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June 2005 Archives
June 30
The
Book of Kells is one of the most beautiful illuminated manuscripts ever made, a fusion of Celtic motifs, Germanic forms and Christian themes. We can view the image gallerys, or even visit in person, but it's a soulfully thin experience compared to actually holding its weight and turning the pages. Enter the world of
Facsimile Books, a faithful re-creation of the original to the extent that it is virtually indistinguishable from the original, where price is no concern, editions are limited, and can cost $20,000 or more and often sell-out quickly.
Finns Fine Books is a leading distributor. A list of
publishers, mostly European fine arts craftsmen.
posted by stbalbach at 9:52 PM PST - 16 comments
"The stars are veiled. Something stirs in the East. A sleepless malice. The eye of the enemy is moving.
He is HERE."
posted by keswick at 6:12 PM PST - 15 comments
Steffen Jahn photography - A Flash site with a wide variety of photos: commercial work for exotic cars, flowers, planes and landscapes. Personal favorites are 'motorsport' in the 'stills' section and the 'little white things' section.
posted by swordfishtrombones at 1:45 PM PST - 9 comments
This game rated JC for eternal salvation, curing of the sick, and excessive scourging at the pillar. Ok, this is getting ridiculous...
a Christian videogame about the rapture and the tribulations? WTF? I guess I know which side I'd be on.
Seriously, though, do these people realize that every single new Christian-centric product is nothing more than a honeypot for harvesting names, addresses, and email addresses? Just like the GOP, people realize there's
money to be made in marketing to Christians. But, the second you sign up, I'm sure you get added to one of the GOP's
spam farms direct mail providers and sold to the appropriate politicrit or ideological demagogue.
Just to show you I'm not full of it, look at who's in the databases of the
Omega List and
Response Unlimited...
Advance Ticket Buyers for the Passion of the Christ,
Peace Frogs (what?),
Y2K Preparedness Buyers, the
current (68k) and
former (19m) subscribers to the Washington Times (aka Moonie Times), and of course, the
Terri Schiavo Donor List.
Take a look at who else is in there -
Limbaugh,
Newsmax,
Fortune Magazine,
Human Events,
Guns and Ammo Magazine,
Oliver North,
the Heritage Foundation,
Linda Tripp donors,
G. Gordon Liddy's Toughguy Database, and
the buyers of the Left Behind Video Series. No wonder we always lose...every single rightwing entity is in there! Via
BoingBoing.
posted by rzklkng at 11:54 AM PST - 53 comments
Why does the National Council of Churches hate America? The NCC -- a coalition of 36 Christian denominations -- makes a firm statement against the war in Iraq: "This year our nation is at war as we observe the 4th of July, a day that honors those founders who spoke out for independence from tyranny. Today in Iraq a cruel dictator has been deposed, yet the suffering of the Iraqi people continues. Mandated elections have been held, yet the future of Iraq remains as uncertain as ever. Day by day the cost of this war for the United States, for Iraq, for peace grows clearer. No weapons of mass destruction have been found; no link to the attacks on September 11, 2001 has been shown. It has become clear that the rationale for invasion was at best a tragic mistake, at worst a clever deception." Mainstream Christians are starting to take back Christianity from the
theocrats.
posted by digaman at 10:59 AM PST - 74 comments
Detached a gorgeous comic based on the author's experiences with having a detached retina and going through eye surgery.
posted by mathowie at 10:40 AM PST - 23 comments
Next Act Won't Be as Easy as the First. Gates once conceded: "Google is still perfect, the bubble is floating and they can do everything. You should buy their stock at any price.” And just this week they affirmed this statement with their release of Google Earth, showing the world that their scope is beyond just websites. But is google growing too ambitious? is this desire to "search all of the world's information" signaling doom?
posted by merc at 10:06 AM PST - 22 comments
Got Beer? Which came first, the Stella Artois or the Ostrich? Does this makes sense
after I drink a few Stellas?
posted by spicynuts at 9:06 AM PST - 30 comments
Michael Jackson is guilty of being
totally excellent in this fantastic whirlwind tour of NES games (a la
Sega Fantasy VI); MJ herein imposes his 16-bit self on a huge amount of games including but not limited to Megaman, Kung Fu, Ice Climber, Super Mario Brothers 1 and 3, Dragon Warrior, Arkanoid, Track and Field, Spelunker, Final Fantasy and more. If you know the Japanese language + games, clue us in. (Flash and hardcore midi dance music warning)
posted by BlackLeotardFront at 8:55 AM PST - 24 comments
To be successful, an occupation such as that contemplated after any hostilities in Iraq requires much detailed interagency planning, many forces, multi-year military commitment, and a national commitment to nation-building... To conduct their share of the essential tasks that must be accomplished to reconstruct an Iraqi state, military forces will be severely taxed in military police, civil affairs, engineer, and transportation units, in addition to possible severe security difficulties. The administration of an Iraqi occupation will be complicated by deep religious, ethnic, and tribal differences which dominate Iraqi society. U.S. forces may have to manage and adjudicate conflicts among Iraqis that they can barely comprehend. An exit strategy will require the establishment of political stability, which will be difficult to achieve given Iraq's fragmented population, weak political institutions, and propensity for rule by violence. From the US Army War College in February 2003:
Reconstructing Iraq: Insights, Challenges, and Missions for Military Forces in a Post-Conflict Scenario (PDF). From June 2005, Anthony Cordesman's analysis of factual misstatements in the President's recent address:
Truth and spin on Iraq. Foresight is 20/20. Irresponsibility and mendacity are timeless.
posted by y2karl at 6:29 AM PST - 44 comments
Legitimate Job Test or Something Wacky? H.J. Cummins of the Minneapolis Star Tribune writes about personality tests--never meant to screen job applicants--being used or misused by employers.
Test sample items:
"I see things or animals or people around me that others do not see."
"My soul sometimes leaves my body."
"I have a habit of counting things that are not important, such as bulbs on electric signs, and so forth."
posted by etaoin at 5:26 AM PST - 38 comments
Republicans are threatening to revoke Major League Baseball's antitrust exemption. Not because of the
steroid scandals, or the numerous abuses of the monopoly to
shakedown cities for publicly financed stadiums.
No, the GOP is attacking baseball because
George Soros, a liberal, might buy a team and he would be a "polarizing figure."
Oh yeah,
Fred Malek, a non-polarizing, competing bidder is a GOP fundraiser and a aide who compiled a list of members of the "Jewish Cabal" at the Bureau of Labor Statistics for Nixon.
This injection of politics into baseball seems
eerily familiar to me...
posted by hipnerd at 1:12 AM PST - 44 comments
June 29
Leave My Child Alone! --a new group teaching parents how to stop the very intrusive recruitment tactics of the military, including getting their kids off
the Pentagon's list of 30 million potential recruits,:
(...a joint effort of the Defense Department and a private contractor, disclosed last week, to build a database of 30 million 16- to 25-year-olds, complete with Social Security numbers, racial and ethnic identification codes, grade point averages and phone numbers. The database is to be scoured for youngsters that the Pentagon believes can be persuaded to join the military...), and getting your kids off the School district records lists (
School districts are required under Section 9528 of the No Child Left Behind Act to release student records to military recruiters or risk losing funding, but they are also required to inform families of their Opt Out rights. Notification varies wildly across districts, and it's a bit of a crapshoot whether families know or not.)
More on this from Bob Herbert here:
The Army's Hard Sellposted by amberglow at 7:43 PM PST - 68 comments
A
new design for the "Freedom Tower"-- the skyscraper that will form the heart of the
rebuilt World Trade Center in New York-- has been unveiled. The new tower
will be slimmer, straighter and
more conventional, it will be set farther back from the street, and it will be
placed atop a mammoth, 200-foot concrete-and-metal pedestal designed to repel explosions.
posted by keswick at 6:09 PM PST - 63 comments
David Foster Wallace's commencement speech at Kenyon University
Please don't worry that I'm getting ready to lecture you about compassion or other-directedness or all the so-called virtues. This is not a matter of virtue. It's a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default setting which is to be deeply and literally self-centered and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self.
The
author of
Infinite Jest attempts to explain what is wrong with your brain's default settings.
posted by Edible Energy at 5:25 PM PST - 26 comments
Freegans !
Because so much is trashed in our society, a freegan lifestyle can be one of great abundance -- food, books, magazines, comic books, newspapers, videos, music (CDs, cassettes, records, etc.), carpets, musical instruments, clothing, rollerblades, scooters, furniture, vitamins, electronics, pet care products, games, toys, bicycles, artwork, and just about any other type of consumer good can be found in the discards of retailers, institutions, and individuals simply by rummaging through their trash bins, dumpsters, and trash bags.
Previously mentioned here. (via memepool)posted by es_de_bah at 4:35 PM PST - 63 comments
Postage stamps with a side of race baiting. The Mexican postal service released a series of five stamps today featuring a 1940's era cartoon of a fat lipped jug eared negro child, known for his hapless adventures, and his Aunt Jemima (classic edition, not modern sassy Jemima) mother.
posted by jonson at 2:36 PM PST - 28 comments
Officer in Charge Responds to Buhriz Allegations Army Ranger 1LT TJ Grider in a letter to
Cryptome responds to allegations that his unit may have killed Iraqi children and then planted weapons before taking photos. The photos and allegations were discussed on Metafilter
here.
When my medic said the wounded were stable we picked them up, threw them over our backs, and moved with them and the detainee over 200 meters to the road where we had coordinated for a field ambulance, at this time we were still taking fire but could not locate the origin. We saved the lives of the very kids that had shot at us and attempted to kill us. And what you all do not realize is that the detainee admitted to an interpreter that he and his friends had attacked us and had been paid to fight by a local insurgency leader.
Although I feel it is not warranted, I welcome any investigation into the events that day. I am confident that my actions were right and in accordance with the Geneva Convention and the laws of land warfare. I hope you feel comfortable with your actions, Mr. Kraft. You have managed to skip any investigation and associated an honorable, very accomplished platoon with a crime that did not exist. posted by mlis at 12:28 PM PST - 92 comments
Page after page of late 50s/early 60s pop posters, advertisements and more, designed by the studio of
Lefor-Openo,
which consisted of Marie-Claire Lefort and Marie-Francine Oppeneau.
Via Papel Continuoposted by iconomy at 10:06 AM PST - 6 comments
“Negative eco-tourism from orbit.” Sprol shows the visual macroscopic effects of the decisions and behavior of our society. Since previous generations have not had the advantage of this perspective, it is our obligation to use it wisely.posted by crunchland at 10:02 AM PST - 20 comments
Ringtones are a growing concern and not just when people don't shut them off.
Jamster is a weekly ringtone subscription that advertises to kids on channels like Nick and MTV. Kids are attracted to
crazy frogs like a magnet and are using the service
without parental permission. Now Britain is launching a
new inquiry into Jamster's
business practices. And lawyers in California filed a
class action lawsuit against the company. But Jamster isn't just some fly-by-night operation trying to milk as much money from kids as they can before regulators crack down. Jamster is
owned by VeriSign.
It's also a fair question whether it's worth paying 3 bucks for a few seconds of a song that sounds like a player piano, when it costs less than a buck to get the whole thing on the web (especially now that that crazy frog is a
single). Why can't you just pay the 99 cents or whatever to get the
song on your phone?
posted by kenneth at 8:37 AM PST - 77 comments
What are you doing for
July 4th? I just found out I'll be
working. Our spacecraft
Swift is going to be observing comet
Tempel1 at the time of the
Deep Impact encounter. (Previous discussed
here on MeFi 2 years ago.) We'll probably have
images and movies first, but the first images you'll see after the encounter will likely come from either
JPL or
Hubble. You can't have
Penn State scooping
NASA.
Oh well, at least we will have a
barbecue at work to celebrate. Our acting Mission Director during this time is a great bloke from
MSSL. It is oddly appropriate to be celebrating the
Fourth with a person from the
UK.
posted by Fat Guy at 8:08 AM PST - 10 comments
Google Earth: Zero Hour +1 If Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith was responsible for a productivity loss of $600 million (for people playing hooky), then the release of Google Earth
has to be responsible for at least $100m. So the next question is...what's next? When you think about all the Google Maps hacks, from
craigslist, to GasBuddy (offline),
Chicago Crimestats and
Transit Maps,
London Traffic Cams,
various sight seeing sites,
NYC Subway Stops, plus
integration with BlogWise,
Terraserver,
Host-IP (broken?),
Yahoo Traffic, and the
US Census, you might wonder what else could be integrated into gEarth?
Things I'm hoping for? How about integrating historical markers, daytrip resources,
factory tours,
social demographics (like Nationmaster), politics (
fundraising,
election results, registration,
polling place location,
election irregularities), mapped to do lists, real-time weather and traffic, things that aren't there anymore, custom
atlas creation, IMDB movie location shoots,
tighter integration with topographical maps,
WiFi access Points, a
News Attention Index,
shipwrecks,
Job Searches, and tighter integration with the
USGS.
As shown in the gEarth interface (left hand side, first one in "Layers"), their
online community is already working on using, improving, and customizing gEarth's new features, including
some updates (Caution, requires the integration of *.kml file, *.eta, or *.kmz files.)posted by rzklkng at 8:06 AM PST - 21 comments
June 28
Yahoo gets social. Yahoo's new search is designed around your contact list. Save a few bookmarks with some notes and the next time anyone within two degrees of you searches on that topic, they'll see your bookmarks above random search results. Oh, and
it's got tags too. Will this kill search engine gaming? What's Google going to do to compete, buy
delicious and incorporate that?
posted by mathowie at 9:43 PM PST - 28 comments
Canada Legalizes Same-Sex Marriage. "We are a nation of minorities. And in a nation of minorities, it is important that you don't cherry-pick rights," said Prime Minister Paul Martin. "A right is a right and that is what this vote tonight is all about."
posted by digaman at 6:41 PM PST - 143 comments
In the emotive world of
child abuse, Professor Sir Roy Meadow became a celebrity in the last 25 years. He described
Munchausen's Syndrome by proxy in which parents were said to have confabulated symptoms in their children in order to obtain medical treatment. Among child and health workers, Police and Social Workers, his eponymous law held that multiple childhood deaths in individual families were indicative of abuse and infanticide.
He was of course a popular forensic expert and his testimony resulted in murder convictions and removal of at-risk children from their families. But the Court of Appeal in UK has found that Prof. Meadow's statistical assertions and scientific
reasonings were themselves confabulated and there have been a number of convictions overturned. He is now
fighting for his professional reputation before the General Medical Council in London.
[More Inside]posted by peacay at 5:33 PM PST - 17 comments
The Invisible Library is a collection of books that only appear in other books. Within the library's catalog you will find imaginary books, pseudobiblia, artifictions, fabled tomes, libris phantastica, and all manner of books unwritten, unread, unpublished, and unfound.
posted by carter at 1:06 PM PST - 20 comments
Beach Billboards "5,000 of your beach sponsoring ads coupled with "Please Don't Litter" are impressed during early morning cleaning leaving the beach manicured with your message all over it".
Support-A-Beach Programs - Do you want to stroll on such
clean beaches?
posted by webmeta at 11:20 AM PST - 54 comments
Need a power source for your
electric car?
Be careful
building a nuclear power
plant in
your back yard, or you could be the center of the next suburban
superfund cleanup.
And it is perhaps best that he does not work on the ship's eight reactors, for EPA scientists worry that his previous exposure to radioactivity may have greatly cut short his life. All the radioactive materials he experimented with can enter the body through ingestion, inhalation, or skin contact and then deposit in the bones and organs, where they can cause a host of ailments, including cancer.
posted by b1tr0t at 11:18 AM PST - 19 comments
Bourgie (boo-zhee) Entertaining food blog (previous
mefi topic) Regularly updated and worth a look for those interested in food ;) Written from Berkeley but not region specific, sometimes recipes.
