student in geography. He was studying the
Little Ice Age (prev), and he was looking for an old
Bristlecone pine in the White-Inyo mountain range of California (prev), as a record for climatic conditions from that period. As that tree, nicknamed
Prometheus, is no longer living, the record for
oldest tree goes to a tree from the same stand,
Methuselah. If trees aren't your thing, there are quite a few
long-living organisms of other sorts. For more fun and photos, join
Rachel Sussman on her journey to photograph them.
[more inside]posted by filthy light thief at 1:57 PM PST - 43 comments
Do It Yourself:
The Story of Rough Trade (goog vid, BBC, 1:28) The history of the legendary indie label/shop, home to such bands as Scritti Politti, The Smiths, The Fall, Cabaret Voltaire, The Feelies, Robert Wyatt, The Slits, and many more.
posted by puny human at 11:54 AM PST - 11 comments
How do you diagnose anemia in a third-world country without electricity? Use the salad-spinner-based
thirty dollar centrifuge, developed by Rice undergraduate students Lila Kerr and Lauren Theis.
posted by jjray at 11:03 AM PST - 25 comments
Assimilate book-ism to webism and the book looks like nothing so much as an unreadably long, out of date, & non-interactive blog post. . . Web 2.0 has been revelatory in lots of ways—user-generated naked photos, for one—but the torrent of writing from ordinary folks has certainly been one of the most transfixing. Over the past five years the great American public has blogged and Tweeted and commented up a storm and fulfilled a great modernist dream: the inclusion, the reproduction, the self-representation of the masses.
posted by four panels at 10:29 AM PST - 15 comments
The
2009 film Garbage Dreams, which is
currently airing on PBS, documents the
Zabbaleen a tribe that lives off of collecting and recycling trash from Cairo. They manage to recycle 80% of trash (vs
32% in the U.S.), the highest level in the world, well above most first world recycling levels, using primitive techniques shown in the film. As depicted in the film, and
on NPR, since 2003 Cairo has been hiring foreign companies, who recycle much less, taking away their livelihood.
They are trying to raise enough money (you can donate, buy a t-shirt or help) to grow their Recycling school, to teach more of their children their practices. Good
interview with the film director here.
posted by Berkun at 9:27 AM PST - 13 comments
The Grand Generation (1993 - 27 min.) is a warm and inspiring portrait of six elderly Americans whose vigor belies their age. The film is a cogent reminder that most of us probably don't hear nearly enough of what the very oldest among us have to say.
[more inside]posted by flapjax at midnite at 6:44 AM PST - 7 comments
Who are the grandfathers of noise music? The
Nihilist Spasm Band formed in 1965 when eight men, using homemade instruments, began creating noise together in London, Ontario. None of these men were traditionally trained musicians, yet they are often credited as being the major influence behind modern noise music, inspiring Japanese noisemakers like
Hijokaiden and
Masonna, as well as western artists like Thurston Moore of
Sonic Youth.
[more inside]posted by threetoed at 1:20 AM PST - 28 comments
May 3
The Personal Photographs of Dr. Vladimir Kosma Zworykin, Television Pioneer. The screen images are time exposure photographs of the picture on the kinescope in the monitoring rack in the main control room. Some were taken with stationary frames of moving picture film projected upon the iconoscope by a standard moving picture machine. Others are actually the pictures transmitted with the iconoscope camera in the studio and outdoors.
posted by tellurian at 7:56 PM PST - 9 comments
Inside the studio of American artist Frank Stella: "After I started getting a sense of the space and in the groove of shooting, he asked if I minded if he could take a nap. I continued working as quietly as possible since his bed was in the middle of all the work." The work in progress in his studio, The Stations of the Cross, is a commission from Richard Meier for his proposed Jubilee Church at the Vatican.
(via DO)posted by ocherdraco at 2:38 PM PST - 16 comments
Everything is a variety program. Five presentations per episode, each one minute or less. Sitting somewhere on the border of experimental film, music video, and bad TV.
