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June 2011 Archives
June 30
Using album & digital song sales, Hot 100 rankings, radio airplay, YouTube views, social media, concert grosses, industry awards and critics' ratings, Rolling Stone compares sixteen female artists to name
the Queen of Pop.
[more inside]posted by troika at 12:11 PM PST - 40 comments
Stuck on a train for an hour every day and sick of sudoku? Hands love to knit but the brain gets bored? Riding out the recession as a streetcorner sign-twirler? Or maybe you've just got a burning desire for "cultural conversation of the depth you demand." If so, then Metafilter's own
Colin Marshall has got what you need at the
Marketplace of Ideas.
[more inside]posted by villanelles at dawn at 11:36 AM PST - 9 comments
Here, we refer to personality as the use of human personality characteristics to describe a robot vacuum cleaner. The translation from personality to behavior was inspired by a role play in which a group of actors was asked to act like a robot vacuum cleaner with these desired characteristics... Attributes, such as macaroni, were available to support acting out some of the situations (e.g. ‘cleaning a dirty spot’)... The actors were asked to act out situations—as if they were the robot vacuum cleaner—making use of motion and sound... In general, the actors either crawled about or walked around at a slow pace to imitate a vacuum cleaner. Often, a typical vacuuming sound was simulated by them. [more inside]posted by jasper411 at 10:57 AM PST - 22 comments
"What do you get when you combine 15kgs of silicon, 2km of wool, 46 highly enthusiastic filmmakers and 2 years of hard work? …
Zero." (youtube / also on
vimeo) Official
site.
[more inside]posted by zarq at 10:27 AM PST - 14 comments
If you like dance but are stuck in a computer chair all day, you could do worse than watch some of these on-location videos showing people dancing for the sheer love of it. Folks from Brooklyn and India made BollyBrook (short for "Bollywood-meets-Brooklyn"), a music video featuring
dancing in Mumbai. A 9-year-old girl
dances in Tiananmen Square (don't miss her pas de deux with her father near the end of the video). A kid with the handle iTr3vor
dances in the Apple Store (one of many videos in his series). And yes, Matt Harding probably helped start it all with his
"dancing badly around the world" videos last decade.
[more inside]posted by mark7570 at 7:26 AM PST - 12 comments
June 29
Robert Morris, a pioneer in the field of computer security, early major contributor to the UNIX operating system, and father of Robert Tappan Morris (author of the Morris Worm), has
died at 78.
NYT [more inside]posted by fireoyster at 10:41 PM PST - 23 comments
Get ready to meet the fourth or fifth most famous pairing in Soviet children's animation: the meek, civil
Leopold the Cat, and the rowdy
mice who endlessly harass him in the course of 11 animated shorts (and a non-canonical feature made after the fall of the USSR).
[more inside]posted by Nomyte at 4:41 PM PST - 25 comments
[Bill] Kerlina said his
two years [as principal of a D.C. Public School] left him with high blood pressure, extra pounds from a stress-induced diet of Armand’s and McDonald’s lunches, and a sense that life is too short. The bitter icing on the cake, as it were, was when certain financial promises made to him were rescinded. Principal K has left DCPS to open a
gourmet cupcake shop. (website under construction)
posted by obscurator at 10:27 AM PST - 49 comments
Minor Threats "The punk icon Ian MacKaye always wanted to create a tribe. Now an elder statesman of D.C. hardcore, the musician talks about organized religion, breaking toilets, and making peace with his mother’s death."
A simply fantastic interview with Ian Mackaye from a magazine you wouldn't expect to be covering a hardcore music legend. I know there are some fans here on the blue who may really enjoy this.
posted by punkrockrat at 10:21 AM PST - 74 comments
Chuck Klosterman
breaks down Led Zeppelin's 1979 Knebworth Festival performance of In the Evening. Bonus: Led Zeppelin when they were
crazy good in 1970.
posted by zzazazz at 10:00 AM PST - 43 comments
June 28
Tepco, the Japanese nuclear power company, is still battling multiple core meltdowns including one complete "melt-through" (breach of containment).
The news gets worse, except for one hopeful story of two dogs.
[more inside]posted by stbalbach at 8:44 PM PST - 129 comments
Pet sales to be banned in San Francisco? The San Francisco Commission of Animal Control and Welfare, a panel of appointed commissioners advising the Board of Supervisors, recently passed "The Humane Pet Acquisition Proposal". This would ban the sale of all pets in San Fransisco - from rodents, reptiles and birds to dogs, cats and fish. The Board of Supervisors is yet to consider what the L.A. Times calls
"a silly idea."posted by joannemullen at 8:43 PM PST - 113 comments
Then, coming on six o'clock, Mr. Myhrvold, the former Chief Technology Officer of Microsoft and an inventor with hundreds of patents to his name, came in, wearing chef's whites, and ushered us into dinner. Boy, people eat early around here, I thought. Little did I know I would be eating non-stop for the next three hours. (previously: 1,2) [more inside]posted by Trurl at 8:39 PM PST - 31 comments
The Avant Garde Project is a series of recordings of 20th-century classical, experimental, and electroacoustic music digitized from LPs whose music has in most cases never been released on CD, and so is effectively inaccessible to the vast majority of music listeners today. Until now, of course.
[more inside]posted by carsonb at 3:31 PM PST - 17 comments
CameraMail. Honolulu based conceptual artist Matthew McVickar sent a Kodak FunSaver taped to a piece of cardboard through the mail with instructions for the postal workers to take pictures as it travelled from his hometown on Cape Cod. These are the results. (
via reddit)
posted by modernserf at 1:50 PM PST - 27 comments
Right around 1879, the
fishwheel (
historical images,
McCord replica) came to the Columbia River. A clever application of mill-like thinking to traditional net fishing techniques, the fishwheel's river-powered automation of upstream harvesting revolutionized canning in Oregon and Washington, drawing both commercial attention and
critical concern [NYT 1881, PDF]. Two men, Thornton Williams and William Rankin McCord, each filed patents for fishwheel designs in 1881 (
#245251) and 1882 (
#257960) respectively; Williams brought an infringement suit against McCord which was
dismissed on the grounds that the invention was not new, being based directly on the publicly documented work of one Samuel Wilson in 1879. Fishwheels were fair game.