"what is a bourgie? First let's get the pronunciation down, boo-zhee, sort of rhymes with sue me. Actually, it doesn't rhyme at all. It's the truncated version of bourgeoisie, you remember middle school history, Marie Antoinette, the rising middle class. But to English speaking nations, assuming that is what you belong to, this is the class with which we aspire to belong. And with food, it's almost the intangible. That little bit of effort that brings the dreary to the divine."posted by wuakeen at 10:01 AM PST - 26 comments
The Penguin Classics Library Complete Collection .
"From Edwin A. Abbott to Emile Zola, the 1,082 titles in the Penguin Classics Complete Library total nearly half a million pages." The weight of the books is approximately 700 pounds. Amazon is offering free shipping! I wonder how big the box would be waiting at my door. (
via)
posted by clgregor at 9:32 AM PST - 32 comments
Patrick Henry, a conservative Christian college (New Yorker) with eighty-five percent of incoming freshman being homeschooled, is a vernable breeding ground for future Republicans. Take cloistered kids, teach them one message, and
Mr. Rove's clone army nears completion. The article is so quotable the whole thing must be read, as it fufills all our fears, stereotypes and snide comments
sounds (Common Dreams). It scares our brother's across the
pond, while the homeschooled community
gets all wet just thinking about it. This raises several questions, what kind of politicians will sheltered college students be and how do they have fun without binge drinking, cocaine and sex?
posted by geoff. at 9:24 AM PST - 96 comments
Norway's Ministry for Modernisation has declared for Open Source formats. Speaking at eNorge, the Norwegian Minister for Modernisation, Morten Andreas Meyer, has said that "proprietary formats will no longer be acceptable in communication between citizens and government". Although he did not mention Microsoft by name, he did say that this was the last time he would be streaming his speech using the current (WMP-based) technology.
The Ministry for Modernisation may sound quaint, but it was founded in 2004 with a
broad remit, and 200 employees, not a small number in a nation of less than 5 million souls. Although Norway's spending on IT may not be great compared to the US or China, as one of the wealthiest and most technologically developed nations on Earth (not to mention the emphasis on long-distance communications robustness created by a large country with terrible weather) it sets a precedent about what a tech-savvy first-world nation might do with Open Source, not because it cannot afford proprietary formats but because it does not want them. Microsoft, meanwhile, might be wondering why it bothered to translate Office into Sami. Will this be the first domino, or can it be written off as the actions of an oil-rich rogue state that will soon be brought back into the global consensus?
posted by tannhauser at 6:05 AM PST - 18 comments
The Aesthetics of Resistance. The first part of
Peter Weiss's 3-volume novel
Die Ästhetik des Widerstands (1975-81) has, after many delays, finally been
published in a Joachim Neugroschel’s English translation: a major, though largely-unheralded literary event. The book ‘stands as the most significant German novel published after The Tin Drum.’
[more inside]posted by misteraitch at 3:54 AM PST - 7 comments
June 27
Ram Ayala - owner of the famed Tacoland nightclub in beautiful downtown San Antonio, Texas - was
shot and
killed during a robbery at his bar last Thursday.
The world-famous club has been a favorite dive for bands and locals alike since 1969, forever immortalized in
the Dead Milkmen song
"Tacoland".
R.I.P.
posted by item at 8:04 PM PST - 3 comments
Zombie Dogs U.S. scientists have succeeded in reviving dogs after three hours of clinical death, paving the way for trials on humans within years.
posted by stevis at 8:04 PM PST - 39 comments
Afghan Children Burned Correspondent Jim Rupert and photographer Moises Saman of Newsday have just done a magnificent report explaining how and why Afghan women and children are increasingly getting burned by exploding kerosene lamps. One of the problems is that the black market is sometimes selling aviation fuel--far more combustible at lower temperatures--as regular kerosene; women and children, who usually have lamp lighting duties, are getting maimed when the lamps explode.
posted by etaoin at 4:01 PM PST - 12 comments
Meet the new watchers California's National Guard has formed a new unit:
Known as the Information Synchronization, Knowledge Management and Intelligence Fusion program, the project is part of an expanding nationwide effort to better integrate military intelligence into global anti-terrorism initiatives.
Although Guard officials said the new unit would not collect information on American citizens, top National Guard officials have already been involved in tracking at least one recent Mother's Day anti-war rally organized by families of slain American soldiers, according to e-mails obtained by the Mercury News.posted by amberglow at 1:37 PM PST - 74 comments
Was agriculture a mistake? Guns, Germs, and Steel author Jared Diamond asks this question. Originally published in 1987, it's still completely relevant today. I personally feel that
memes are the real culprit, and they are inevitable in any sizable social group with a common system of communication. Could agriculture be an ancient meme which has profoundly impacted the history of mankind?
posted by mullingitover at 1:04 PM PST - 116 comments
Paul Winchell the voice of Tigger passed away on June 24th at the age of 82. In addition to his famous voice, he also helped develop the artificial
heart , held over 30
patents, had a plan to feed the hungry with
tilapia, was a
ventriloquist and was the voice of
Gargamel. One day later the voice actor for
Piglet also passed away. With
Thurl Ravenscroft, the voice of Tony the Tiger, succumbing to prostate cancer in late May, it may be true that celebrities die in threes. Or does tiger voice actor
Jim Cummings have something to worry about?
posted by phirleh at 12:15 PM PST - 16 comments
Harlan Erskine Photography The catalogue for Walker Evans's exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, prepared by John Szarkowski in 1971, opened with a quotation from Walt Whitman:
"I do not doubt but the majesty and beauty of the world are latent in any iota of the world ...I do not doubt there is far more in trivialities, insects, vulgar persons, slaves, dwarfs, weeds, rejected refuse, than I have supposed..."
This passage has been quoted countless times in the context of photography with good reason. It allows us to sum up the difference between photographing flowers and photographing a milk bottle on a tenement fire escape. Erskine says he tends to gravitate to photographing the milk bottle and not the flower.
posted by Francesnash at 9:09 AM PST - 27 comments
The Supreme Court's Big Day
The court chose not to review the controversy surrounding
"reporter's privilege" in withholding the names of confidential sources; meaning reporters may continue to be jailed or fined for refusing to name sources in court.
In
Brand-X, the Court decided
6-3 that cable providers did not have to allow competitors to access their lines (the way DSL companies do). FCC opponents had been hopeful the Court would find the other way, opening new markets for competition and service options.
The Court ruled
one of two Ten Commandment displays are unconstitutional. The decalogue display on a courthouse wall in Kentucky was found
5-4 to be an unconstitutional endorsement of religion because it was serving a religious purpose. However, the Ten Commandments display on the grounds of Texas' state capitol were found to be constitutional.
The Court finally decided the
MGM v Grokster case. The Court found
unanimously that the file sharing service
can be held liable for the copyright infringement of their users.
posted by falconred at 7:59 AM PST - 56 comments
June 26
The Civic Action Network : Firefox meets Le Resistance ! Introduced at this year's
DemocracyFest 2005, CAN's idea of "Civic Action Teams" ( not too different from corporate "teams" ) - was made into a 50's era camp movie short. [Watch it:
Quicktime,
Windows Media Viewer appr. 10-11 MB]. The real goal : weaning liberals from their fractious ways and convincing them that small group teamwork can be effective, fun, and difficult to infiltrate.
"We admired the organizational strength of the right-wing and noted much of it was built on small, church-based structures.". Download their "Small Groups, Big Victories" as a
pdf ( 1.8 MB).
posted by troutfishing at 11:53 AM PST - 7 comments
Oh! that I were a T---d, a T---d,
Hid in this secret Place,
That I might see my Betsy's A----,
Though she sh--t me in my Face.
(Written under this in a Woman's Hand)
'Tis Pity but you had your Wish, E. W.
Boghouse (public toilet) poetry from 18th century london.
posted by Kickstart70 at 11:06 AM PST - 27 comments
As if living in NY wasn't hard enough, this poor guy seems to have gotten himself bitten by something nasty.
Usually, I hate the whole "blog as meta-fiction" thing, but this is saved by good writing and a nice sense of humor. It's a bit annoying that the archives make you start at the bottom, but it's still a fun read. Make sure to check the comments. I still can't decide if the teenagers are part of the fiction, or they thought it was real....
posted by lumpenprole at 8:08 AM PST - 15 comments
June 25
Iraq War Fatalities is a chart of US and coalition military fatalities that have occurred in the War in Iraq since the onset, mapped across the dimensions of time and space. It is an ongoing project that is updated regularly, and will continue to go on as long as the war does. The animation runs at ten frames per second--one frame for each day--and a single black dot indicates the geographic location that a US fatality occurred. Each dot starts as a white flash and a larger red dot that fades to black over the span of 30 frames/days, and then slowly fades to grey over the span of the entire war. Accompanying the visual representation is a soft 'tic' sound for each fatality, the volume of which increases relative to the number of fatalities that occurred simultaneously that day. More deaths in a smaller area produces visually deeper reds and audibly more pronounced 'tics.'
Iraq War Fatalities (via Bop News)posted by y2karl at 11:36 PM PST - 100 comments
Library Elf is a nifty free service that tracks all of your library books. It sends you emails and/or delivers RSS notifications when your books become due, shows you a list of all books you currently have out, and lets you know when that book you wanted is available. It supports multiple cards per account, so you can track all books for the whole household. Also, do everyone in your community a favor--
see if your library is listed and, if it isn't,
request that they add it.
posted by juggernautco at 6:47 PM PST - 35 comments
cli·ché :: 1 : a trite phrase or expression; also : the idea expressed by it; 2 : a hackneyed theme, characterization, or situation; 3 : something (as a menu item) that has become overly familiar or commonplace
posted by anastasiav at 12:49 PM PST - 42 comments
iPod competitors talk briefly about the iPod and how they think their products and design philosophies compare to it.
The comments of the CEO of Archos lives up to his country's "we are right and you are stupid" stereotype, saying,
"I do not share the opinion that Apple's design for the iPod is any good."posted by centerpunch at 6:14 AM PST - 66 comments
Shell Eco Marathon UK is coming up in England (6-7 july). It is a race not for the swift, but for those who can drive immense distances in super-efficient vehicles. Two years ago, the current world record of
10,706 MPG was set at one of these events. The lessons learned are useful in development in other fuel-efficient cars, such as the 100 MPG
Honda Insight. Interesting in these times of high oil prices, then, when considering that
despite tactical driving, normal petrol cars rarely get better than 45 MPG. Diesels are slightly better, as
illustrated on BBC Top Gear, where Clarkson drives an Audi A8 from London to Edinburgh and back on a single tank of diesel. That's 800 miles.
posted by SharQ at 5:19 AM PST - 13 comments
June 24
I waited to see if anyone else might post this. I saw it on
Future Feeder.
Photron's model
ultima APX-RS is a high speed video camera - 250,000 fps. Here's a
quick link to the gallery of video (flash interface).
apparently that's not the fastest. That appears to be Shimadzu’s
HyperVision HPV-1 at 1,000,000 fps. They also have a
gallery - but with only 3 mpg clips each a little more than 2.5 MB (
1,
2,
3).
posted by tvjunkie at 10:58 PM PST - 19 comments
POLITENESS, n. The most acceptable hypocrisy. On this day Ambrose Bierce was born in 1842 in Ohio. The author famous for
The Devil's Dictionary was a Civil War vet who despite being wounded in the head moved to San Francisco where he began a successful career in journalism, writing cynical columns, fighting publisher William Randolph Hearst, and ultimately serving the first blow upon the railroad industry whose political muscle had grown obscene. A decade later, the family man whose wife was from one of the most well-to-do families in the City, dissapeared probably in Mexico never to be seen or heard from again.
posted by tsarfan at 1:37 PM PST - 13 comments
Eprida: using biomass to produce hydrogen, reduce the emissions of coal-fired power plants, and suck CO2 out of the atmosphere, all while improving agricultural productivity. A new
virtuous cycle (flash)?
posted by alms at 11:18 AM PST - 9 comments
The Destruction of Medieval Boston - "Most people think of Boston as a dense city, and it is, especially by American standards. Today’s city is, however, a pale shadow of the medieval maze that was Boston before large-scale modern planning and spatial concepts entered the picture... Here is what Urban Renewal replaced."
posted by mrbula at 11:02 AM PST - 44 comments
Le Building (quicktime) is a minute-and-a-half film that was used as an opening for the 2005 Annecy International Animated Film Festival. Made by
students. Kids today. What can't they do? Making-of movie
here.
via cartoonbrew
posted by maryh at 9:27 AM PST - 13 comments
Oriana Fallaci back in the soup. She's being sued in Italy for defaming Islam in her last book,
The Rage and the Pride, and faces up to two years in prison.
The suit was brought by President of the Italian Muslim Union,
Sig. Adel Smith, a fellow who's activism even other Muslims sometimes
profess to find a bit much.)
And now, as if this makes things right, he's
gone to jail for defaming Catholicism.
Ms Fallaci's most recent book,
The Force of Reason, as radioactive as her last, is due out in America later this year.
The free speech in Europe thing is interesting, if crazy making, but does it distract us from the issues that dare not speak their names? Is she right, can East and West survive together? Or are we really best advised to
go our separate ways?
posted by IndigoJones at 4:18 AM PST - 15 comments
June 23
Nashville cops target gays: Since the fall of 2004, officers at the Hermitage Police Precinct have been quietly conducting a sting operation exclusively targeting gay men. Nobody there denies that.posted by mrgrimm at 4:07 PM PST - 40 comments
CENSORED! BY U.S. GOVERNMENT!
Changes to our photo policy mandated by the Bush Administration.
Always on the lookout for hot guys and ways to keep people from having fun, the U.S. Dept. of Justice is taking a break from prosecuting terrorists to do something it thinks is more important: restricting your right to view and share photos online.
posted by ericb at 12:03 PM PST - 74 comments
Southern Baptist Convention targets gays "[ The SBC ] passed a resolution urging parents and churches to investigate whether their community schools promote homosexuality....It encourages Southern Baptists to “investigate diligently the curricula, textbooks and programs in our community schools and to demand discontinuation of offensive material and programs. ....It added a commendation for “godly teachers and students who feel a call from God to take a stand for Christ at secular schools to be a light shining in the darkness.” ” ( via
Mainstream Baptist )posted by troutfishing at 11:14 AM PST - 51 comments
The first issue of the comic book adaptation of Neil Gaiman's
Neverwhere was released yesterday. Mr. Gaiman is credited as a "consultant." So far, the story is fairly intact, but it's the visual element that deviates from the novel--characters look nothing like they were described, and don't even resemble the
old BBC miniseries. And for someone accustomed to the phenomenal artwork seen in most of Gaiman's previous graphic novels (which included several adaptations of his short stories),
Neverwhere seems downright bland. If a feature film follows in the same vein as this adaptation, will Gaiman pull an Alan Moore and
refuse all royalties? (Go easy on me; it's my first post.)
posted by Saellys at 9:25 AM PST - 32 comments
Get 1 Minute. "When I wake up in the morning I go out and film a one
minute observation of the day."
Every day Johanna Marxer films for one minute and posts it. While you are there check out the chaotic
future.
posted by rachsumat at 8:48 AM PST - 8 comments
Cancer be damned, kids wanna tan “I know I might get cancer, but sometimes you want to look good no matter what. I’d rather look good that worry about what could happen to me–looks are more important to me sometimes than my health.” (Maclean’s Magazine)
Perhaps cancer is ‘natural selection’ at work trying to weed out all of societies undesirables from the gene pool. I for one think we could do without people this stupid.
posted by haasim at 8:31 AM PST - 72 comments
The Unicorn Orgy ...as I sculpted unicorns, one by one, things went their own way--the ghost orgy turned into a playful group of varied mythical creatures, nothing like the dream. Still, it started with unicorns. Most things do. (NSFW)posted by Robot Johnny at 8:11 AM PST - 27 comments
Immortalia: a website ‘dedicated to traditional bawdy songs, erotic toasts and other recitations.’ See, for example, the list of
bawdy songbooks, variously in text and PDF formats, beginning with
songs from a 1661 book of ‘Merry Drollery.’