[more inside]posted by idiopath at 11:34 AM PST - 11 comments
This that you call Ursus maritimus, this polar bear. This is a being who came from somewhere and is going somewhere. It's not locked in time. And that—the great resistance to Darwin is, I think, he told us that it's all moving. And it's headed in no particular place. And then particular physics comes along. And quantum mechanics come along. And these physicists tell us the same thing. "It's really fuzzy out there."
A few days ago, without much notice, PBS broadcast the
final episode of the
Bill Moyers Journal. Moyers devoted his final segment to
an interview with essayist Barry Lopez—whose writing, Moyers said, has "set the gold standard for all of us whose work it is to explain those things we don't understand."
(Transcript.) [more inside]posted by cirripede at 8:55 AM PST - 34 comments
Agence France Presse's slap to photographers. The AFP sues a photographer after using his photographs illegally: "On Monday, Agence France Presse filed a complaint in the United States District Court Southern District of New York against Haiti-based photographer Daniel Morel. Agence France Presse claims Morel engaged in an 'antagonistic assertion of rights' after the photographer objected to the use by AFP of images he posted online of the Haitian earthquake of 12 January."
posted by chunking express at 8:41 AM PST - 44 comments
May 2
GENETOS is the history of Shoot-em-ups in a single game. Take on everything ranging from Space Invaders-like aliens to 21st Century bullet hell. Power up your craft (by collecting green and blue bits and blobs) with innovations like slow-motion, super bombs, lock-on lasers, and the ability to move vertically. (Windows only)
[more inside]posted by CrunchyFrog at 11:02 PM PST - 10 comments
Apollo Gauntlet is an independent cartoon created by Winnipeg animator Myles Langlois, with contributions from Drue Langlois and Hollie Dzama. All 10 episodes are available on YouTube:
[more inside]posted by oulipian at 10:28 PM PST - 5 comments
Make a Map is a website that lets you create your own maps of the US and areas thereof using various demographics data. It's still in beta stage but it's got all of the US (at least everywhere I've thought to look) and so far has datasets for median household income, population change 2000-9, population density, median home value, unemployment rate, average household size and median age. It's fun to use and taught me a great deal about my home city. The sitemaker, ESRI, also has a pretty good free globe map software,
ArcGIS Explorer, for which you download
map layers and
add-ins.
posted by Kattullus at 12:14 PM PST - 13 comments
Ben Heine is a Belgian painter, illustrator, portraitist, caricaturist and photographer. His recent project,
Pencil vs. Camera, is an amalgam of illustration and photography, creating something similar in a single image showing two different actions. His
Flickr Photostream.
posted by netbros at 8:25 AM PST - 3 comments
May 1
“We were online, and I saw this link and it intrigued me: a person encased in a suit,” says Ben, a 25-year-old computer programmer from Irvine, California. “My girlfriend thought it was the weirdest thing she had ever seen.”
But Ben saw something else—something he didn’t even know his life was missing. “I couldn’t stop thinking about it. After a couple of weeks of bringing it up, I convinced my girlfriend to let me buy one. Finally it came in, I put it on… and I felt free.”
[more inside]posted by unmake at 8:08 PM PST - 95 comments
New York Times article: A year ago, Tough Mudder was a semifinalist in the Harvard Business School’s annual Business Plan Contest. A British student named Will Dean thought he could attract 500 people to run a grueling race through mud and man-made obstacles. . . . But on Sunday [May 2, 2010], the Brooklyn-based Tough Mudder will conduct a race for 4,500 people. Each has paid up to $100 for the privilege of negotiating a seven-mile obstacle course of muddy hills, cold water and flaming bales of straw at a ski resort near Allentown, Pa.posted by (Arsenio) Hall and (Warren) Oates at 12:56 PM PST - 21 comments