[more inside]posted by cortex at 1:34 PM PST - 15 comments
The Supreme Court of British Columbia decided that the
BC Adoption Act is unconstitutional "because it treats adopted children differently from children of sperm donors. Adopted children are provided information about their biological parents, whereas the children of donors are not."
[more inside]posted by Salamandrous at 12:36 PM PST - 60 comments
Steven Aftergood at the Federation of American Scientists presents
Fifty Years of Space Nuclear Power
"A plutonium fueled RTG that was deployed in 1965 by the CIA not in space but on a mountaintop in the Himalayas (to help monitor Chinese nuclear tests) continues to generate anxiety, not electricity, more than four decades after it was lost in place. See, most recently,
"River Deep Mountain High" by Vinod K. Jose,
The Caravan magazine, December 1, 2010." (
MeFi previously)
posted by HLD at 11:33 AM PST - 8 comments
Snailiad: The snails of Snail Town have gone missing! Use your power to climb walls to explore a Metroid-like world to find all the secrets also snails. YAY!
posted by The Devil Tesla at 10:06 AM PST - 11 comments
Late Night Political Zingers. The best of Leno, Letterman, Fallon, Maher et al for those of us who don't have the time to watch. e.g. "New Rule: Stop asking Miss USA contestants if they believe in evolution. It's not their field. It's like asking Stephen Hawking if he believes in hair scrunchies. Here's what they know about: spray tans, fake boobs and baton twirling. Here's what they don't know about: everything else. If I cared about the uninformed opinions of some ditsy beauty queen, I'd join the Tea Party." –Bill Maher
[more inside]posted by storybored at 9:47 AM PST - 43 comments
Reviewing Netflix's 'Example Short 23.976.' Netflix has subsequently released the short in a variety of forms and at various lengths, in one case looping it for a full eight hours in a version that many viewers compared to Andy Warhol's 1964 film Empire.
In another case the film was compiled into "a sample show with many episodes" titled Example TV Mega-series 700,
containing exactly 700 episodes.posted by shakespeherian at 9:33 AM PST - 17 comments
The Hardest Cases: When Children Die, Justice Can Be Elusive A joint investigation by PBS Frontline, ProPublica and NPR has found that medical examiners and coroners have repeatedly mishandled cases of infant and child deaths, helping to put innocent people behind bars. (
Via. (Article contains descriptions of children that have been killed by abuse. May be disturbing / triggering to some readers.) [more inside]posted by zarq at 6:47 AM PST - 20 comments
As de Waal says, couldn't the full range of human nature encompass both those who want to rape and those who are powerfully averse to it? Put another way, just because some men commit rape doesn't mean all other men are only restrained from it by the artificial strictures of society. In fact, the fantasy of a hyper-willing female partner, one who is both exceedingly desirous of sex and exceedingly satisfied by a man's skills, is common in both porn and pop culture. A few current videos on XTube, for instance, include Climax2000, Cuming [sic] For You, Debbs Dark Desires, and Wanting Some Big Dick, all of which appear to depict women in various states of hunger-for-your-cock. Of course, Debbs Dark Desires may depict more what dudes want Debb to want than what she actually craves, but the point is that even quite male-centric depictions of female sexuality often include not just consent but enthusiastic desire and orgasm. The idea that men's natural instincts are rape-centric isn't supported even by media that serve their most private predilections.posted by outlandishmarxist at 6:15 AM PST - 63 comments
Such Hawks Such Hounds explores the music and musicians of the American hard rock underground circa 1970-2007, focusing on the psychedelic and '70s proto-metal-derived styles that have in recent years formed a rich body of unclassifiable sounds.
posted by mhjb at 2:17 AM PST - 17 comments
June 27
"
I remember going to a totally boring party for the magazine one night and thinking nobody is dancing because their heels are too high. Nobody is eating because in order to look like the women in the magazine, you have to eat next to nothing. And no one is actually drinking the cocktail in their hand because those are fattening, too. Nobody was really even talking to each other because they were too self conscious and painfully busy standing in the corner trying to look beautiful and important. It was not long after that party that I decided to try and resurrect my soul and work for a magazine that focused on something other than beauty and fashion. " [
Linda Wells Would Be Horrified] (
via)
posted by vidur at 11:13 PM PST - 54 comments
As much as any book I know, Crippled Detectives transcribes the dream state, not just in its flights of fancy and logic-jumping juxtapositions, but in the mutating narrative tactics, the topsy-turvy focus (the climax is over in a flash, whereas digressions distend to marvelous effect), and especially the inconsistent point of view... I forgot to mention that Lee Tandy Schwartzman was all of seven years old when she wrote it.posted by Trurl at 8:21 PM PST - 14 comments
PossessedHand is ostensibly a training system for students of stringed musical instruments. It teaches fingering positions by means of electrodes that stimulate muscles in the forearm, forcing the hand into the correct configuration.
posted by contraption at 8:08 PM PST - 31 comments
Walking Home From Walden is a 5 part series by
Wen Stephenson describing how a middle-aged resident of Wayland, MA got advice from Henry David Thoreau about responding to global warming while living in suburbia, by taking a 12 mile hike.
posted by paulsc at 7:58 PM PST - 5 comments
The Harvard Study of Adult Development is the longest prospective study of mental and physical well-being ever conducted. For 72 years, researchers at Harvard have been following 824 individuals through war, career, marriage and divorce, parenthood and grandparenthood, and old age. Designer
Laura Javier took ten of those cases and visualized them in the
Elements of Happiness.