Many songs are displayed alongside the appropriate sheet music, for example
I Used To Work In Chicago and
The Sexual Life of the Camel. There are numerous mp3s too, both samples and entire songs, many of which are
field recordings by the site’s proprietor,
John Mehlberg. Please note that the songs range from plain stupid to extremely offensive, that many pages have embedded audio, and that the site is confusingly-organised and may crash your browser. The site as a whole is
NSFW.
posted by misteraitch at 2:28 AM PST - 12 comments
June 22
In this paper, I will first consider the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as the latest examples of the new Western way of war, and analyse their casualties alongside those of previous campaigns in the Gulf and Kosovo. I shall identify the new type as “risk-transfer war,” a central feature of which is a “militarism of small massacres.” I shall argue that this new type thus offers only a partial answer to the problems, for the legitimacy of warfare, caused by the systematic targeting of civilians in earlier “degenerate war.” Despite a closer approximation to “just war” criteria, the application of which the new mode I shall discuss, inequalities of risk between Western military personnel and civilians in the zone of war revive the question of legitimacy in a new form. The paper then suggests that in our concern for relatively small numbers of civilian casualties, we may be applying to war standards from which it has historically been exempt. In this context, I shall conclude by proposing that the contradictions of the new Western way of war reinforce a 'historical pacifist' position towards the general legitimacy of warfare.Risk-transfer Militarism and the Legitimacy of War after IraqFrom JustWarTheory.com, which has its own blog.posted by y2karl at 8:45 PM PST - 18 comments
Ever have trouble visualizing how the solar system is put together, how the orbits work, how everything is positioned relative to everything else? This site helps you see how we think it all fits together.
posted by Fozzie at 5:49 PM PST - 16 comments
By the year 2050, nearly 80% of the earth’s population will reside in urban centers. An estimated 10
9 hectares of new land (about 20% more land than is represented by the country of Brazil) will be needed to grow enough food to feed them, if traditional farming practices continue as they are practiced today.
A Potential Solution:
farm vertically.
posted by signal at 4:51 PM PST - 36 comments
Triacetone Triperoxide (TATP), also known as acetone peroxide, is the explosive of choice for Palestinian suicide bombers since it's easily made using commonly available materials. It was also part of the mixture in Richard Reid's
shoe bomb. It contains no nitrogen and is thus undetectable by commonly used methods such as
NQR, though an effort to
cheaply
detect it shows promise. What I find most interesting is the way it
detonates; unlike most high explosives, it doesn't combust, but instead
decomposes rapidly to form acetone and ozone.
posted by vira at 4:19 PM PST - 60 comments
Elvis Post-It Note Mosaic "My boss decided that we needed to do something fun and creative in one of our conference rooms - the one we use for brainstorming and internal meetings - and together we came up with the idea of filling the wall with post-it notes in a multicolored mosaic of (and i’m not sure whose idea this was)
Elvis."
posted by ColdChef at 3:43 PM PST - 15 comments
Gel.TV A bunch of crazy japanese guys keep howling and screaming and throwing jelly around and then there are sneakers and then... I really have no idea what this is all about, but it's really funny. Warning: This site seems to load pretty slow sometimes. And: Try the knobs of the tv-set and these little Icons below. *Really* weird.
posted by heimkonsole at 12:12 PM PST - 23 comments
Foundcity is a social mapping tool for creating a personalized map of your life on-the-fly. Using your mobile phone, you "tag" or capture photos throughout the day, label them with any words you want, and send them to your map. At home, you access and customize your map, which you can share with friends, keep private, or publish openly.
As a visitor to the Foundcity site, you view a map of all tags and connect with the people and places that share your interests. By plugging in to the network of Foundcity users, you learn what others value in the city as you surf their hotspots. By publishing your own tags, you share what you know about your city. posted by srboisvert at 11:22 AM PST - 14 comments
A Long Look Ahead: NGO’s, Networks, and Future Social Evolution The information revolution favors the rise of network forms of organization, so much so that a coming age of networks will transform how societies are structured and interact. ...In the years ahead, the [environmental] movement's strength (and sometimes its weakness) will continue to be asserted through social network-based wars against unresponsive, misbehaving, or misguided corporate and governmental actors. …Ageing contentions that “the government” or “the market” is the solution to environmental or other particular public policy issues will give way to new ideas that “the network” is the optimal solution. The rise of network form of organization and strategy will drive long-range social evolution in radical new directions.
David Ronfelt’s explorations of
information and society are based on a
framework of societal evolution involving tribes, institutions, markets and networks.
Modes of conflict with participants networked (as opposed to hierarchically structured) are called
netwars. Many of the recent
domestic and
international terrorism conflicts are being fought as netwars. The civil society approach to politics and diplomacy in the network age may hinge on
noopolitik, a strategy of information.
posted by warbaby at 10:55 AM PST - 8 comments
"In those days, there wasn't a lot of talk about gay priests. People didn't want to believe it." On Dec. 4, 1982, a deeply suntanned man, about 40 years old, walked into the Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Boise, Idaho, and readied himself for confession. As he waited, the man swallowed a cyanide capsule. A few minutes later, he was dead. He had no identification, and a note in his pocket said only that the $1,900 he carried should be used for his burial, with any remainder donated to the church. The note was signed with what turned out to be a false name. To this day, no one has been able to identify the man, nor to determine why he had come to the church to absolve himself of his sins. On the answers to that mystery may hang the fate of
a small, quiet, meticulous man who now lives in South Austin, and who
spent 20 years in a Texas prison for a murder he says he did not commit, but which investigators believe may be connected to the dead man at the Boise Sacred Heart Catholic Church. More inside.
posted by matteo at 8:59 AM PST - 25 comments
They hate Flickr for it's Freedom. An
ISP (and government controlled monopoly) in the
United Arab Emirates has decided to ban access to Flickr for it's citizens, apparently due to the complaints of a couple of
UAE expats in the
UK and
Canada. Of course, said blockage won't apply to them. Most interestingly, they blame the rest of the world's non-flesh-fearing photographers as opposed to their ISP (and by proxy their own oppressive government.) Now Flickr joins
Skype, AtomFilms, Friendster, AOL, and anything from Israels top-level domain, as
outlawed content and services in the UAE (related study
here). Well, if they don't care, why should we? Via
linkfilter.
posted by rzklkng at 7:33 AM PST - 28 comments
Built at
Lockheed's secret
Skunk Works facility for use by the
Central Intelligence Agency, and in service since 1950s, the
U2 spy plane has seen service all over the world (or, at the very least,
70,000 feet above it). It has shown us what both our friends and enemies were doing,
helping us avert wars, and in at least one occasion, almost
causing one itself. Today, just over 45 years since
Francis Gary Powers fell from the sky into the Soviet Union, the United States Air Force has announced from Baghdad that yet another Dragon Lady has
fallen from the sky in an undisclosed location in Southwestern Asia.
posted by NotMyselfRightNow at 6:55 AM PST - 37 comments
Who Pagan Bullies Are and What Makes Them Tick "Bullying is a compulsive need to displace aggression and is achieved by the expression of inadequacy (social, personal, interpersonal, behavioural, professional) by projection of that inadequacy onto others through control and subjugation (criticism, exclusion, isolation etc)."
posted by nickyskye at 5:20 AM PST - 29 comments
June 21
There are actually three different kinds of zombies. All of them are like humans in some ways, and all of them are lacking something crucial (something different in each case).
Hollywood zombies. These are found in zombie B-movies...
Haitian zombies. These are found in the voodoo (or vodou) tradition in Haiti...
Philosophical zombies. These are found in philosophical articles on consciousness...Zombies on the webposted by y2karl at 8:20 PM PST - 127 comments
Buy the 7am News ticker service! It appears that the long running 7am News Ticker is up for sale. It was supposed to cease its service yesterday (June 20) but it's still up today. I've used it for many years.
I like that it hits the Guardian and the BBC newsfeeds, plus you can add one of your own for free.
It's a cool little service. I hope someone rescues it.
posted by misangela at 6:45 PM PST - 7 comments
In just over two hours,
Cosmos 1, the world's first experimental "solar sail" spacecraft will launch, and reportedly
will be visible "from nearly everywhere on its surface at one time or another".
posted by theonetruebix at 10:36 AM PST - 19 comments
"I am so lonely." Search Google using
that phrase and you may end up
here. Some of the posts in this thread really resonate, "I feel so much better that I am not the only one that typed in "I am lonely" on google. How pathetic that I have nothing better to do. It is amazing that I can be so extremely successful at work and so lonely at home."
posted by VelvetHellvis at 9:27 AM PST - 51 comments
Watch the bike disintegrate. The Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter published the story of a bicycle that they abandoned on a bridge in Stockholm. The author then took pictures of the bike during its lifecycle that spanned from September 27, 2004 to June 13, 2005. Shockwave flash move, set to Vivaldi's
Four Seasons. Brought a tear to my eye. Via
Bike Log.
posted by fixedgear at 9:22 AM PST - 38 comments
Stations Of The Cross, a piece on "faith-based" news outlets from the May/June
Columbia Journalism Review: "In recent months, evangelical broadcasters have dedicated program after program to bemoaning 'judicial tyranny,' and urging audiences to agitate for the 'nuclear option' — changing Senate rules so Democrats can no longer filibuster and thereby block nominees they oppose....All the while, the dizzying blend of God, news, and politics that he [Pat Robertson] has crafted and honed was bouncing off satellites, winding through thousands of cable systems, rippling over the airwaves, and glowing on television screens across America." [
Via HighSignal]
posted by jenleigh at 6:05 AM PST - 26 comments
When I was Garbage by Allison Crews at age 17, teen mother advocate and activist.
"I had become garbage, worthy only to sit in my isolated desk and cry to myself and throw up in a dirty bathroom stall. I was a pregnant teenage girl.
" Allison died recently aged 22. She was active in
girl-mom.com, an online and in life support and education network for young mothers.
"To radically accept and defend a woman's right to choose, we must acknowledge the multiple ways that women come to make reproductive choices. By marginalizing teenage mothers, even within the feminist community, we are failing to recognize the realities of countless women and their children." There's a
report of her funeral and a
website has been set up to collect memories for Allison's 7 year old son. {Allison's
LJ}
All of this comes via
BitchPhD - her entry is also worth reading.
(previous semi-related MeFi)posted by peacay at 5:40 AM PST - 50 comments
The London Underground is home to some of the most interesting,
weird and fun adverts, which have been tailored to the fact that they have huge posters that passengers are often looking at for minutes at a time while waiting. In Copywriting goes Underground, they challenged ad agencies to write an ad which had at least 50 words in it. Some are crap, but some are pretty innovative -
check them out.
posted by adrianhon at 5:17 AM PST - 15 comments
Nun crucified at Romanian exorcism. A Romanian nun has died after being bound to a cross, gagged and left alone for three days in a cold room in a convent, Romanian police have said.
"I don't understand why journalists are making such a fuss about this. Exorcism is a common practice in the heart of the Romanian Orthodox church and my methods are not at all unknown to other priests," Father Daniel added.
UPDATE: She was
buried yesterday and the Principal monk has been charged with false imprisonment leading to death.
posted by cbjg at 3:57 AM PST - 48 comments
June 20
How Powerful Is Productivity? TCS interviews Former Carter Staffer (and Democrat) William Lewis, who makes some interesting remarks about worker productivity:
There were many disparaging comments made in the US and maybe even stronger abroad, (and especially in Japan) about how the US labor force was getting what it deserved because it was lazy, uneducated and maybe even dumb. And of course, the Japanese then showed -- the really capable, competent Japanese manufacturing companies -- showed that was wrong by coming here, building their own factories, managing American labor and taking a lot of other local inputs and coming within five percent of reproducing their home country productivity.posted by Kwantsar at 10:18 PM PST - 11 comments
Knowmore.org is a Wiki repository of corporate information. Still in its infancy, it aims to applaud eco-friendly
companies and document the failings of
others. Funded almost entirely by hip-hopper
Sage Francis of Non-Prophets and Anticon fame, it is
no surprise Clear Channel is currently featured on the front page. Hopefully the Wiki format will keep it somewhat balanced as it grows.
posted by sophist at 8:08 PM PST - 12 comments
The Logic of Diversity "A new book,
The Wisdom of Crowds [
..:] by
The New Yorker columnist James Surowiecki, has recently popularized the idea that groups can, in some ways, be smarter than their members, which is superficially similar to
Page's results. While Surowiecki gives many examples of what one might call collective cognition, where groups out-perform isolated individuals, he really has only one explanation for this phenomenon, based on one of his examples: jelly beans [
...] averaging together many independent, unbiased guesses gives a result that is probably closer to the truth than any one guess. While true — it's the
central limit theorem of statistics — it's far from being the only way in which
diversity can be beneficial in problem solving."
(Three-Toed Sloth)posted by kliuless at 6:03 PM PST - 6 comments
"A shocking discovery has been made deep within the text of
Moby Dick. The great codes researcher
Michael Drosnin, who pioneered the art of predicting assassinations using
Equidistant Letter Sequences, is himself encoded in a famous book. And directly across his name appears the text 'Him to have been killed'! Yes, folks, using the method that Drosnin himself uses, and the text that he himself chose as a challenge to his
critics, we find that Drosnin himself will be murdered in a grotesque manner."
posted by brundlefly at 4:46 PM PST - 23 comments
A throw down? [Warning link to extremely graphic images of dead bodies, some nudity] Did US troops plant weapons on young boys after killing the boys? Currently, being discussed
here, but it might be missed without coming here to the front page. Via
insomnia_ljposted by caddis at 4:34 PM PST - 197 comments
Lemon-Red's Mix Series - "Each month, I ask one of my favorite DJs
to contribute a 30-40 minute mix of whatever they're feeling at the time... Get yourself over to lemon-red.org/mix and download the exclusive DJ/rupture mix,
Low Income Tomorrowland, in beautiful high-quality stereo mp3 format."
Chris Lemon-Red starts of his new free music mix series with this 31:46 (29 mb) track.
posted by dobbs at 2:49 PM PST - 15 comments
Wal-Mart Institutes "availability requirement" Imagine your boss (a guy named 'Knuckles') comes to you and tells you you need to be available to work anytime between 7:00am and 11:00pm, 7 days a week. Oh, and if you can't be available, you'll be fired. This should be expected in a slave labour camp, but couldn't exist in the pride of Corporate America, could it?
Updated during preview: Whoops, perhaps the bad press caused a
flip-flop.posted by gwenzel at 1:06 PM PST - 79 comments
Learn the ketchup lesson CEOs... A London secretary turned the tables on a tightarse boss by humiliating him in front of his
peers. Everyone has a laugh but is this guy just a scrooge or a workplace
psychopath. It may seem like a big jump but a lack of empathy, narcissism, no grip on reality sounds like he's a little out of it to me. Why else would you send a demand like that to your secretary?
posted by ClanvidHorse at 12:33 PM PST - 50 comments
WAITRESS
(challenging him)
You want me to hold the chicken.
BOBBY
Yeah. I want you to hold it between
your knees.
Lorna Thayer, who died June 4 at 85 after 40 years before the camera, was remembered for one brief appearance: the waitress on "
Five Easy Pieces." In that
memorable moment in the 1970 film, as the voice of authority opposite Jack Nicholson`s rebellious Bobby Dupea, a classical pianist turned oil rigger, the middle-aged Thayer proved to be a formidable foil in what has come to be known as
the "chicken salad scene."posted by matteo at 11:02 AM PST - 21 comments
GoDaddy.com condones torture. One of the most important assets we are using to protect Americans both at home and abroad is our military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba -- “Gitmo.”
(Blog posting from founder Bob Parson's highlighted on the front page of GoDaddy.com) [update:
recanted]
posted by mr.curmudgeon at 9:08 AM PST - 154 comments
Book-readin' bad guys This makes me safer already, knowing the feds are spending their time checking on who's reading about Osama bin Laden. Just &*##$@! brilliant work.
Law enforcement officials have made at least 200 formal and informal inquiries to libraries for information on reading material and other internal matters since October 2001, according to a new study that adds grist to the growing debate in Congress over the government's counterterrorism powers.
In some cases, agents used subpoenas or other formal demands to obtain information like lists of users checking out a book on Osama bin Laden.
(snip)posted by etaoin at 7:06 AM PST - 68 comments
June 19
Never use a debit card to pay at the pump: "Each day millions of Americans use their debit card at gas stations to "pay at the pump." What you probably do not know is gas stations have the right to overcharge you a certain amount to ensure they get their money. Each gas station decides how much to overcharge and hold on your account. Some put a $75 or $100 hold on the account while others only hold $5 or $10. But, these stations also decide how long to hold that money. Some hold the money for up to three days. . ." How is this even legal? Am I the last schmuck in the U.S. to find out about this? I just found out that Sam's Club (for example) charges $50 and deposits your change
three days later.
posted by spock at 10:19 PM PST - 94 comments
For the sake of your sanity, for five minutes this week forget the memos, the autopsies, the celebrity verdicts, and the rest. Go outside and look at the full moon, which will hang in the sky at its lowest point in 18 years over the next three nights, says NASA, creating the
"summer moon illusion." If you're a US resident, calculate your local moonrise time
here.
posted by digaman at 7:32 PM PST - 26 comments
U.S. GP starts and ends in farce
In what could very well be the last Formula One race in the USA, the United States Grand Prix turned to farce yesterday when the vast majority of the grid (14 cars), shod with Michelin tyres, aborted their race after the formation lap and pulled into their garages, leaving the six cars shod with Bridgestone tyres to start and finish the race.
posted by tomcosgrave at 5:14 PM PST - 105 comments
Sacco & Vanzetti. Two anarchists executed in Massachusetts in 1927. Their guilt was and is widely disputed.
'Sacco and Vanzetti were executed on August 23, 1927, a date that became a watershed in twentieth-century American history. It became the last of a long train of events that had driven any sense of utopian vision out of American life. The workings of American democracy now seemed to many Americans as flawed and unjust as many of the older societies of the world, no longer embodying any bright ideal, but once again serving the interests of the rich and the powerful. '
posted by plep at 11:22 AM PST - 67 comments
What Dads Don't Need for Father's Day: "A team of psychologists headed by Dr. Toni Zimmerman from Colorado State University analyzed the top-selling parenting books. Using a feminist perspective, they trawled the books for hidden gender messages. In findings published earlier this year, they concluded that the two mega-best sellers, John Gray's
Children Are from Heaven and Laura Schlessinger's
Parenthood by Proxy: Don't Have Them If You Won't Raise Them are filled with stereotypes, formulaic advice and information that does not conform to research findings."
Both books scored low in a feminist analysis of best-selling parental advice books. Kathleen Trigiani also wrote
a series of essays on John Gray entitled "Out of the Cave: Exploring Gray's Anatomy".
posted by jenleigh at 11:15 AM PST - 49 comments
Do we need management consultancies? A new
book written by "David Craig" - a nom-de-plume for an insider with 20 years of consultancy experience.
"What distressed me and many other consultants was how the greed of directors and partners put me into situations where we cheated,lied to and defrauded clients while our bosses became enormously rich through various tax avoidance schemes."Of course
John Birt (BBC) and
other consultants tend to disagree.
The UK goverment spend on consultants is now
£1.9 Billion per annum (about $10 Million/day.)
posted by Lanark at 10:06 AM PST - 17 comments
The Doctor of Music. "
A General History of Music From the Earliest Ages to the Present Period, Volume IV", written by the English musician and historian Dr.
Charles Burney (1726-1814) was published in 1789. Its first volume, completed in 1776, was the first History of music ever published. The fourth volume is of particular interest as it discusses the state of music in Burney's own lifetime. He observed the music, and musicians that he wrote about first hand. In fact, Burney was close friends with composers such as Haydn and Handel, he even played violin in Handel's orchestra, and lived with Dr. Thomas Arne for two years in London, as his apprentice. The fourth volume, to Dr. Charles Burney, was the most interesting as he preferred the music of the current time, finding no interest in "
antiquarianism." In the main link, the entire volume -- in facsimile -- is available to readers. Burney also translated
Pietro Metastasio's
Memoirs. Also:
The Burney Collection of Newspapers at the British Library. More inside.
posted by matteo at 9:37 AM PST - 6 comments
June 18
Burn Centers A Hot Potato The San Antonio burn center is possibly the busiest in the nation. It's not because of poor building design in the local area. Are troop fatalities in Iraq more substantial than we are told?
posted by mk1gti at 10:51 PM PST - 22 comments
Tokyo Times is an insightful, well-written blog dedicated to Japanese culture, books, current affairs, news, sex, random images and observations of life, as seen through the eyes of an English expat living in Tokyo.
posted by darkstar at 8:12 PM PST - 13 comments
Get your game on with Kaneva. Billing itself as
"The world’s first digital entertainment marketplace!" Kaneva is a beta launch of a concept that maybe interesting to gamers, media creators, and consumers as well. An Atlanta based company, Kaneva.com aims to be an exchange/market portal for game and media creators, who can directly create Massively Multi-player Online (MMO) games using the Kaneva Framework, and for digital media creators seeking distribution. The business model is innovative, and has been described as
"a kind of multi-media flickr (pre-fame) meets eBay on steroids, or an online marketplace for folks hyped on digital entertainment. An Intertainment Hub. A platform and host." The company recently presented its concept at the June meeting of the International Game Developers Association, and back in April
Computer Gaming Magazine had an article. During the beta test phase, the site's tools are free to all comers, and there is already a limited amount of content available for those who just want to play something new.
posted by paulsc at 7:12 PM PST - 8 comments
There are approximately 81,000 Robert Smiths residing in the United States. Bob Smith USA appeared at the AFI SilverDOCS film festival yesterday to a sold out crowd.
Bob Smith (New York City) dons his Satan costume to preach the virtues of atheism; Bob Smith (Pennsylvania) puts on his red nose and teaches as part of a Christian clown ministry; Bob Smith (Syracuse) spends his retirement transforming his yard into an oasis of junk; and Bob Smith (Texas) runs for county sheriff.
posted by clgregor at 2:18 PM PST - 19 comments
Unleash the Resistance. Karen Kwiatowski worked in the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans prior to the Iraqi invasion. She is now calling on us to resist its government, in the name of liberty and in the spirit of the Iraqi insurgents. Posted on
From the Wilderness, which offers insight on Kwiatowski's essay from other radicals.
posted by Candide at 11:32 AM PST - 53 comments
A New Alpine Melt Theory: "The Alpine glaciers are shrinking, that much we know. But new research suggests that in the time of the Roman Empire, they were smaller than today. And 7,000 years ago they probably weren't around at all." Fascinating report from Der Spiegal about the "Green Alps" theory.
This page has a small graphic showing the Alps today and how they might have looked in a warmer period. Another article
here. Maybe
Otzi forgot to pack his sunscreen?
posted by LarryC at 7:49 AM PST - 9 comments
June 17
The aim of
Fada'íat No Border Temporary Media Lab is to remain as a permanent public media interface, part of the counter hegemonic cyborg that we imagine at the gate of Mediterranean sea.
A bunch of media-activists, members of social organizations, artists, video/film-makers, programmers and architects from Europe and North Africa, establish a WiFi connection across the Straits of Gibraltar and do stuff. And there's a
java interface of some sort.
posted by signal at 7:37 PM PST - 1 comments
Slow 'em down. "Traffic calming is the combination of mainly physical measures that reduce the negative effects of motor vehicle use, alter driver behavior and improve conditions for non-motorized street users." If you are a frequent pedestrian user of a residential street with high traffic volumes, or speeds, you may be interested in
strategies and
data from various community projects to alter traffic flow.
posted by paulsc at 6:09 PM PST - 40 comments
"
Tempe decided to leave Tibet inorder to continue his religious training. He had been in Dharamsala about a month and was actually planning to begin a life-long solitary retreat the day after this photo was taken. He said his retreat was not to escape from the world but to transform his mind so he could serve more effectively in future lifetimes."
Check out Phil Borges'
Tibetan photos.
posted by JohnR at 5:26 PM PST - 7 comments
After decades of advocacy for Canadian women's right to choose
(including opening several abortion clinics decades before they were legal, and spending 10 months in jail for having performed an abortion, and his case was the groundbreaking 1988 Supreme Court decsion that threw out all the criminal law related to abortion in Canada) prominent Canadian abortion activist Dr. Henry Morgentaler recieved an honourary degree this week from the University of Western Ontario.
In his own words.
posted by raedyn at 4:17 PM PST - 16 comments
The Backstroke of the West! Screen shots from a street-purchased dvd of Revenge of the Sith. Apparently translated into Chinese and back again for subtitles.
He big in nothing important in good elephant... Palpatine talking about Obi Wan.posted by jasper411 at 2:56 PM PST - 17 comments
Where are the areas in the United States with highest marijuana use? Where are the areas with the lowest? A different kind of red versus blue. But wait, there's
more, especially if you would prefer to be binge drinking to wash away those lonesome blues. And a
list of information broken down by drug, if your fix is more obscure.
posted by nervousfritz at 2:11 PM PST - 48 comments
Spots Before His Eyes? At last, the Paper of Record publishes a story about something I've known and experienced for years. This retired math professor believes that New York is "...a parking paradise." Want a free parking spot, just believe you'll find one, and you will.
When I lived in the SF area and had to go to The City for business, I would visualize parking and something
always turned up.
How about you? How do you conjure the parking Goddess?
posted by dbmcd at 11:17 AM PST - 38 comments
Censorship is bad, but
this is F*****ing hysterical. And by "F*****ing", I of course mean "Friday posting" (Quicktime movie. Extremely sfw yet, oddly, not)
posted by haricotvert at 8:51 AM PST - 27 comments
The Bumpy Yet Finger-tingling Road to God Arriving in
17 volumes, and taking up
76 inches of shelf space, who needs the
mp3? These nice folk print and distribute Bibles in braille.
(Please use this link for good and not evil. Abuse this service and go directly to Hell. Do not pass Purgatory. Go directly to Hell.)posted by Sully at 7:21 AM PST - 21 comments
Assia Djebar the
Algerian novelist and filmmaker was elected to fill the only vacancy at the
Académie Française, the august French institution that watches over the French language. Ms. Djebar, 68, is the first North African to join the 40-member academy.
Most interesting in light of recent discussions here on Dutch/Muslim relations. Comments from those who've read her books or know her from her work at
LSU or elsewhere would no doubt be appreciated
posted by IndigoJones at 5:51 AM PST - 12 comments
June 16
Michael Jackson's 'innocence' = Nelson Mandela, the fall of the Berlin Wall and more. What, no Moon landing?
(warning! Flash, bad loud music, delusions of grandeur and possibly the scariest Michael Jackson link ever: His own website.)posted by loquacious at 10:06 PM PST - 43 comments
Outcasts in Their Own Villages "More than one million young women with the condition are scattered throughout the so-called fistula belt that stretches across the southern hem of the Sahara from Eritrea to Mali. Because of their severe incontinence and smell, many have been ostracized by their families and villages and live by themselves or with fellow fistula sufferers. They are the lepers of the desert." [
also see]
posted by kliuless at 9:12 PM PST - 15 comments
The Global Housing Price Bubble is bursting. Prices are already declining in Australia and Britain. The Economist has another
story that outlines how a global bursting of this bubble could be deleterious to the world's economy. The bubble is bigger than the stock market bubble of the late 90s. Will there be a smooth landing or will spending collapse when it cannot be funded on housing price gains?
posted by sien at 5:42 PM PST - 52 comments
10 Questions for
Brian McLaren, pastor of
Cedar Ridge Community Church, contributor to the
Emergent Village:
"[T]his power of consumerism, the power of money, and the power of the desire for more, and the idea that we live for the economy — I think this has an enormously subversive and subtle power.
A quick example: Right now, I'm involved with a group of people who are very concerned about the situation in Darfur in the Western Sudan. I knew there was a genocide going on there twelve months ago, and four hundred thousand more people have died since then. I think I just assumed somebody would do something about it. And it’s just stunning to me about how little can get done. Meanwhile, Christians are arguing about what seems to me to be incredibly pathetic, trivial things compared to 400 thousand people dying, when, if they can get so much stuff out there about their national agenda, if they were to push this to the front, four hundred thousand lives could have been saved."
Where to look for other postmodern Christians:
Sojourners,
RELEVANT.
posted by heatherann at 4:08 PM PST - 23 comments
Why one man steals music. Either a wonderfully scathing indictment of a music industry that doesn't care about its customers, or a pathetic attempt at justifying illegal activities, depending on your perspective. (Looks like Glenn Mcdonald didn't
close up shop after all.) [
Via.]
posted by dersins at 2:25 PM PST - 49 comments
NextGen Macromedia Flash Tool "Zorn" to Run on Eclipse • "Macromedia's announcement that their next generation enterprise Flash development tool, code-named Zorn, will be built on top of Eclipse, is a watershed moment both for Macromedia and for the open source movement. Macromedia's choice of Eclipse speaks volumes about the impact of open source on commercial software development -- and about Macromedia's commitment to making Flash into an essential platform for next-generation internet applications." </glavin>
posted by dhoyt at 2:15 PM PST - 16 comments
San Carlo of the Symphony. Il Maestro
Carlo Maria Giulini, orchestra conductor who passed away Tuesday at 91 "had an almost uncanny ability to transform the sound of an orchestra, any orchestra, into a dark and intense glow, which became his trademark over the years". "We have lost one of the greatest musicians of our time," says
Esa-Pekka Salonen (.pdf), music director of the LA Philharmonic. Giulini has been called "the last humanist", a gentle man beloved by his orchestras, so humble in his approach to music that, always feeling the necessity to "fathom" each new work, it wasn't until the 1960s that he finally felt ready to conduct Bach, or the symphonies of Mozart and Beethoven. This from a man who, at the beginning of his career (as a viola player) had played under Richard Strauss. "I had the great privilege to be a member of an orchestra," Giulini said in 1982. "
I still belong to the body of the orchestra. When I hear the phrase, 'The orchestra is an instrument,' I get mad. It's a group of human beings who play instruments." More inside.
posted by matteo at 12:35 PM PST - 11 comments
You remember Hunter, right? Sure you do.
So does Robert Love, who had the distinct if difficult privilege of editing him.
What Hunter is justly celebrated for, among his other virtues, is his authorial voice, his truest creation, as powerful and unique a voice as exists in American letters. But this instrument, as his editors knew, existed only on paper. Those poor souls who booked him for public speaking gigs found that out soon enough. But Hunter’s authorial voice was perhaps at its purest and most potent in the memos and marked-up manuscript pages that came through the wires late at night and were waiting for us in neat little piles in the fax machine[...] Asked for a touch more detail in this sentence from the Elko piece “For many hours I tossed and turned . . . ,” he came back with “like a crack baby in a cold hallway.”
Enjoy. (Via
Incoming Signals.)
posted by languagehat at 11:24 AM PST - 14 comments
Charlie Stross releases his new book Accelerando as a Creative Commons e-book, thereby buying in to the open source idea that offering up one's intellectual property (under certain circumstances) will result in greater sales of the physical object, not fewer (see:
Cory Doctorow). In a time where promotional opportunities for new and "mid-list" authors seem to be continually shrinking, is offering up a complete work the current equivalent of the author interview or newspaper puff piece? Or is it simply a recognition that here in the 21st century
anything can be pirated -- better to offer up your work in good will (and in a form where you have some control), and hope some of the kids will realize that behind the free content is a guy who needs to eat? And what happens if/when all books become digital books?
posted by jscalzi at 9:38 AM PST - 24 comments
A "stunning" link between an ingredient in childhood vaccines and autism leads to a cover-up conspiracy. "But instead of taking immediate steps to alert the public and rid the vaccine supply of thimerosal, the officials and executives at Simpsonwood spent most of the next two days discussing how to cover up the damaging data. According to transcripts obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, many at the meeting were concerned about how the damaging revelations about thimerosal would affect the vaccine industry's bottom line." An
earlier post (concerned only with fish) asked, "Got mercury?" Why,
yes you do - and fish is the least of your problems. Interestingly, hints of this story surfaced in the media in the
Spring/Summer of 2005. There may also be a link between thimerosal and Alzheimer's, A.D.D., and Asperger's Syndrome.