[via flowingdata]posted by anifinder at 4:38 PM PST - 13 comments
Come on down to Funk Junction, we've got it all!
Songs about cats, songs about
orange things, songs about
dolls, and songs about
Canada! We have
IDM,
jungle,
breakcore, and
harsh noise! Do you like
jazz and
modern classical music? Great! We've got that, too,
chopped up and
re-arranged for easy digestion!
A whole world of sound, created by Aaron Funk! A veritable city of
Venetian Snares! And we have a biography, too, after the break (or you can skip the background, and go directly to
the streaming music). Please note that kids should probably stay outside the Funk Junction, as it'll get
loud, angry and obscene at times.
[more inside]posted by filthy light thief at 3:02 PM PST - 21 comments
Dutch state secretary for culture Halbe Zijlstra
published a letter stating that €200 million would be cut from the arts and culture budget, starting as early as 1 January 2013.
[more inside]posted by palbo at 1:27 PM PST - 11 comments
"Just last week you read about the H-bomb being dropped. Now two great English writers, two very imaginative writers — I’m gonna tell you if you have youngsters in the living room tell them not to be alarmed at this ‘cause it’s a fantasy, the whole thing is animated — but two English writers, Joan and Peter Foldes, wrote a thing which they called ‘A Short Vision’ in which they wondered what might happen to the animal population of the world if an H-bomb were dropped. It’s produced by George K. Arthur and I’d like you to see it.
It is grim, but I think we can all stand it to realize that in war there is no winner." [
via]
posted by brundlefly at 12:41 PM PST - 13 comments
From steroid-spiked pork to glow-in-the-dark meat to recycled cooking oil collected from sewers: China wrestles with food safety problems. 'China's food scandals are becoming increasingly frequent and bizarre': 'In May, a Shanghai woman who had left uncooked pork on her kitchen table woke up in the middle of the night and noticed that the meat was emitting a blue light, like something out of a science fiction movie.' 'Farmers in eastern Jiangsu province complained to state media last month that their watermelons had exploded "like landmines" after they mistakenly applied too much growth hormone in hopes of increasing their size.' 'Until recently, directions were circulating on the Internet about how to make fake eggs out of a gelatinous compound comprised mostly of sodium alginate, which is then poured into a shell made out of calcium carbonate. Companies marketing the kits promised that you could make a fake egg for one-quarter the price of a real one.'
[more inside]posted by VikingSword at 12:27 PM PST - 48 comments
As a public transit geek, I really enjoyed
this story. We've talked about taking public transit on
unlikely routes
previously, and I read the original
blog post giving the directions on how to get from SF to LA using only public transit. But the article from
SF Weekly's In Transit blogger, Joe Eskanazi, really brings the trip to life.
posted by agatha_magatha at 11:04 AM PST - 28 comments
We have explained that the matching funds provision substantially burdens the speech of privately financed candidates and independent groups. ... We have explained that those burdens cannot be justified by a desire to “level the playing field.” In a 5-4 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court has
struck down an Arizona law that provided public funds to candidates who have been outspent by either private funding or independent spending.
Link to PDF of full decision. [more inside]posted by gerryblog at 10:01 AM PST - 105 comments
Daniel Soar
on the militarisation of metaphor:
Spies aren’t known for their cultural sensitivity. So it was a surprise when news broke last month that IARPA, a US government agency that funds ‘high-risk/high-payoff research’ into areas of interest to the ‘intelligence community’, had put out a call for contributions to its Metaphor Program, a five-year project to discover what a foreign culture’s metaphors can reveal about its beliefs.posted by jack_mo at 8:05 AM PST - 41 comments
June 26
"
Any industry would be proud of an average annual growth rate of 34% over ten years and of a global reach from Austria to Taiwan. But the headlong expansion of exchange-traded funds (ETFs), which by May this year controlled almost $1.5 trillion of assets (not far short of the $2 trillion in hedge funds), has become a matter for concern among financial regulators. Could ETFs be the next source of financial scandal, or even of systemic risk?" Characterizing the Financial sector "like a hyperactive child" that "can never leave a good thing be",
The Economist appears to be
wishing for the
ETFs to be
better regulated because "it would be a shame if reckless expansion spoiled a good innovation".
posted by vidur at 8:50 PM PST - 28 comments
(Sunday night arthropod terror filter): YouTube user
memutic has uploaded several dozen high-quality backyard video recordings of exotic insects, arachnids, crustaceans, and millipedes native to Central America, Southeast Asia, and the US.
[more inside]posted by Nomyte at 8:38 PM PST - 20 comments
Anatomy of a Writer. "Like the protagonist of 1984, who risked his life to purchase a notebook and signed it away by filling it with words, writers sometimes find themselves huddled in a corner, crouching onto their guilty pleasure protectively, hoping that their spouse, or friends won’t catch them at it."posted by Phire at 5:40 PM PST - 13 comments
The Reith Lectures are an annual series of lectures by the BBC, started in 1948 and dedicated to advancing "public understanding of significant issues of the day through high-profile speakers." The BBC have just opened a
complete archive of them, both as audio and as transcripts. (
previously)
[more inside]posted by dng at 3:49 PM PST - 15 comments
Which device in the American home uses the most energy? No, it's not the refrigerator or the TV. It is actually the
HD DVR cable box.
posted by beisny at 1:02 AM PST - 99 comments
June 25
R.M. Berry on Samuel Beckett's peculiar writing style: "It's as though the narrator's words were almost thoughtless, accidental, written by someone paying no attention to what he or she says." Beckett is best known for his play
Waiting For Godot, in which "nothing happens, twice", but he was also an accomplished writer of prose, ranging from the relatively simple
Three Novels to the extremely minimal
Imagination Dead Imagine. Some of Beckett's more challenging short plays are available on YouTube:
Play (
pt. 2),
Not I (the famous "mouth" play), and
Come and Go, one of the shortest plays in the English language (ranging between 121 and 127 words, depending on translation).