A thimerosal resource guide. Maybe we'll take notice this time around?
posted by spock at 7:45 AM PST - 137 comments
Elmo Strikes Back? Investigators at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting are examining payments to two Republican lobbyists that were not disclosed to the corporation's board, and whether Mr. Tomlinson had the authority to approve the payments.
PreviousFilter.
posted by R. Mutt at 6:25 AM PST - 4 comments
June 15
Gallery 41 A jazz photography collection covering the past quarter-century and over 150 artists. Hear musical excerpts and highlights of recorded conversations as you explore.
posted by LinusMines at 9:26 PM PST - 8 comments
Ulysses speaks! Background: The Conservative
Nation of Ulysses (conservative refers to a reserved manner of dressing and acting) is a
violent and
rejectionist group operating out of the Washington, D.C. area who seek to "wreak their vision on the world" through the medium of
music. Despite fiery condemnation by both liberals and the right, and a virulent campaign waged by the media and by parents' groups, their aggressive campaign seems undaunted, and schoolyards now more than ever chime with the chant: "Ulysses, Ulysses, little flower, beloved by all the youth."
posted by underer at 2:53 PM PST - 24 comments
Australia Looks to US to help Hunt Dr. Death Maybe its because he was
living in Portland, Oregon in a million dollar mansion while an Australian inquiry charged Jayant Patel, dubbed Dr. Death by the Australian public, with murder, negligence and fraud. One Aboriginal patient developed gangrene after he left an amputation untreated for
several weeks after the operation. [More inside]
posted by fenriq at 12:07 PM PST - 8 comments
A distinction between “old” and “new” wars is vital. “Old wars” are wars between states where the aim is the military capture of territory and the decisive encounter is battle between armed forces. “New wars”, in contrast, take place in the context of failing states. They are wars fought by networks of state and non-state actors, where battles are rare and violence is directed mainly against civilians, and which are characterised by a new type of political economy that combines extremist politics and criminality... I argue in this article that the United States viewed its invasion of Iraq as an updated version of “old war” that made use of new technology. The US failure to understand the reality on the ground in Iraq and the tendency to impose its own view of what war should be like is immensely dangerous and carries the risk of being self-perpetuating. It does not have to be this way. Iraq: the wrong war - Mary Kaldor writes of what was happening in pre-invasion Iraq, what happened thereafter and what the alternatives were. Well, there is always
Exit strategy: Civil war. And on that, note this:
Kurdish Officials Sanction Abductions in Kirkuk--a city from which, I am afraid, we will hear more and more as time goes by.
posted by y2karl at 8:17 AM PST - 20 comments
How do you attack the monster that is hype/commersialism/advertising, a monster that turns every rebellion into a profitable fashion? The preferred answer seems to be: with a practical joke. Practical jokes as media criticism is a current trend in art and documentary movies. An early example is Michael Moore's
TV Nation. But there's always the bigger prank. Two Czech filmmakers made a huge advertising campaign for the opening of a new supermarket which didn't exist. 3,000 people showed up on an empty field.
This is their story.
Thanks, dabitch!posted by Termite at 7:47 AM PST - 39 comments
Roll your own air-conditioning. I'm a student, with limited funds and a cheap house without air conditioning. To avoid dying this summer, I've built a primitive air conditioner. It's a basic heat pump, using water as the medium. You'll probably need to fiddle a bit with the dimensions of the supplies based on your resources and preferences.
Not sure I'd do this but hey, when you're sweltering hot, anything is worth a try.
posted by KevinSkomsvold at 7:14 AM PST - 48 comments
The Dutch-Muslim Culture War
The backlash against Hirsi Ali has astonished and disappointed many Dutch feminists, who continue to count themselves among her biggest fans. Margreet Fogteloo, editor of the weekly De Groene Amsterdammer, said flatly that [historian Geert] Mak is crazy. "People like him feel guilty because they were closing their eyes for such a long time to what was going on," she said. In what appears to be a Europe-wide pattern, some feminists are aligning themselves with the anti-immigrant right against their former multiculturalist allies on the left. Joining them in this exodus to the right are gay activists, who blame Muslim immigrants for the rising number of attacks on gay couples. (Via PoliticalTheory.info)posted by jenleigh at 5:43 AM PST - 52 comments
Imagine rocking down to the shops on this thing. The Wheelsurf is a motorised monocycle powered by a chainsaw engine. Designed by Brazilian engineer Tito Lucas Ott, the rider sits inside the turning wheel, and steers by leaning the whole machine into corners – hence 'surfing'. The wheelsurfer takes practice to master and you need to be relatively well coordinated. Weight distribution, body balancing and throttle all play a part in a successful ride.
See images. Via
Beyond Tomorrow.
posted by sjvilla79 at 4:49 AM PST - 37 comments
Legend has it that
Charles Dellschau (1830-1923) was the
draftsman for the secret
Sonora Aero Club, a collective of 60 or so mostly German immigrants who reportedly constructed
dirigible like aircraft in California in the 1850's. One club member was said to have discovered
suppe -- the magic antigravity fuel alleged to have lifted the craft.
There were sightings of these 'airships', tenuously linked back to the club, up to
the end of the 20th century.
Dellschau, described variously as butcher, inventor, civil war spy, scientist and
America's first visionary artist, retired at age 70 in Texas and
spent the last 2 decades of his life as a recluse,
producing mixed media art works that
record the craft and workings of the fabled Sonora Aero Club.
They are accompanied by cryptic symbols, newsprint about aircraft and detailed notebooks and were salvaged from the garbage in 1967.
His artworks were selling for $15,000 each 5 years ago. A would-be author and long-time sleuth believes he has unlocked the mysteries of
Dellschau's cryptic accoutrements and may be
publishing a book on the legends this year.
viaposted by peacay at 2:16 AM PST - 11 comments
June 14
That's Mathematics! Warning, contains bad camera work, worse editing, a rather complicated homework problem, a few mathematical in-jokes, illegible chalkboard writing, and a 13 minute performance by Tom Lehrer.
posted by eriko at 7:37 PM PST - 29 comments
A bill to repeal the 22nd Amendment was introduced in the House a few months ago, though it seemed that no one else in the world noticed. Interestingly enough, the bill was sponsored by
Rep. Steny Hoyer, the House
Democratic Whip.
But it gets better: the bill was cosponsored by
Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, who's made the news recently for
storming out of committee hearings,
interfering with
Rep. John Conyers's investigation of the Downing Street Memo, and, of course, loudly proclaiming his hatred of the number
42023.
Oh, and in case you've forgotten, the
22nd Amendment is the one that limits the president to two terms.
posted by greatgefilte at 7:31 PM PST - 83 comments
Polar Inertia is an online photojournal devoted to exploring and documenting contemporary nomadism, urban architectural typology, and the oft-hid-in-plain-sight infrastructure of contemporary existence.
posted by Chrischris at 7:23 PM PST - 6 comments
"We're going to hit houses, dude," (NYT Reg. ),
Alone in their 50-seat commercial jet, the two young pilots decided to see what it could do...A few minutes later, though, both engines were dead, and the pilots were struggling to glide to an emergency landing at an airport in Jefferson City, Mo. (or the non-registration Jefferson City NewsTribune
version, or the NTSB
site)
posted by R. Mutt at 1:45 PM PST - 48 comments
"This planet answers an ancient question," said team leader Geoffrey Marcy, professor of astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley. "Over 2,000 years ago, the Greek philosophers Aristotle and Epicurus argued about whether there were other Earth-like planets. Now, for the first time,
we have evidence for a rocky planet around a normal star."
The star,
Gliese 876, visible in the night sky, lies only 15 light-years away.
posted by vacapinta at 1:44 PM PST - 19 comments
Little visual miracles. For more than forty years that most American of photographers,
Chevalier in the Order of Arts and Letters Lee Friedlander, has recorded
modern American urban life -- with its
jumble of
people,
signs,
buildings, and
cars, and
television sets. He likes to turn
a common blunder of amateurs -- photographing something nearby
with one's back to the sun -- into a
leitmotif.
His shadow plays the role of alter ego, sticking to the back of a woman's fur collar, clinging to a lamppost as a parade of drum majorettes passes by, reclining like a stuffed doll on a chair. Clever jigsaw puzzles, his pictures frequently reveal themselves to be
laconic, austere poems to what
Friedlander has termed "
the American social landscape',' meaning mostly ordinary places and affairs. "Friedlander,"
an exhibition of more than 480 photographs and 25 books covering decades of work, runs at MoMA through Aug. 29, before traveling to Europe until 2007. More inside.
posted by matteo at 11:41 AM PST - 8 comments
A new flag for a bold new us - The Christian Flag,
"The time is right for this dynamic concept. It will be effective when Christians for God and country boldly identify with Christ and each other by flying the U.S. National Christian Flag right under Old Glory to represent Christ as our foundation and Christian heritage."posted by sourbrew at 10:33 AM PST - 78 comments
Spray-on Mud - So you own a big 4x4, and you feel a bit stupid that you only use it to take the children to school. You want people to think you're a bit country - that you need 6 tonnes of car to get you from A to B because you like to take it off-road every so often. You need
Spray-on Mud apparently.
posted by The Ultimate Olympian at 9:15 AM PST - 101 comments
The rareified land of op-ed is the latest section of the big-city daily to see upheaval. A few weeks back, outgoing NYT ombudsman Dan Okrent and professorial columnist Paul Krugman waged an
all-out snarkfest over the accuracy of Krugman's statistical references. As Okrent intimates, should op-ed columnists be subject to the same fact-checking standards as reporters? And how much should the views of one columnist be taken to represent the views of the paper? The
Los Angeles Times is shaking up its model by
allowing editorial board members to openly dissent from op-ed columns, effectively turning philosophical pronouncements into policy debates. But the most interesting thing to come out of the redesign, to be launched next week, is
wikitorials, the op-ed that Anyone Can Edit. Disaster in the making, or the new face of journalistic opinion?
posted by Saucy Intruder at 8:19 AM PST - 40 comments
The Art of Loving.
What is the problem with modern man? In 1956, psychologist Erich Fromm questioned Western society's ability to foster love:
"If we speak about love in contemporary Western culture, we mean to ask whether the social structure of Western civilization and the spirit resulting from it are conductive to the development of love. To raise the question is to answer it in the negative."
Almost 50 years later, what can we say about our culture now? Valentine's Day spending totaled
$13 billion this year, but it seems modern man has not yet found love. Instead he fills it with "entertainment" and forms of pseudo-love which ultimately alienate him from others.
Media from dawn to dusk: Media consumption averages ten hours per person per day in America. What's more, Americans are
“media multi-tasking”: using different media at the same time. Ritalin Sales have soared. Americans carry an average
$8,562 in debt on their credit cards.
Hummers.
Bling bling.
Crunk juice.
Hooking up.
Baby mamas.
Tweens.
Obesity.
Binge Drinking.
Depression.
posted by MarkO at 7:44 AM PST - 61 comments
Comic Alert is a free, elegantly designed service that provides RSS feeds for just about every comic with a web presence, allowing you to track updates from the newsreader of your choice. And since it links directly to artists' webpages without copying their images, it neatly sidesteps any pesky copyright issues. Those who prefer a dedicated comic viewing application might want to check out
Comictastic or
iComic, although some comic creators would
prefer you didn't. (
Via)
posted by yankeefog at 7:32 AM PST - 7 comments
Not Ready for
Their Close-Up.
Quote: "On the brighter side, TV will lose a certain amount of its power over us - I can promise you that.
HD won't do advertisements quite the same way. Ask any Catholic priest, or Jung, or Scott McLoud about the power of icons, and they'll explain it the same way. Too much detail, and they lose their ability to induce our identification."
posted by gsb at 4:33 AM PST - 41 comments
June 13
The Dark Side Is The Best Sauce I'm not sure if the cartoonist has their own personal LiveJournal, but the one for the comic is rather adorable and funny. It's just a handful of strips thus far, and they're terribly spoilery for Star Wars: Episode III. But still worth a quick look.
posted by FunkyHelix at 8:33 PM PST - 22 comments
Exploring enron -- A breathtaking web of conspiratorial email messages. How often did Jeff Skilling email Ken Lay? How often were those emails about company business? Internal alliances? The company's allegiance? The California energy crisis? Who else was talking about it? Who wasn't?
Temptingly complete with software download and MySQL tables for your own tinfoil hat explorations.
posted by boo_radley at 4:32 PM PST - 10 comments
For the first time since the 1980s, the CDC estimates that there are more than 1 million people living with HIV in the United States. [MSNBC link, but the article is actually good.] This is good news and bad, it means more people are living with the disease with the help of
Highly Active Anti-Retroviral Therapy (HAART), of which there are just over 20 drugs in 4 different classes. The CDC has recently launched a
new prevention initiative targeted at people with the disease, rather than at convincing HIV- people to avoid contracting it. Central to the new effort are increased HIV surveillance methods, which basically boil down to increased testing (in the case of pregnant mothers, testing they would have to opt out of) and reporting of HIV positive testees. This despite the fact that there is plenty of evidence that HIV discrimination is
alive and
well.
The other discouraging news is that despite the success of HAART for controlling HIV, the adverse effects are significant, including much higher rates of
heart attack and cardiac disease, increased incidence of
diabetes and insulin resistance,
lipodystrophy and very noticeable changes to how people look,
lactic acidosis, as well as the more standard (and less toxic) problems of nausea and diarrhea. Up to 50% of people on HAART will experience these problems.
posted by OmieWise at 3:22 PM PST - 80 comments
The Pioneer Anomaly. Something's up in deep space: the
Pioneer spacecraft, now out of contact, have shown an unexplained Doppler drift, indicating sunward acceleration, effectively decelerating the probes cumulatively. The effect may be be nongravitational, and could be explained by any number of factors: an undiscovered twist in Newtonian physics, localized cosmological contraction issues, or just venting gas. Other deep space probes may have experienced the anomaly as well, and
a new mission could explore the puzzle; but for now, all we have is past Pioneer data, and that's stored on old
9 track tape which can only be read by antique readers. What's to be done? (Also see
Pioneer Odyssey for a nostalgic romp through those early days of deep space exploration. And NASA, bring back the
original Pioneer home page plz, kthx.)
posted by brownpau at 12:00 PM PST - 21 comments
Porridge. Lots of Porridge. Not the (allegedly) classic
BBC TV comedy, but the stuff you make from oats and that's fed generations of Scots. And now you too can attempt to win the Golden Spurtle and be crowned the World Porridge Making Champion. Some light relief for a Monday..
posted by Nugget at 11:14 AM PST - 10 comments
Building a Left Wing CNN Toronto
documentary film maker Paul Jay has a vision -- to build the first global independent news network. If successful,
Independent World Television would be fully funded by its viewers, independent of corporate or government funding and commercial advertising. Here's the pitch: "If half a million people in the entire world contribute just $50, IWTnews will secure the $25 million it needs to fund its first year of broadcasting, in 2007."
Will this model work?
posted by btwillig at 10:23 AM PST - 69 comments
"One lawyer said that his client... has told him that he was beaten regularly in his early days at Guantánamo, hanged by his wrists for hours at a time and that an interrogator pressed a burning cigarette into his arm." The age of this "client" when he was detained?
14 years old. The reply of the camp's public affairs officer: "They don't come with birth certificates."
posted by digaman at 9:55 AM PST - 36 comments
Pledge Bank is an interesting project. Promise to do something provided others will do the same. This could help to get small enterprises started, but might work for national politics as well. For example, the
No 2 ID campaign is making
use of it.
posted by mleonard at 4:39 AM PST - 6 comments
June 12
How the US tortured the 20th hijacker (and others). According to the logbook, which covers al-Qahtani's interrogations from November 2002 to January 2003, the Time article reports that daily interviews began at 4 a.m. and sometimes continued until midnight. Was the torture effective?
A senior Pentagon official told Time the Defense Department wasn't sure how effective such treatment was. At times, the logbook notes that al-Qahtani was more cooperative when interrogators eased up on him, according to the Time report.posted by caddis at 11:34 PM PST - 140 comments
"When they emerged after 50 yards, the landscape no longer looked anything like the southern edge of the Amazon forest.
It looked like Iowa."
In Mato Grosso, Brazil the rainforest is vanishing. And all because of soybeans and beef.
"If we were an aggressive tribe, we would have killed the land owners already," said Tupxi, one of the canoeists, who estimated his age at 77. "
good Washpost story...
posted by punkbitch at 1:29 PM PST - 27 comments
Pink Floyd to reunite! The rumours have been proven correct. In a last minute decision, Roger, Dave, Richard, and Nick have put their differences aside and will re-form in support of Sir Bob's
Live8 concerts. They have made this
Floyd fan's year!
posted by lazywhinerkid at 8:43 AM PST - 131 comments
June 11
The Physics Evolution - a flash based history from the Institute of Physics in London. Clickable maps with timelines and short biographies of the main figures. It's a bit superficial, but a lot of fun.
posted by thatwhichfalls at 9:43 PM PST - 4 comments
Europe's oldest known civilization discovered. Archaeologists have discovered an ancient civilization of temple builders that existed in central Europe between 4800BC and 4600BC -- over 2000 years before Egypt. They constructed over 150
geometrically, astronomically, and spiritually aligned temples (translated) out of earth and wood, that
had diameters of up to a half a mile. They were built by a people who lived in villages centered around communal longhouses of up to 150 feet in length. Their civilization raised large herds of animals, gathered grain with primitive sickles, made tools out of of stone, bone, and wood, manufactured
pottery decorated with geometric designs (.pdf), and created
small clay figurines of humans and animals.
Only one male figurine has been found so far (.pdf) -- the rest have been of women with large breasts -- fertility symbols -- which suggests a fertility-based spirituality, and possibly a matriarchal society.
posted by insomnia_lj at 8:41 PM PST - 77 comments
A fire supreme. An all-too brief series of photographs demonstrates the disastrous after-effects of a coal train with an overheated wheel bearing stopping on a wooden bridge to investigate the cause of the smoke...
posted by jonson at 7:55 PM PST - 37 comments
Go to the "Wok-Star" sauce homepage, click "Watch the TV Spot" and you see what at first glance is one of those whacky Asian TV Ads, with whooshing graphics, over-acting, and the yelling of slogans.
The thing is, it's a fake. The ad was made in Australia, for an English-speaking market, as a
parody of whacky asian ads. The performers are Vietnamese-Australians* speaking Vietnamese in an exaggerated way.
Some people think it's insulting, some people think it's hilarious, I'm just puzzled. Are the makers assuming we'll think it's a real ad, imported from china, untranslated? Or do they think we're all so culturally literate that we're in on the gag?.
* the main guy is award-winning actor, writer and Extreme Violinist, Hung Le.
posted by AmbroseChapel at 7:12 PM PST - 52 comments
Coffee Starbucks and the Revolution PDF The Tatler. First post: April 12, 1709.
...wherein I shall from time to time report and consider all matters of what kind soever that shall occur to me, and publish such my advices and reflections every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday in the week for the convenience of the post. I have also resolved to have something which may be of entertainment to the fair sex...posted by Tlogmer at 6:11 PM PST - 10 comments
Monster Magazine Covers! Quote: "Vintage pulp magazines will be offensive to many people today. They were issued before the current climate of political correctness overtook the country. Themes of many magazines (or at least the covers) are racially insensitive, show violence to women, unsafe and/or promiscuous sex, and negative stereotyping of gays, lesbians, Asians, and almost any group you can imagine."
posted by mischief at 4:49 PM PST - 13 comments
The Secret Paul Lynde Agenda
The American Family Association
warns us about a TV special that blows the lid off the Homosexual Agenda: "TV Land's 'Happy Face' On Homosexuality Masks Tragic Lifestyle."
"Ed Vitagliano, a media researcher for the
American Family Association, says although 'Tickled Pink' does not promote the latest political issues of the pro-homosexual movement, the one-hour special does appear to have some disturbing objectives. One thing the show seems to do, he observes, is to hint that Hollywood has somehow 'outsmarted' mainstream culture for decades by 'sneaking" homosexual characters and motifs into television programs.' "
posted by ericb at 6:24 AM PST - 65 comments
Mitch Albom is a Terrible Writer "Morrie" has a keen dislike for the sports columnist (Detroit Free Press)/author ("Tuesdays with Morrie"/radio talk show host. And he expresses it -- sometimes quite angrily, sometimes wittily, always hilariously........
posted by ringie78 at 6:19 AM PST - 18 comments
June 10
The announcement that Apple was moving to Intel hardware was the first move in Intel's take-over of Apple, according to
Robert Cringely, giving Intel a platform to compete head-to-head with Microsoft.
"This scenario works well for everyone except Microsoft. If Intel was able to own the Mac OS and make it available to all the OEMs, it could break the back of Microsoft. And Apple/Intel could easily extend this to the consumer electronics world. How much would it cost Intel to buy Apple? Not much." More.
posted by bobbyelliott at 3:51 PM PST - 57 comments
Is a "virtual" Philly even better than the real thing? Well,
GeoSim Systems thinks so. Except for the aroma of freshly-grilled cheesesteak, at least. Their "Virtual Philadelphia" is the most detailed urban imaging system I've seen yet, and you can read about the monumental process of turning photographic images (taken from both aircraft and street-level) into this incredible rendering in a February 17 NY
Times article (reg req). And - as expected - Google wants to get in on the action and
do the same thing in San Francisco.
via BBposted by luriete at 3:11 PM PST - 29 comments
"If I do come out straight I'll be so mentally unstable and depressed it wont matter.. I'll be back in therapy again. This is not good--" Teenage boy
comes out to parents, sent to straight camp.
Refuge, located in Memphis, TN, is a division of
Love in Action, Intl, a program created to treat "addictions" like homosexuality. Run by
John Smid, parents can ship their kids there in hopes that particular brand of Jesus will cure The Gay. The program's rules are . . .
interesting. Kids may be placed in virtual isolation at any time (not allowed to communicate with others except in writing, and only when "absolutely necessary"), must be accompanied by a parent at all times when off-campus (even to the restroom), and undergo a "False Image" search every morning to ensure they are not carrying any articles that may interfere with their "affirmed gender identity". Not that we're supposed to know any of this--the
rules are sent to the parents with the note to keep them from the child.
The boy is inside the program now. A protest is being held outside the facility--
Cherry Blossom Special covers it
here.
posted by schroedinger at 12:25 PM PST - 194 comments
Bunnock - a game of skill, accuracy... and horse bones. Register your team for the world championship!
posted by Wolfdog at 8:38 AM PST - 6 comments
Wired for Books HUNDREDS of uncut, behind-the-scenes AUDIO (!) interviews (scroll down) by Don Swain. Douglas Adams, William Burroughs, Joyce Carol Oates, Henny Youngman... to name just a few.
posted by R. Mutt at 4:58 AM PST - 14 comments
Biojewellery. Thought titanium was 'a bit different' for your wedding rings? Have you considered a ring made from your own bioengineered bone tissue?* Apparently the instigators are "...interested in how technological innovation is used by human needs and desire rather than the pure functionality of the innovation." A short report
here.
*May require extraction of wisdom teethposted by biffa at 4:16 AM PST - 8 comments
Algorithmic composition is a method of composing music using basic alogrithm models to compose.
Musicalgorithms is a program designed to allow composers a tool to explore algorithmic composition and lay people the opportunity to create music based on non-musical models.
posted by DeepFriedTwinkies at 12:17 AM PST - 4 comments
June 9
George Bush sings (MP3 contains swearing) and shows how he imagines the world should be. Now that John Ashcroft has left the administration it was clearly time for someone else to step up and lead the vocals. There's more info at
Wax Audio.
posted by sien at 9:30 PM PST - 27 comments
A dental miracle?! The Japanese have invented a synthetic crystaline polymer which not only safely repairs small cavities, but can also be used to strengthen the enamel of healthy teeth. The
before and after pictures are impressive. The catch?! Having it applied to your teeth whitens them at the same time.
posted by insomnia_lj at 3:57 PM PST - 46 comments
MoneyChimp - a "coherent, logical, useful and accessible financial education resource".
posted by daksya at 3:28 PM PST - 4 comments
The BBC showed a programme last night about a secretary who stole from her employer. Nothing much unusual about that. But the number of deceptions and the amount of money were unusual.
Joyti De-Laurey was a PA at
Goldman Sachs. Over a couple of years,
she forged thousands of checks worth millions of pounds. The really interesting part of the programme was the insight into the lives of Goldman Sach's executives. They thought nothing of running up a $30,000 wine bill. Joyti was the person responsible for paying the bills so she had a unique insight into the incredible life-style of these people. She claimed that she was treated like a slave. She was on-call 24/7 (in spite of having a husband and child) and was responsible for organising the business and personal lives of her bosses - including covering for her boss when
he sneaked away in the middle of the day for sexual liaisons. De-Laurey started small, signing cheques for small amounts of money to pay for her debts. But she grew in confidence when she got away with signing hundreds of cheques - for increasing amounts of money. Eventually her audacity and greed got the better of her and she was caught cashing a cheque for $3½M. De_Laurey was given a
seven year prison sentence.
It's hard to believe that you could fail to spot millions of dollars going missing but as a former director of Golden Sachs said: "When you're making £60m a year, a few million missing is like a regular person not remembering the last penny on their account."
posted by bobbyelliott at 2:09 PM PST - 51 comments
BrainMeta "is a community site that was established for the purpose of accelerating the development of neuroscience through web-based initiatives, which include the development, implementation and support of a wide range of neuroinformatics tools, services, and databases. BrainMeta also functions as an internet hub for fostering communication between individuals involved with the neurosciences."
[Via Mind Hacks.]posted by homunculus at 1:28 PM PST - 5 comments
A cuddly new species!
Severe neuro-trauma wound is plainly visible, as is the foreign tentacle, which was found to be grasping the mid-brain area.
posted by kenko at 12:27 PM PST - 68 comments
Republican Congressman Pete Sessions from Texas
introduced a bill that would make all free, public, municipal WiFi illegal. Sessions, as it turns out, is a
big fat recipient of SBC funds. Why stop there? Should we privatize highways as well? How about subways? Glad the liberal media is all over this one. Here are a couple of links: Original post on
DailyKos, An informative
editorial from the Fort Wayne paper
posted by mountainmambo at 11:22 AM PST - 48 comments
"Oh shit!
It's Baby Man," says one cashier, a Hispanic kid who's heard the legend but has never been a witness to the spectacle. "It's like Sasquatch!" he says. "You don't believe it exists until you see it." And even then, you're likely to think Baby Man is the star of a hidden-camera TV show, a singing telegram, or maybe on his way to a costume party. But Windsor (AGE 54) is
for real. This is no spoof.
posted by miss lynnster at 11:22 AM PST - 59 comments
The Illuminated Middle Ages database presents several hundred recently digitized illuminated texts from French national library collections.This web site gives access to the entire database. Only a portion of the full collection has been translated into English for the web site, but visitors may also view the French-language galleries in the site, where a dozen texts from each of the ten themes are presented daily. You are sure to enjoy this collection of breathtaking texts dating from the year 500 through the 1400s.
posted by hortense at 8:35 AM PST - 19 comments
Just a reminder: Living as we do in a highly politicized world, I think its worth reminding ourselves of what a past master at manipulating such a world had to say for himself
posted by donfactor at 4:22 AM PST - 68 comments
Did any one ask the elephants what they think about
creationism? I guess this addition will just complete a diorama that already includes
Ganesh and the symbol of the Republican party.
posted by pkingdesign at 12:30 AM PST - 44 comments
June 8
Face Analyzer Just upload a picture of your face and get feedback on what ethnicity you most resemble and a physiognomatic breakdown of your personality.
posted by BuddhaInABucket at 9:36 PM PST - 73 comments
Raid on Deerfield: The Many Stories of 1704 (Flash) In the pre-dawn hours of February 29, 1704, a force of about 300 French and Native allies launched a daring raid on the English settlement of Deerfield, Massachusetts, situated in the Pocumtuck homeland. . .Was this dramatic pre-dawn assault in contested lands an unprovoked, brutal attack on an innocent village of English settlers? Was it a justified military action against a stockaded settlement in a Native homeland? Or was it something else?
posted by mlis at 8:34 PM PST - 7 comments
Death sentence for online gamer SHANGHAI: A Shanghai online gamer who murdered another player because of a dispute over a "cyber-weapon" was given the death sentence with a two-year reprieve yesterday at Shanghai No 2 Intermediate People's Court.
Qiu Chengwei's death penalty will be commuted to life in prison if he behaves well in jail, and no other crimes relating to him are uncovered.
Not to condone the murder, but is cyber theft or isn't it? Acording to the DMCA if I download a song or movie from cyberspace I am commiting a crime. Yet if someone steals your item in a cyberworld and sells it for real world cash your left without recourse. I feel China had a chance to establish new law and balked.
(more inside)posted by Trik at 2:34 PM PST - 124 comments
Inside a tornado. It's a technological first. A well-placed probe fitted with 7 video cameras—6 with a 60-degree field-of-view designed to achieve a full 360-degree field-of-view and one pointing upward—captures footage inside a tornado, providing visual data on ground wind speeds where the storm does the greatest damage. And Tim Samaras with his team of storm chasers are there to make it happen.posted by KevinSkomsvold at 11:28 AM PST - 25 comments
O'Reilly's Cruise Cancelled Due to Lack of Interest
Fox News star Bill O'Reilly's week-long Caribbean cruise with a theme of "The Battle for American Values" has been cancelled because reservations fell "well short" of the anticipated 800 passengers. The cruise would have included a symposion on "How to Combat the ACLU."
It seems that
Al Franken was one of the few who'd booked a reservation. That would have been fun to watch.
posted by fenriq at 10:40 AM PST - 39 comments
LossofPrivacyFilter: 1) Patriot Act Expansion Bill Approved in Secret , which now provides a new ‘administrative subpoena’ authority (that) would let the FBI write and approve its own search orders for intelligence investigations, without prior judicial approval.
...Flying in the face of the Fourth Amendment, this power would let agents seize personal records from medical facilities, libraries, hotels, gun dealers, banks and any other businesses without any specific facts connecting those records to any criminal activity or a foreign agent. ...,
and from the Justice Department: 2)
Most health care employees can't be prosecuted for stealing personal data, and finally, 3)
Citibank admits losing 4 million customer files. These 3 examples all within the past few days--any others i missed?
posted by amberglow at 8:36 AM PST - 31 comments
Andy Warhol Time Capsule 21 - Warhol got in the habit of keeping a cardboard box by his desk and stuffing it with daily correspondence, gifts, clippings, notes, photos, and ephemera. He would seal and date each box, filling more than 600 over time and leaving art historians and fans a rich
legacy. This multimedia exhibit highlights contents from 15 of these boxes. (flash)
via La Petite Claudineposted by madamjujujive at 8:27 AM PST - 12 comments
The Political Terror Scale (link opens an Excel sheet). There have been
several posts about human rights recently and the Political Terror Scale ties them all together. The PTS is an ongoing project which assigns a number from 1-5 (5 is bad) to a country based on its level of political terror (usually human rights abuses committed by the government) based on the yearly Amnesty and U.S. State Department reports according to
these criteria (link opens a Word document). Because the PTS was started in 1980, one of its most useful aspects is that it allows changes in political terror to be tracked over time. For example, a nearly worldwide spike in human rights abuses in the years following the 9/11 attacks can be clearly visualized using the information provided by the PTS.
posted by Crushinator at 6:38 AM PST - 7 comments
The Maze. From the annals of the Internet: Before there was
The Riddle, there was this
"virtual space in the shape of a book" based on the quaintly illustrated
Maze by Christopher Manson. Find the shortest path in and out of the maze, from Room 1 to Room 45 (the center) and back. At Room 45 is another riddle, whose answer is concealed somewhere in that shortest path, which, if you are clever, you can make in only 16 steps.