Once he interviewed John Lennon and found out who the eggman really was. Beckett's final creative work was his poem
What Is the Word.
posted by Rory Marinich at 1:50 PM PST - 41 comments
In 1976, at the age of 27, Patricia Rose began a relationship with the married, 62-year-old billionaire
John Kluge. At the time, Kluge owned
MetroMedia, a company that started life as the Dumont TV network and would go on to become Fox television. Previously, Patricia had been married to British pornographer Russell Gay. She had posed nude in
Knave Magazine and had a bit part as a
belly dancer in
The Nine Ages of Nakedness. In 1981, Patricia Rose and John Kluge married. Soon after, construction began on the
Albemarle Estate, a 29,000 sq ft., 45 room home in Virginia. Patricia and John were
the 1980s power couple. In 1990, they divorced, and Patricia kept the house and went on to found the
Kluge Estate Winery. Now, everything has come
crashing down.
posted by Jasper Friendly Bear at 11:59 AM PST - 35 comments
Philosophy fundraiser mountain walk-a-thon. Prominent philosophy professor Crispin Wright will walk the length of the
Pennine Way, a 250+ mile mountaintop trail in the UK, to raise funds to support his philosophy students. (The link on the Pennine Way is worth reading.) Along the way he'll stop each day to answer a philosophical question voted on by the people who contribute to the fund.
posted by LobsterMitten at 11:21 AM PST - 17 comments
June 24
It was bound to happen eventually. After
a quarter-century,
26 Academy Awards, and an unparalleled streak of
eleven artistic and commercial triumphs, Pixar's latest project,
Cars 2, is
Certified Rotten. Critics have
assailed the film as a slick but hollow vehicle for Disney's
$10 billion-dollar Cars merchandising industry "lifestyle brand," replacing the original's serviceable tale of small-town redemption with
zany spy games,
hyperactive chase sequences, and even more
lowbrow aww-shucks potty humor from
Larry the Cable Guy. But it's not all bad news! Along with
a fun new Toy Story 3 short, preceding today's (3-D) premiere showings is a first look at next year's
Brave --
a darkly magical original story set in ancient Scotland featuring the studio's first female lead (and
director).
Evocative high-res concept art [mirror] is available at the official website, and
character sketches have leaked to the web, with the apparently striking teaser trailer sure to follow. Also, be sure not to miss the sneak peak of
Brave's associated short,
"La Luna"!posted by Rhaomi at 11:42 AM PST - 263 comments
The
long-polluted New York rivers are
getting cleaner, but can still be dangerous to swim in. There are
efforts underway to clean up the Bronx River, but that will take years, if not decades. Until then,
signs are posted, warning would-be swimmers, yet people still risk sickness to battle the heat. One current safe solution is
the Floating Pool Lady, a barge that was remade into an 82-foot-long city parks department swimming pool.
She first arrived in the Bronx in 2008, and
she'll return to the Bronx in a week. There's a new Big Idea to bring swimmers back into the rivers:
the +Pool, a floating swimming pool located within a river, designed with a series exterior walls to filter the river water and make it safe to swim in. While that's in the early design stages, you can take a chance and
jump in a swimming hole.
posted by filthy light thief at 10:28 AM PST - 26 comments
Root Hog or Die has an extensive collection of links to world folk music repositories. There are over 60, with days and days of music to listen to. Some are comprised of field recordings, some are from old 78s, and some are from more contemporary sources, so you'll have to use your judgement about which you're comfortable visiting. The sites cover everything from
Hmong music to
Ossetian music to
Northwest Fiddle Field Recordings.
posted by OmieWise at 8:03 AM PST - 13 comments
SAFECAST is helping people in Japan (with internet access) review amateur and official radiation data.
posted by jeffmac at 6:20 AM PST - 6 comments
June 23
Austrian research company IAT21 has presented a new type of aircraft at the Paris Air Show which has the potential to become aviation's first disruptive technology since the jet engine. ... The key to the D-Dalus' extreme maneuverability is the facility to alter the angle of the blades (using servos) to vector the forces, meaning that the thrust can be delivered in your choice of 360 degrees around any of the three axes. Hence D-Dalus can launch vertically, hover perfectly still and move in any direction, and that's just the start of the story.posted by Trurl at 9:12 PM PST - 38 comments
Kansas: The First Abortion-Free State? "The law also requires the health department to issue new licenses each year, and it grants additional authority to health department inspectors to conduct unannounced inspections, and to fine or shut down clinics ... the department wasted no time in drafting the new rules, issuing the final version on June 17 and informing clinics that they would have to comply with the rules by July 1. The new requirements require facilities to add extra bathrooms, drastically expand waiting and recovery areas, and even add larger janitor's closets, as one clinic employee told me—changes that clinics will have a heck of a time pulling off by the deadline. Under the new rule, clinics must also aquire state certification to admit patients, a process that takes 90 to 120 days, the staffer explained." Previously,
George Tiller (
2).
posted by geoff. at 8:57 PM PST - 91 comments
Final Cut Pro backlash. Two months ago, Apple
previewed the new 64-bit version of its popular professional video editing application, completely re-written and re-designed with loads of new, revolutionary features, an iMovie-like interface, and a deep price cut.
Excitement and
anticipation abounded. On Tuesday, it was
released, and the excitement has been completely
reversed. Unfortunately, as Apple
typically does with
all-new products, they left out a lot of features that users particularly needed (including backwards compatibility), and simultaneously
killed the previous version, causing an unprecedented amount of
confusion and
anger in a matter of
hours. Many people felt left in the lurch, others felt that Apple had abandoned the pro market without telling anyone, and still others prescribed
patience.
posted by fungible at 6:28 PM PST - 193 comments
Glen Campbell Announces That He Has Alzheimer's Disease Glen Campbell, the studio musician who shot to fame as a solo pop-country crossover singer in the 1960s with
his summer replacement TV series, has told People Magazine that he is suffering from Alzheimer's Disease. The announcement comes just as he begins the all-too-appropriately named "Goodbye Tour" to
promote his final studio album. His wife told People: "Glen is still an awesome guitar player and singer. But if he flubs a lyric or gets confused on stage, I wouldn’t want people to think, 'What's the matter with him? Is he drunk?'" (In 2003, Campbell made headlines with
an unfortunate mugshot after an arrest for drunk driving). We shared our love for Glen in
this 2007 MeFi post, which features a number of great links to Campbell's performances and covers of his hits by other artists.
posted by briank at 6:19 PM PST - 28 comments
"
Hackers of the world are uniting and taking direct action against our common oppressors - the government, corporations, police, and militaries of the world" says LulzSec
(previously) in their latest release,
Chinga La Migra. "
We are releasing hundreds of private intelligence bulletins, training manuals, personal email correspondence, names, phone numbers, addresses and passwords belonging to Arizona law enforcement. We are targeting AZDPS specifically because we are against SB1070 (previously) and the racial profiling anti-immigrant police state that is Arizona."
#antisec is a new track from nerdcore rapper
ytcracker (previously)posted by finite at 6:03 PM PST - 47 comments
Seven days ago, a new
YouTube channel teased the creation of a mysterious new website called
Pottermore. Today, JK Rowling
released details about the new site. Pottermore will be 1) the exclusive place to purchase Harry Potter e-books, 2) a Harry Potter interactive experience/social networking site of sorts, and 3) a (free) repository of many pages of back notes about the Harry Potter series, similar in content, different in form, and
possibly replacing the existence of the Harry Potter encyclopedia long-teased by Rowling.
Fans react.
posted by lewedswiver at 5:55 PM PST - 54 comments
If you're a Chicagoan or have even a passing interest in Chicago's 'L',
Chicago "L".org is an amazingly comprehensive resource for anything you might want to know about the Second City's rapid transit system. Highlights include
historic route maps, details on
rolling stock past and present, and more than you could ever want to know about every
station.
[more inside]posted by kmz at 12:50 PM PST - 41 comments
Twenty years ago today, the gaming world saw the launch of a truly landmark title:
Sonic the Hedgehog. Developed as a vehicle for a new Sega mascot, the fluid, vibrant, cheery-tuned wonderland swiftly became the company's flagship product, inspiring over the ensuing decades
an increasingly convoluted universe of TV shows,
comic books, and dozens of games on a variety of systems (all documented in
this frighteningly comprehensive TVTropes portal). And while in recent years the series has turned out
more and more mediocre 3D and RPG efforts, the original games remain crown jewels of the 16-bit era. So why not kick off this anniversary by replaying the titles that started it all for free in your browser:
Sonic the Hedgehog (1991),
Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (1992),
Sonic the Hedgehog 3 (1994),
Sonic & Knuckles (1994). Or click inside for music, remakes, and other fun stuff!
[more inside]posted by Rhaomi at 10:56 AM PST - 71 comments
Blogger jailed over critical restaurant review. The Taichung branch of Taiwan High Court on Tuesday sentenced a blogger who wrote that a restaurant’s beef noodles were too salty to 30 days in detention and two years of probation and ordered her to pay NT$200,000 in compensation to the restaurant.
posted by lily_bart at 10:19 AM PST - 89 comments
Andy Baio: “Kind of screwed”. Baio produced a
chiptune tribute to Miles Davis’ classic album
Kind of Blue. He licensed all of the tracks and assigned all profits directly to the five musicians on the album.
The one thing he didn't do was check about the cover art, a pixelated rendering of the photo on the original album cover.
Jay Maisel, the photographer who shot the photo in question, sued Baio for $150,000 per download plus $25,000 for DMCA violations. Baio settled for $32,500, not because he wasn’t convinced he was in the right (this almost certainly qualifies as fair use), but because it was “the least expensive option available”.
[more inside]posted by spitefulcrow at 9:52 AM PST - 302 comments
The most recent issue of Superman, 712, was supposed to have a certain storyline, but it seems at the last minute, DC Comics decided to nix that storyline and instead publish a five-year-old story about Krypto the Super-Dog. These sorts of things happen, but
Comics Alliance opined (with some help from direct sources) that the change was due to DC not wanting to feature a Muslim superhero (the original story had Superman aiding "Sharif", a Muslim superhero.) The theory is, after the brouhahae surrounding
the Muslim Batman and
Superman renouncing his American citizenship, DC is hesitant to add any more fuel to the "DC hates America" fire.
"But," says comic-book muckraker
Rich Johnston, "I have inside DC stories that are telling me the REAL reason the story got nixed." He claims it's not about Muslims, it's about...well, just see for yourself what it's allegedly
really about.
posted by Legomancer at 6:51 AM PST - 55 comments
This year Georgia (US state) passed an Arizona-style law to make life and employment harder on its undocumented immigrants, including about 425,000 agricultural workers. In the spring,
farmers argued that they would be unable to recruit new workers on time for the summer harvest with a sudden change in policy. Surprisingly, the Obama administration
did not step in to block the law taking effect.