"Anything in this space might be a clue. Not all clues are necessarily trustworthy."posted by Lush at 12:10 AM PST - 25 comments
June 7
I first saw Chel White's Photocopy Cha Cha (
mpg excerpt - can't find whole thing online) in 1996 and I thought it was fantastic. In 2002 I saw Virgil Widrich's
Copy Shop, which impressed me even more. Yesterday, thanks to
Kottke, I saw Wildrich's phenomenal
Fast Film. Wow. From Channel 4's page on the film: "Director Virgil Widrich captured stills from ... 300 movies, and made over 65,000 photocopies of these, then folded them into a variety of shapes and animated them." {the two VW films are unfortunately in Real format but definitely worth putting up with the format for}
posted by dobbs at 11:34 PM PST - 8 comments
Urban Golf. I normally get bored quickly with golf games, but the urban twist makes this shockwave game pretty entertaining. (Just ignore the Jaguar logo and the occasional product placement.)
posted by brain_drain at 10:54 PM PST - 15 comments
The John Quincy Wolf Folklore Collection from the University of Arkansas. "John Quincy Wolf began collecting Ozark ballads while an undergraduate at Arkansas (now Lyon) college. His first serious professional interest in Ozark folksongs dates from his attendance at the Old Settler's folk music festival at Blanchard Springs in 1941. He and his wife Bess began to seek out folksingers in the White River and surrounding areas, often placing advertisements in local newspapers for people who knew 'old songs'. Wolf recorded hundreds of Ozark folksingers between 1952 and 1963, including Almeda Riddle, Neal Morris, Oscar and Ollie Gilbert, and Jimmy Driftwood. [...] The
Wolf Folksong Collection at Lyon College contains hundreds of recordings." Site contains the field recordings of
Ozark Folksongs, as well as sections for
Memphis Blues,
Sacred Harp Singing, and
more. The folk song recordings are indexed by
song title and
singer. Music files play in Windows Media or Real.
posted by jokeefe at 8:42 PM PST - 10 comments
Not quite ready to settle down? I know how you feel. But then that's only
temporary, right?
StatsCan releases the results of a
study showing that Canadians who delay marriage are less likely to marry at all. Attitude appears to be key, with Francophones being the most likely to say "
Ça ne fait rien".
posted by dreamsign at 6:52 PM PST - 19 comments
Beyond the science fair. Behind a veneer of shoddy web-design lies a brilliant idea: getting grade- and high-school students to do actual scientific work. For example, "10 students from New York, Texas and Virginia joined three World War II veterans and a retired railroader from Virginia" and discovered a way to make walls
self-sterilize. The guy behind it is
Carl Vermeulen.
posted by greatgefilte at 3:37 PM PST - 6 comments
How "USA" became a dirty word "Small c" conservative Ferdinand Mount, for the UK Telegraph, describes the rise of anti-american sentiment among British soccer fans:
"And what 30,000 Arsenal supporters were chanting for two hours....was 'USA! USA!' This was apparently the most offensive chant they could think of....How deeply peculiar it is that the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave should now be the rudest word in the vast lexicon of football insults."posted by troutfishing at 11:46 AM PST - 57 comments
The 2005
Trafficking in Persons Report by the US State Department has been released. It reviews 150 countries.
The introduction provides a broad overview of the report with anecdotal stories, legislation imperatives, methodology, definitions, specific country reviews and suggested remedies. It is a commendable document and well worth perusing.
UN page. viaposted by peacay at 9:45 AM PST - 2 comments
How Marvel convinced us to cut up our comics “The program destroyed the value of countless Marvel comics of this era, and missing value stamps are the bane of serious Bronze Age collectors.”
¶ I was ten years old and I collected all 100 Series A
Marvel Value Stamps, so I totally grooved on this remarkably comprehensive site. Ironically, the coolest artifacts are the
empty collector’s books, which show off the artwork best, in glorius black & white & red, without the crappy colour printing of the era.
posted by KS at 5:33 AM PST - 5 comments
The "ransom" model. "It works like this: They described the basic gist of the game on their web site, and set a ransom of $600 for it. If they received $600 in donations by September 2005, they would finish creating the game -- and then release it on their site, for anyone to download for free. (If they didn't get the full $600 in time, they would donate whatever money they'd received to a homeless shelter.)" And it worked! Here's some additional links described in the comments:
The Street Performer Protocol and
Fundable.org.
posted by gsb at 4:27 AM PST - 15 comments
You've probably heard of Frankie Wilde, the DJ from Ibiza. He shot to fame at a young age, and lived a life of cocaine, models, cocaine, all night raves, more cocaine and music so loud you could feel it in your bones. And then some more cocaine. Admittedly,
he had a face only
a mother could love,
but the music he made is legendary. He hung out with the likes of
Pete Tong and was a frequent guest on his
BBC Radio One show. But all too fast, the lifestyle caught up to him. He completely lost his hearing, the drugs took control of his life, and he was quickly dropped by his label,
Motor City Records. But more than a year later, during one single legendary night in Ibiza, Frankie Wilde, "The Deaf DJ," proved that he could still amaze a crowd,
even if he couldn't hear their reaction. And then, the DJ who had gone from the high point of his career to the low point of his career to the new high point of his career again,
simply disappeared off the face of the earth. Perhaps you've
bought some of his CDs, or read some of the books written about his life, or maybe you've just read his Wikipedia entry and
nothing else. But, if you know nothing else about him at all,
at the very least,
see the movie about his life.
It will tell you everything you need to know.
posted by NotMyselfRightNow at 4:05 AM PST - 35 comments
Photographs by Parkeharrison 'demonstrates an ability to distill and redress complex environmental problems and failed technological systems with resourcefulness and dark humor.'
posted by dhruva at 12:47 AM PST - 5 comments
June 6
At a time when several Arab regimes are at least feinting toward political reform, Jordan is goose-stepping backward. Freedom of assembly has been restricted, and the threshold for dissent has been ratcheted down as political prisoners accumulate and oppositionists are rattled out of bed for interrogation. Journalists have been intimidated or bribed into spying on colleagues and sources. Street demonstrations have been all but eliminated by laws that require protesters to carry permits that are prohibitively difficult to obtain... Corruption, defiantly uninhibited compared with the low-key looting that percolated under the late King Hussein, has soared. And although diplomats tend to absolve Abdullah of wrongdoing--he is deceived, they imply, by courtiers scheming behind his back--a growing number of Jordanians believe that the 43-year-old monarch is not only aware of the plundering but may be very much a part of it.
Letter From Jordanposted by y2karl at 11:11 PM PST - 5 comments
Aliens and Children. "This website features a series of drawings made by children who were abducted by aliens for the alien purpose of creating a new race of alien/human hybrids." More goodness from our old friend,
Michael Menken.
posted by cedar at 9:10 PM PST - 21 comments
NEWSWEEK's Baghdad bureau chief, departing after two years of war and American occupation, has a few final thoughts. A short, yet refreshingly honest, look at Iraq from a respected journalist on the way home.
What went wrong? A lot, but the biggest turning point was the Abu Ghraib scandal. Since April 2004 the liberation of Iraq has become a desperate exercise in damage control. The abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib alienated a broad swath of the Iraqi public. On top of that, it didn't work. . . . The four-square-mile Green Zone, the one place in Baghdad where foreigners are reasonably safe, could be a showcase of American values and abilities. Instead the American enclave is a trash-strewn wasteland of Mad Max-style fortifications. The traffic lights don't work because no one has bothered to fix them. The garbage rarely gets collected. Some of the worst ambassadors in U.S. history are the GIs at the Green Zone's checkpoints. They've repeatedly punched Iraqi ministers, accidentally shot at visiting dignitaries and behave (even on good days) with all the courtesy of nightclub bouncers—to Americans and Iraqis alike.posted by caddis at 8:50 PM PST - 51 comments
Feral Robotic Dogs OUT THERE, in happy family homes, in the offices of corporate executives, in toy stores through out the globe, is an army of robotic dogs. These semi-autonomous
robotic creatures, though currently programmed to perform inane or entertaining tasks: begging for plastic bones; barking to the tune of national anthems; walking in circles; are actually fully motile and
AWAITING FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS.posted by warbaby at 7:03 PM PST - 4 comments
Years ago, Jane and Michael Stern authored
Amazing America, a fabulous book about roadside America, which was one of my favorite references for something novel to see while traveling in the US. The New Jersey section is far too brief. Thank you
Weird NJ for filling in the gap.
posted by plinth at 5:58 PM PST - 9 comments
Ikaruga putting you to sleep?
Battletoads as challenging as
Animal Crossing? If so, consider saving up for an XBox and/or
Ninja Gaiden Black, expansion-of-sorts to the infamous
Ninja Gaiden (the game so hard it
kills your friends). Due out in September, the game's creator claims in an interview that roughly 1% of American players will complete the game's new "Master Ninja" difficulty. You can read the rest of the interview
here or grab the
outlandishly large trailer. Is there a legitimate demand for games this challenging, or is this just a case of misguided "difficult==better" thinking?
posted by Monster_Zero at 5:19 PM PST - 31 comments
The New York City Draft Riots: "As a hot and muggy Monday morning dawned on July 13, 1863, a large crowd of New York working people moved uptown, gathering workers from workshops and factories along the way... They banded together to express their collective outrage at the new draft law. Once they reached the Provost Marshall's office on 46th Street and Third Avenue, the scene of Saturday's first draft lottery, the crowd attacked the building, setting it on fire."
Maps, commentary, history. The main site is pretty cool too:
Virtual New York City. Previously in the
blue: a
primary account from The Brooklyn Daily Eagle archives.
posted by OmieWise at 10:13 AM PST - 10 comments
The
National Coalition for
Homeless Veterans says soldiers returning from Iraq and
Afghanistan are
beginning
to request help from service providers.
Stars
& Stripes: "Advocates for the homeless already are seeing
veterans from the war on terror living on the street, and say the
government must do more to ease their transition from military to
civilian life. Boone said the reasons behind the veterans' housing
problems are varied: Some have emotional and mental issues from their
combat experience, some have trouble finding work after leaving the
military, some have health care bills which result in financial
distress."
Philly.com has more (Reg Req, or view
here) on a recently homeless vet from Philadelphia.
posted by jenleigh at 7:24 AM PST - 110 comments
Greenzap opened for business last week, with every intent of taking on PayPal for the title of online payment portal
du jour. But even before the service officially launched, there was already a growing number of
people hotly debating the validity of the enterprise. Will this be the next big thing, or just another lollipop party waiting for the suckers to show up?
posted by deusdiabolus at 2:28 AM PST - 16 comments
June 5
Surfrider is a nonprofit environmental organization that produces a annual
"State of the Beach" (explanation
here) report with information about US beach access (public access and private ownership issues), water quality, beach erosion, surfing, links and more. Reports are available for
Hawaii,
West Coast,
Gulf States,
Southeast,
Mid Atlantic,
Puerto Rico,
Northeast and
Great Lakes.
In-depth
Water Quality reports for beaches in CA, HI, TX, AL, and parts of FL, as well as results of beach water testing conducted by (or sanctioned by)
Surfrider Chapters are also available.
There are also Surfrider chapters in:
Australia,
Brazil, Canada (no website),
Europe and
Japan.
EPA: Beaches is also an excellent resource for information about the condition of US beaches.
[via LII New This Week]posted by mlis at 8:05 PM PST - 7 comments
Well, it's an old rumor, but many sources (including the
NYT,
WSJ,
Wired, and many rumor sites) are reporting that Steve Jobs will be announcing a switch to Intel at the
WWDC tomorrow. The WSJ claims Apple will be switching to x86 processors, while others speculate Intel will simply be manufacturing PPC chips, or only processors for a tablet PC. If the rumors are true, and it seems like they are, what of the Intel DRM
recently announced? Are we destined to have DRM hardwired into our computers no matter where we turn?
Curiously, the
major rumor site has remained mum on the matter. Your best bet to follow the drama will probably be
MacRumors, who will be providing live updates from Steve-o's keynote tomorrow.
posted by keswick at 8:01 PM PST - 111 comments
Monkey Business Something else happened during that chaotic scene, something that convinced Chen of the monkeys' true grasp of money. Perhaps the most distinguishing characteristic of money, after all, is its fungibility, the fact that it can be used to buy not just food but anything. During the chaos in the monkey cage, Chen saw something out of the corner of his eye that he would later try to play down but in his heart of hearts he knew to be true. What he witnessed was probably the first observed exchange of money for sex in the history of monkeykind. (Further proof that the monkeys truly understood money: the monkey who was paid for sex immediately traded the token in for a grape.)
posted by raaka at 5:07 PM PST - 34 comments
rand()% is an automated net radio station
streaming real-time generative music. All audio is generated by algorithmic software applications and programs written by sound artists and programmers.
posted by signal at 4:24 PM PST - 18 comments
Chines government loves Flickr interface! So, Chinese government copies Flickr interface? So similar that Flickr users have no problem joining and creating accounts. Quickly, they have the most popular photo:
The kitchen sink. As one Chinese user writes "evrything is free in china , you know ,4 example the software that microsoft made"
posted by vacapinta at 1:25 PM PST - 27 comments
Maxthon website Internet Explorer has not been updated for some time and
competing browsers have improved on its ageing feature-set. But there's no need to ditch IE.
Maxthon provides tabbed functionality and a lots more besides to give you a taste of what is likely to be included in IE7.
posted by bobbyelliott at 4:43 AM PST - 60 comments
Over the past month, people in
Qinghai province, China have been reporting that migratory birds in the mostly-rural region were dropping dead of an unknown disease, later diagnosed as a few hundred cases of
"an isolated case" [sic] of
influenza strain H5N1, a.k.a.
bird flu. Three weeks later,
the Chinese government admitted that
actually about a thousand birds had died of bird flu in the province. Now there are reports saying
that at least 8,000 animals--not just birds--have died from the flu, including not only breeds of fowl not previously known to be affected by the virus, but non-avian species, too.
Every national park and bird sanctuary in China has been
closed for weeks, since the first reports surfaced of an outbreak. But today, disturbing photos started appearing on Chinese language news websites, supposedly taken at the closed
Qinghai Lake Nature Reserve. They appear to show
thousands of dead birds (
warning, disturbing images -
Engrish version via Babelfish here) on the island in the middle of Qinghai Lake, China's largest saltwater lake and a rest-stop for migratory birds from all across southeast Asia. Nervous pandemic-watchers
are debating whether the photos are real or doctored, but compared to
previous photos of the
once-lively birding spot, something definitely seems to be wrong.
[ much more inside >> ]posted by Asparagirl at 2:19 AM PST - 42 comments
Sick of all those fad diets? The No S Diet consists of fourteen words: No snacks, no sweets, no seconds except (sometimes) on days that start with 's'. It's sound advice and fairly easy to stick to. And what would a diet be without
some exercise?
posted by bbrown at 12:02 AM PST - 38 comments
June 4
PBwiki is a super simple, extremely clean route to having, what you always wanted (admit it), your very own
wiki. Just enter your username and email address, and wait for the password to be sent to you, and you're off and running. No need for your own web space, no messing around with CGI, PHP or Python, and if you're worried that the site will vanish and take your stuff with it, you can even download your entire wiki in a ZIP file. It's
not the first free
wiki farm out there, but it's just about as simple and clean as one can get.
But what do you do with it once you have one? I've been using a personal wiki for keeping track of ideas, places and characters for a (rather sprawling) novel project; the simplified page markup of a wiki combined with easy hyperlinking make them great for brainstorming. You could also start up a game of
Lexicon, which is well-suited
for play on a wiki, and as
previously seen in these parts. Or, you know, you could just start your own
Everything. (Originally found on
bOINGbOING.)
posted by JHarris at 7:09 PM PST - 17 comments
Edinburgh's Scotsman newspaper has launched a digital archive covering all editions from 1817-1950.