The result is an estimated 46% of farms without enough workers and $300M of crops rotting in the fields. Georgia's govenor is
shocked.
posted by a robot made out of meat at 6:17 AM PST - 215 comments
June 22
Turntable.fm DJ for a virtual room at the newest attempt at music-sharing 2.0. Listeners can vote songs up or down, or DJ themselves. Other similar projects like
Muxtape and
Listening Room have unfortunately not survived long.
posted by melissam at 8:27 PM PST - 14 comments
The title track on Michael Jackson’s hit album “Thriller” began life as a very different song - called “
Starlight.” WNYC's
Soundcheck gives us a listen.
posted by Fofer at 5:35 PM PST - 26 comments
The Bravest Woman in Seattle "The reason for her sitting on the witness stand of a packed and sweltering eighth-floor courtroom at the King County Courthouse on June 8, in jeans and a short-sleeved black blouse, hands clasped over knees, a jury of strangers taking notes, a crowd of family and friends and strangers observing, a bunch of media recording, was to say: This happened to me. You must listen. This happened to us. You must hear who was lost. You must hear what he did. You must hear how Teresa fought him. You must hear what I loved about her. You must know what he took from us. This happened." (Trigger warning for rape and violence.)
posted by verbyournouns at 3:53 PM PST - 86 comments
Ernestina Herrera de Noble heads up The Clarin Group and the
Clarin newspaper (in Spanish), the largest in Argentina. She is the mother of two adopted children, Felipe and Marcela, heirs to the Clarin Group fortune.
She has been a controversial figure for much of her life. Currently, her paper stands in staunch opposition to the administration of President Cristina Kirchner, who in 2009 successfully pushed through legislation forcing the Clarin group to sell off some of its holdings. President Kirchner recently announced
she will be seeking a second term.
However, Mrs. Herrera de Noble's legacy will probably rest on the suit brought against her by the
Grandmothers of the Plaza del Mayo, forcing her children to
submit DNA samples to ascertain whether they are the children of detainees killed by the military during Argentina’s “
Dirty War”. The siblings and their mother have fought to avoid DNA testing, claiming it is a violation of their privacy, but there are families who claim that Felipe and Marcela are the natural born children of
women pregnant when they were detained and subsequently disappeared. Ernestina insists that the adoptions were “legal”, and her children stand by her side. If a genetic link is proven to former detainees, Mrs. Herrera de Noble may face a criminal investigation.
posted by msali at 12:28 PM PST - 30 comments
Who owns the term "app store"? Apple
wants to, but
Amazon and
Microsoft, among others, think it is generic. Will Steve Jobs's
own words come to haunt him? In any case, the first casualty of the fight between giants seems to be
Amahi, a small open-source media server.
[more inside]posted by kmz at 11:17 AM PST - 98 comments
Lightfield cameras capture the
entire photonic information of a scene with essentially infinite depth of field, meaning that pictures can be focused
after the photo is taken, and low-light conditions do not require a flash. Lightfield images are also “3D” without the need for stereo lenses.
Lightfield (aka “plenoptic”) technology was developed in the 90's: the first working prototype required dozens of separate cameras and a supercomputer.
Professional plenoptic cameras have been available for the past year; the
Lytro startup intends to release a consumer-ready shirt-pocket lightfield camera later this year.
[more inside]posted by Bora Horza Gobuchul at 10:13 AM PST - 54 comments
Heated Debates, Burning Books [Via NewYorker.com] The Canadian writer
Lawrence Hill recently received the unsettling news that a Dutch political group would be assembling on Wednesday in Amsterdam to burn copies of his novel, “The Book of Negroes” (published in the Netherlands under the title “Het Negerboek,” and in the U.S. as “Someone Knows My Name”). So what exactly does this historical novel have to do with the Dutch?
[more inside]posted by Fizz at 7:00 AM PST - 46 comments
June 21
The World of Jim Henson: 1
:: 2
:: 3
:: 4
:: 5
:: 6
:: 7
:: 8
:: 9
:: "An excellent biography of the Muppet master, this 85-minute film from the PBS show Great Performances mixes the history of Henson's projects with plenty of sketches that any fan age 6 and older should enjoy. The film shows the incredible range of Henson's creations, starting in 1955 with "Sam and Friends" then moving on to Sesame Street, The Muppet Show, Fraggle Rock, and beyond. It illustrates the breadth of his genius, from creating entirely new worlds in film (The Dark Crystal) to pithy '60s TV commercials that achieved branding and a laugh in less than six seconds. There's footage that most fans haven't seen in years, or at all: a regular bit from The Jimmy Dean Show; tantalizing bits of his 1965 Oscar-nominated short, Time Piece; appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show and The Tonight Show; his explanation of Wall Street on Nightline; and Miss Piggy's hilarious deconstruction of Morley Safer on 60 Minutes."
posted by puny human at 7:47 PM PST - 23 comments
In 1772, at the age of 73, Mrs. Mary Delany invented a new way of depicting flowers: with hundreds of small pieces of paper carefully cut out and placed. This method - which she called "paper mosaicks" and which later became known as (paper) collage - enchanted her friend Lady Portland, King George III and his queen, and natural historians, artists, collectors, and friends alike. They look like botanical paintings, but are constructed out of paper.
Browse the British Museum's collection.
[more inside]posted by julen at 3:11 PM PST - 21 comments
June 20
Haw Par Villa, also known as
Tiger Balm Gardens, was quite possibly the
weirdest theme park on the planet. The first park was built in Hong Kong in the 30s, soon followed by another in Singapore. Built by brothers Aw Boon Haw and Aw Boon Par, who made their fortunes selling
Tiger Balm, the park was really a sculpture garden devoted to all aspects of
Chinese mythology. Weirdest and most surreal of all was the section of the park which depicted the the
10 levels of
Buddhist hell, featuring demons
dismembering sinners, and is best described as "if Heironymus Bosch built a putt putt course."
posted by puny human at 7:14 PM PST - 30 comments
Whitefield-Madrano is regarding mirrors in the same role that I often give to social media. (Social-media sites seem to me to be self-consciousness machines, encouraging that one maintain a directorial distance from one’s own life experience in order to strategize how to present it in update broadcasts.) But the realities of patriarchy complicate matters considerably; as much as believe we are collectively compelling one another to route our social life through commercial social-media sites, that seems like nothing compared with the coercion involved with fulfilling gendered expectations of self-presentation.
Marginal Utility dissects Mirror Fasting. A goal that
blogger Whitefield-Madrano recently took up and called a
Month Without Mirrors. The initial reason behind her project:
"Sometimes I look in the mirror and see myself, or whatever I understand myself to be. Other times, I distinctly see an image of myself."posted by P.o.B. at 2:50 PM PST - 25 comments
The Speedup. Webster's defines speedup as "an employer's demand for accelerated output without increased pay," and it used to be a household word.
posted by bitmage at 2:11 PM PST - 43 comments
More evidence of brain plasticity: Some blind people are able to use echolocation to perceive space and objects around them in surprising detail, even though the time differences in echoes necessary to do this are two small to be consciously perceived. An fMRI study by Lore Thaler, Stephen Arnott and Melvyn Goodale revealed that people who are especially adept at this use their calcarine cortex (a.k.a. V1 or primary visual cortex) to process spatial information from the echoes.
The original paper. A shorter discussion. (
Previously)
posted by nangar at 8:58 AM PST - 13 comments
Although
much has been said about the demographic composition of the United States Congress, much less has been said about the thousands of staffers who work behind the scenes, drafting legislation, interacting with constituents, and advising their congressperson. The National Journal has created
two infographics that attempt to describe this silent, but influential workforce.
posted by schmod at 8:41 AM PST - 19 comments
In a 32 page
report to Congress [pdf] President Obama concludes:
...the current U.S. military operations in Libya are consistent
with the War Powers Resolution and do not under that law require
further congressional authorization, because U.S. military
operations are distinct from the kind of “hostilities”
contemplated by the Resolution’s 60 day termination provision.
Now, the
New York Times reports that this legal opinion was reached by rejecting the views of top lawyers at the Pentagon and the Justice Department. It is instructive to
compare President Obama's actions with those of his predecessor, George W. Bush.
[more inside]posted by ennui.bz at 8:28 AM PST - 240 comments
'Dumbland is a crude, stupid, violent, absurd series. If it is funny, it is funny because we see the absurdity of it all.' Fresh off the critical success of
Mulholland Dr. [
previously] in 2001,
David Lynch set out in 2002 to conquer the internet, creating a paywalled website to feature original content like his short film
Darkened Room, an anti-sitcom called
Rabbits, and the intentionally lowbrow
DumbLand.
Featuring animation, music, sound effects, and voice acting entirely by Lynch,
DumbLand is a black and white Flash animation series with a total running time of approximately half an hour.
A few notes on DumbLand from Lynch. [
Also previously: David Lynch's Weather Report] [
And super-previously.]
posted by shakespeherian at 6:43 AM PST - 14 comments
June 19
"...authorities would try to find the culprits and would seek to clean up
the monument, but it was unlikely to happen right away."
posted by griphus at 7:02 PM PST - 27 comments
In an effort to preserve the rich story behind this landmark film, CONELRAD has spent the last two years thoroughly researching DUCK AND COVER's production history as well as its initial public reception in 1952. Interviews were conducted with living participants involved in the making of the film as well as surviving family members of those key players who had passed away. In the course of our research, CONELRAD also uncovered a wealth of archival material that leaves no doubt that a tremendous amount of thought went into the making of this nine minute motion picture that has been the subject of so much dismissive ridicule over the years. (More CONELRAD goodness previously)posted by Trurl at 6:29 PM PST - 12 comments
"The conventional wisdom, promoted by government and echoed
by the subservient media, is that UFOs are mysterious objects
which by definition are unknowable. Anyone attempting to explain
them is a charlatan perpetrating a hoax and using 'junk physics' .
That may not be so."
[more inside]posted by Obscure Reference at 5:19 PM PST - 50 comments
This morning "
The Daily Show's Jon Stewart entered the proverbial lion's den, appearing live [
video highlights | 01:43] on
Fox News Sunday to debate 'media bias' with host Chris Wallace." "The
interview [video | 24:11] got off to a rousing start with Wallace almost immediately calling Stewart out for his criticism of the network and its brand of news coverage and went exactly where you'd expect it to from there."
[more inside]posted by ericb at 3:56 PM PST - 102 comments
From bouffants du jour and shampoo secrets of the stars to yesteryear's 'dos and you-know-you-want-it accessories, if it's about hair, you'll find it at the always entertaining
Hair Hall of Fame.
posted by madamjujujive at 2:28 PM PST - 6 comments
Solaris, Stanislaw Lem's 1961 masterpiece, has
finally been translated directly into English. The
current print version, in circulation for over 4 decades, was the result of
a double-translation. Firstly from Polish to French, in 1966, by Jean-Michel Jasiensko. This version was then taken up by Joanna Kilmartin and Steve Cox who hacked together an English version in 1970. Lem,
himself a fluent English speaker, was always
scathing of the double translation. Something he believed added to the universal misunderstanding of his greatest work. After the relsease of
two film versions of the story, and decades of speculation, a new direct English translation
has been released. Translated by American Professor
Bill Johnston '
The Definitive Solaris' is only available as an audiobook for the time being. Copyright issues, hampered by
several, widely available, editions of the poor English translation may mean it is some time yet before a definitive print edition makes it
onto our bookshelves.