There are several stories with an
American slant which may be something that interests you. There is coverage on such things as the hanging of the notorious bodysnatchers
Burke and Hare.
Unfortunately, after viewing the free archives it is a paysite, but I still think it's worth a look as there is easily a couple of hours of interesting reading on the free articles that are included.
The set-up and look of this site is brilliant as well.
posted by ClanvidHorse at 1:20 PM PST - 9 comments
Like mutation, but rinses out in four generations! A new study finds that exposure to high levels of environmental toxins produces epigenetic changes in rats' sperm. "Epigenetics does not involve DNA sequence changes but chemical modification of the DNA." Ultimately, this may help to explain why certain human diseases, such as breast and prostate cancer, are becoming more common. The increase in the incidence of these diseases cannot be accounted for by a normal rate of genetic mutation, but epigenetic damage could be the culprit.
posted by bricoleur at 11:58 AM PST - 6 comments
The Hidden History of the United Nations: "The history told about the defeat of Nazism and the founding of the United Nations in the 1940s has become distorted. A false view of the past is being used today to shape how we think about our future. The military power of the victorious wartime allies is offered as a model for running the world, while the UN’s supposed utopianism is seen as ineffective and irrelevant. This is a travesty of the facts."
posted by jenleigh at 11:16 AM PST - 15 comments
The making of a D-Day tradition... I immediately get
goosebumps when I hear the score of
Band of Brothers...I'm not sure why, maybe it was my local connections (
Dick Winters,
Bill Guanere,
Albert Blithe,
Babe Heffron,
Thomas Meehan,
Ralph Spina,
Harry Welsh, and
Robert Strayer are all from Philadelphia), the surrounding suburbs, or Pennsylvania), or maybe it was because the original airings took place in the shadow of 9/11 (the premiere was September 9th, 2001, with the D-Day drop occuring in the second episode, Day of Days, on 9/16/2001), but this series will ALWAYS have a special place in my heart. Everything is done so beautifully, from
the special effects, to the sound,
the music, to the dutiful translation from
Stephen Ambrose book to the screen. It's certainly worthy of the
9.5 out of 10 that IMDB readers had given it. Every year now since, either HBO (On Demand - you have to subscribe to HBO plus have digital cable) or
the History Channel has played
Tom Hanks' and
Steven Spielberg's masterful WW2 epic. You can think of it as Saving Private Ryan, but 3 times as long. Even if war movies are not your thing, I can almost guarantee that they will see the human side of the soldier and becomely deeply invested in the characters. Follow the men of Easy Company from training and the running of Currahee, to the parachute jump on D-Day, through the liberation of Europe, the horror of a German concentration camp, and eventually to the end of the war, to Hitler's mountaintop retreat. I'm not the only one - check out the numerous fan sites to BoB (forum shorthand for Band of Brothers)
here,
here, and
here, as well as entries on
TVTome,
Wikipedia, and
Television without Pity. If you want to try before you commit to watching the whole thing, I'd recommend the episodes
Day of Days,
Crossroads, and
the Breaking Point.
posted by rzklkng at 8:52 AM PST - 24 comments
Other Africas. Critical observers have long noted that museum collections from Africa are composed largely of the spoils of colonial pillage. Thus the Africa we normally encounter in museums—the Africa of masks and ritual objects displayed on walls and in glass cases—is a fetishized Africa of colonial nostalgia. The objective of this exhibit is to offer images of
Other Africas, perspectives that lead us away from the desolate and romanticized Africa of the Western imagination toward those places where African modernities are emerging.
posted by tpoh.org at 7:20 AM PST - 27 comments
June 3
He Shoots He Scores! It won't be considered a classic, but this little game is the perfect one to be playing while you're on that conference call. Happy weekend!
posted by TheFarSeid at 10:57 PM PST - 16 comments
Why We Should Build Apartments at Ground Zero by
Paul Goldberger:
In an ideal plan, most of Ground Zero would be devoted to housing, hotels, and retail space. Lower Manhattan currently has a range of housing options: the converted lofts of Tribeca, the converted office buildings of Wall Street, and the retro-style apartment complexes at Battery Park City. The one thing missing is experimental architecture. Ground Zero would be the perfect place for an inventive alternative to the prim, packaged urbanism of Battery Park City. [...] With several blocks to build on, Ground Zero provides an opportunity to think not in terms of single buildings that are stand-alone works of sculpture but of ensembles that fit together to make coherent streetscapes and complete neighborhoods – something modern architecture has rarely succeeded in doing, in New York or anywhere else.Martin Filler in the NY Review of Books on books about the proposals for Ground Zero, including Goldberger's 2004 addition,
Up from Zero:
Goldberger's establishment-friendly attitude toward architecture has always lacked a discernible moral center. Although here he displays less of the maddening equivocation that has been his most defining characteristic as a critic, the targets he picks are most often easy ones, and unlikely to bar him from the corridors of power.posted by gramschmidt at 8:38 PM PST - 13 comments
Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby So you’ve got to know that synergy doesn’t actually mean synergy in this book. I can’t do normal synergy. No, in this book, synergy means cartoon foxes. What I’m saying is: this book will be starting off with an exorbitant amount of cartoon foxes.
And I will be counting on you to turn them into synergy.
Possibly the funniest computer programming book ever written.
posted by carmen at 7:17 PM PST - 17 comments
The Pimping of the President --Jack Abramoff and Grover Norquist Billing Clients for Face Time with G.W. Bush:
...He had just concluded his work on the Bush Transition Team as an advisor to the Department of the Interior. He had sent his personal assistant Susan Ralston to the White House to work as Rove’s personal assistant. He was a close friend, advisor, and high-dollar fundraiser for the most powerful man in Congress, Tom DeLay. Abramoff was so closely tied to the Bush Administration that he could, and did, charge two of his clients $25,000 for a White House lunch date and a meeting with the President. ... Jack Abramoff, in the news due to his shady dealings with DeLay, and
Grover Norquist, and the White House.
Norquist has not responded to inquiries about using the White House as a fundraiser. posted by amberglow at 6:18 PM PST - 11 comments
"The latest 'must-have' in the world of plastic surgery is the
'designer vagina'. As if we didn't have enough to worry about (bikini-line waxes, highlights, Botox injections), it seems we're now meant to be worrying about our vaginas
not being pretty enough. Labia-envy is apparently rife, if you believe the ads in many women’s magazines. And like those who head for the hairdresser clutching pictures of Jennifer Aniston, many women are now taking copies of Playboy to their plastic surgeons, saying:
'I want one like that'." Price list
here. Sort of previously discussed
here. [First link SFW; others questionable.]posted by mudpuppie at 12:56 PM PST - 100 comments
Action Item Man Commissioner: We need you to put a stop to Dr. Diabolical's nefarious plan! Action Item Man: To fully own this challenge, I'll need to be goal-oriented and results driven!
posted by carter at 12:21 PM PST - 12 comments
The Golden Era Missile Command Challenge! The Epic Battle of
Billy Mitchell vs.
Mr. Awesome (Roy Shildt), in which, Pac-Man Champion and renowned creator of Rickey's Chicken Wing Hot Sauce, Billy Mitchell, has his status as "Player of the Century" challenged by Missile Command record holder and arch-nemesis, Roy Shildt.
Funspot Classic Games Message Board For World Record Holders CLOSED Because of too much airing out of dirty laundry.
Below: Conversations With [Roy Shildt,] Guinness Book Missile Command Champion, who is always in hot water with Twin Galaxies due to his accusations and fight to stay on the scoreboard. He has apologized, even though Mitchell has moved on, insisting that "his passion for winning has abated somewhat, or at least
shifted." ... "Now," he says, "I bring my passion to the sauce." Billy Mitchell never gives up." (Warning: Crazy site design and information overload! Be sure to scrooooooll down)posted by mr.curmudgeon at 11:55 AM PST - 11 comments
Ratablog If the rats could type (or more accurately, if they could type actual words and refrain from peeing on the keyboard) they would tell their own stories. They can't, so we will.posted by srboisvert at 8:29 AM PST - 10 comments
Phantom limb illusions Dr. Ramachandran is an investigator of the senses. His explorations on
synesthesia, phantom limbs, and human consciousness are revealing excursions into sensory awareness. And his reader-friendly books, such as
A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness and
Phantoms in the Brain (both from Amazon) are a pleasure to read. His greatest gifts appear to be a childlike simplicity, coupled with straightforward empiricism. His writing is easy-to-understand, often sparked with unpredictable humor. Recommended for all mind & brain enthusiasts who may not have heard of him yet.
posted by ember at 3:57 AM PST - 10 comments
Worth picking up if you have a library with a subscription. The May 20th issue of Science was devoted to the
Sumatra-Andaman Earthquake of December 24 describing the full power of that event, the most powerful recorded since the deployment of modern electronic sensors. The
multiple effects claimed include swarm earthquakes in Alaska, a shock wave that moved every place on Earth a centimeter, and resonant waves continuing weeks after the event. It is also the
the longest rupture recorded and took over an hour to complete. Animated simulations of aspects of the event are linked through
PhysOrg.com.
posted by KirkJobSluder at 1:12 AM PST - 4 comments
June 2
Review of "A Possible Declining Trend for Worldwide Innovation," by Jonathan Huebner, who says the rate of human innovation has been steadily declining since the industrial revolution, and is headed toward an "economic limit" of very low apparent innovation that will be reached circa 2038. As one potential explanation, we must consider the possibility that human-initiated innovation, like energy consumption and population growth, is a process that naturally saturates with rising global income levels and technological intelligence--as technological progress increasingly satisfies current human needs, individuals become less concerned with technological development and turn more toward personal growth. More articles from
Acceleration Watch.
posted by stbalbach at 11:22 PM PST - 24 comments
Erik Petersen. Danish newspaper photographer. Died in 1997. He took a number of pictures around WWII.
He never developed them.
Fortunately, sixty years later, someone else has.
Now they can be found in
a book.
Here's a bit of
bloggery as well.
posted by IndigoJones at 7:02 PM PST - 14 comments
Sy Hersh's Loose Relationship with the Literal Truth | Interesting article from
NY Metro which seems to condem Hersh's squirrely handling of facts while admiring his accomplishments & tenacity: "In bending the truth, Hersh is, paradoxically enough, remarkably candid. When he supplies unconfirmed accounts of military assaults on Iraqi civilians, or changes certain important details from an episode inside Abu Ghraib (thus rendering the story unverifiable), Hersh argues that he’s protecting the identities of sources who could face grave repercussions for talking. 'I defend that totally,' Hersh says of the factual fudges he serves up in speeches and lectures."
posted by jenleigh at 6:54 PM PST - 33 comments
The whiff of trust. "The possibility of reconciliation between individuals and the potential of healing rifts between political groups, even nations have arrived. " And the possible repercussions strain the imagination.
posted by semmi at 1:44 PM PST - 12 comments
Is somebody taking the piss with this NYT reporter? [NYT, use bugmenot] Seriously, I thought it was a complete joke when I read this line:
"The Dutch people won against this crazy constitution," said
Tiny Kox, a member of the
small Socialist Party, which was pivotal in the "no" campaign.
That aside, I'm curious why all these EU member nations are rejecting this. First the French, now the Dutch, what is going ON here?
posted by antifuse at 10:46 AM PST - 54 comments
Body Art. (NSFW) Martin Armand gives a whole new meaning to the term "anatomical art" with his airbrush paintings on bare skin. Five galleries of photos: the first page only links to a few larger images, but the rest of the galleries work fine. More bodypainting
here (E-cards site, but very cool images),
here (very nice "camouflage" body art),
here (especially artistic) and via
this previous MetaFilter thread. But remember; if you worky, no clicky the linky!
posted by taz at 2:50 AM PST - 10 comments
It's appalling! - and watching sports on TV will eat your brain. Gilbert & George on hoodies, chichimen and pubic lice. You'll have to do your own links, I gotta go.
posted by TimothyMason at 2:28 AM PST - 4 comments
June 1
Josh Micah Marshall,
longtime favorite blogger of the center-left crowd, has opened up a new spin-off discussion site for his eminently popular
Talking Points Memo, which has long been lacking for open yammering from the peanut gallery. The
new site will feature weekly guest bloggers, and is hitting things off right with former vice-presidential candidate
John Edwards!
posted by kaibutsu at 9:26 PM PST - 5 comments
Thomas Campbell Butler at 63 years of age, is completing the 1st year of a
2-year sentence in federal prison, following an investigation and trial that was initiated after he voluntarily reported that he believed vials containing _Yersinia pestis_ were missing from his laboratory at Texas Tech
University.
posted by warbaby at 8:39 PM PST - 30 comments
"It wouldn't surprise me if we paid rewards" --As part of the AP's receipt of transcripts of the millitary tribunals in Guantanamo, multiple reports of our allies using money the US gave them to buy "terrorists" for shipment there.
..."When I was in jail, they said I needed to pay them money and if I didn't pay them, they'd make up wrong accusations about me and sell me to the Americans and I'd definitely go to Cuba," he told the tribunal. "After that I was held for two months and 20 days in their detention, so they could make wrong accusations about me and my (censored), so they could sell us to you."
Another prisoner said he was on his way to Germany in 2001 when he was captured and sold for "a briefcase full of money" then flown to Afghanistan before being sent to Guantanamo....posted by amberglow at 4:50 PM PST - 14 comments
Daily Type is a creative project run by five russian type designers. Day by day, they create original typefaces and post their results along with routine.
posted by Robot Johnny at 2:55 PM PST - 10 comments
If you live in the South/Southeast U.S., as of today you are able to get your
Free Annual Credit Report via Equifax, Transunion & Experion. Chose one service every fourth month and get reports year-round.
posted by Pressed Rat at 2:45 PM PST - 12 comments
Rise of the Creative Class followed by the Flight of the Creative Class. Following up on The Rise of the Creative Class (2002), Florida argues that if America continues to make it harder for some of the world's most talented students and workers to come here, they'll go to other countries eager to tap into their creative capabilities—as will American citizens fed up with what they view as an increasingly repressive environment. He argues that the loss of even a few geniuses can have tremendous impact, adding that the "overblown" economic threat posed by large nations such as China and India obscures all the little blows inflicted upon the U.S. by Canada, Scandinavia, New Zealand and other countries with more open political climates. Florida lays his case out well and devotes a significant portion of this polemical analysis to defending his earlier book's argument regarding "technology, talent, and tolerance" (i.e. that together, they generate economic clout, so the U.S. should be more progressive on gay rights and government spending). He does so because that book contains what he sees as the way out of the dilemma—a new American society that can "tap the full creative capabilities of every human being." Even when he drills down to less panoramic vistas, however, Florida remains an astute observer of what makes economic communities tick, and he's sure to generate just as much public debate on this new twist on brain drain.
posted by mk1gti at 9:56 AM PST - 107 comments
"Approximately 250,000 persons viewed and passed by the bier of little Emmett Till. All were shocked, some horrified and appalled. Many prayed, scores fainted and practically all, men, women and children wept". Chicago Defender, September 1, 1955.
Federal officials this morning
erected a white tent over the grave of Emmett Till in
Alsip, Ill.,
in preparation to exhume the body to shed light on the
Chicago teenager's death 50 years ago.
Till, 14 years old at the time,
was killed in a hate crime in Money, Miss., that
sparked the Civil Rights movement. (previous Emmett Till MeFi threads
here and
here)
posted by matteo at 8:56 AM PST - 5 comments
Interviews:
Russell Banks,
Susan Orlean,
Tibor Fischer,
Azar Nafisi.
| Writing on
social justice:
Susan Power on Bosnia.
Barbara Erenreich on poverty.
| e-books:
Aristotle,
Emma Goldman,
Buddha.
| New
Non-
fiction,
fiction.
| Hundreds of
Reviews. Graphic Art, Poetry, Music, and much more from
identity theory, one of the best literary websites I've encountered, thanks to an incredulity-inducing amount of work by what seem to be volunteers. Wow.
(Specific interviews already MeFid in these threads.)posted by louigi at 8:16 AM PST - 1 comments