posted by 0bvious at 4:29 AM PST - 64 comments
In 1991 during the publicity tour for
Harlot's Ghost,
Martin Amis interviewed Norman Mailer (
pt. 2,
pt. 3, and
pt. 4). Topics covered include the CIA, the Democratic Party, liberalism, communism, the writing life, being Jewish, feminism, the men’s movement, homosexuality, George Bush, and the Kennedys.
posted by Jasper Friendly Bear at 12:27 AM PST - 7 comments
June 18
To record the history of the large format movies and the 70mm cinemas as remembered by the people who worked with the films.posted by Trurl at 6:23 PM PST - 18 comments
Imagine a web where domains can end in just about any generic top-level domain (new gTLD), e.g. .metafilter. Well, that's soon a
reality:
The organization that oversees the Internet address system is preparing to open the floodgates to a nearly limitless selection of new website suffixes, including ones in Arabic, Chinese and other scripts. That could usher in the most sweeping transformation of the Domain Name System since its creation in the 1980s
[more inside]posted by Foci for Analysis at 4:09 PM PST - 103 comments
Scientists at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine have published a
new study (behind paywall -
summary) on the effects of "magic mushrooms". Volunteers were given 4 doses of psilocybin spaced one month apart. The study built on previous work and attempted to optimize the experience for
long-lasting positive effects:
61% of volunteers considered the psilocybin experience during either or both the [highest dosage] sessions to have been the single most spiritually significant of their lives, with 83% rating it in their top five. Consistent with this, 94% and 89% of volunteers, respectively, indicated that the experiences on those same sessions increased their well-being or life satisfaction and positively changed their behavior at least moderately.
[more inside]posted by crayz at 2:35 PM PST - 172 comments
"Punk-artist-anthropologist Cameron Jamie has made three documentaries on violence; I’ve read about them all and seen
just this one." The author speaks of "Kranky Klaus," LA-born artist Jamie's peek into the Austrian folkloric character
Krampus, a sort of photo-negative of Santa Claus who comes on Christmas to punish bad children.
[more inside]posted by Astro Zombie at 10:20 AM PST - 12 comments
June 17
One night, I awoke out of a dead sleep, and jumped to my computer, and instantly began typing up an article about David Letterman. I kept going for ten minutes, until I realized I had dreamed it all. There was no article to write; I was simply typing up the same meaningless phrases that we all always used: “LADY GAGA PANTLESS ON LATE NIGHT WITH DAVID LETTERMAN,” or some such.
AOL Hell: An AOL Content Slave Speaks Out.posted by Horace Rumpole at 7:30 PM PST - 126 comments
Stuck. On their way home from photographing Formula Drift Palm Beach,
Joe Ayala &
Larry Chen found themselves stranded over night in Dallas Fort Worth as their flights home were canceled
posted by growabrain at 5:53 PM PST - 34 comments
Enrique Metinides artfully captured five decades of mayhem in Mexico City. His successors keep his tradition alive. "David Alvarado is a quiet guy who does one of the ugliest jobs in this world but he will win your sympathy with his famous saying "se logró el objetivo" (the objective was accomplished).
previously (graphic images and content Very NSFW and NSFC not safe for children)
[more inside]posted by Xurando at 5:38 PM PST - 20 comments
The Muppets in Thor is NOT another fake trailer for the upcoming movie. It's a 24-page mostly-24-hour comic by the guy who does
Max Overacts. Note: contains discrete male nudity, pig-on-Norse-God violence, obscure references (Junior Woodchucks!), sentimental time travel and IMO very good use of a lot of familiar characters, including Rowlf (MY favorite Muppet) putting it all in perspective.
posted by oneswellfoop at 3:53 PM PST - 22 comments
"What I'm asking is this: Are screenwriters now affected by "spoiler culture" before they even begin the writing process? If you know a twist will be unavoidably revealed before the majority of people see the work itself, and if you concede that selling and marketing a film with a major secret will be more complicated for everyone involved … would you even try? Would you essentially stop yourself from trying to write a movie that's structured like The Sixth Sense?"
Are Spoilers Flipping the Script?posted by Brandon Blatcher at 2:48 PM PST - 128 comments
Control of Robert Smithson's earthwork masterpiece
Spiral Jetty (360° panorama - QuickTime required) is now in dispute. Last week, a spokesperson for the Utah Division of Forestry, Fire and State Lands announced that the New York-based Dia Foundation, which was given stewardship over the work by the artist's estate, had been
tardy in making its annual $250 payment on the 10 acres of land and had also failed to respond to an automatically generated notice that the 20 year lease had expired. (The Dia Foundation
disagrees.) Consequently, it will now be "managed like any other sovereign land" - which may be of interest to the
energy companies that have sought to explore the area.
(previously)posted by Trurl at 10:11 AM PST - 46 comments
Do you want some Spam with your Kindle? Spam has hit the Kindle, clogging the online bookstore of the top-selling eReader with material that is far from being book worthy and threatening to undermine Amazon.com Inc's publishing foray.
posted by Fizz at 8:53 AM PST - 95 comments
"In this piece I didn't browse YouTube, I actually wandered around Jerusalem, met with musicians and filmed them." New music/video from
Kutiman -
Thru Jerusalem.
posted by pashdown at 8:23 AM PST - 14 comments
The New Aesthetic For a while now, I’ve been collecting images and things that seem to approach a new aesthetic of the future, which sounds more portentous than I mean. What I mean is that we’ve got frustrated with the NASA extropianism space-future, the failure of jetpacks, and we need to see the technologies we actually have with a new wonder.posted by jack_mo at 4:05 AM PST - 57 comments
Aviation Week and Space Technology explains that sequence of events in the crash that killed all 228 people onboard the flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris can be segmented into two distinct phases.
In the first phase, the pilots were dealing with the failure of speed readings that are almost certain to be linked to iced-over pitot tubes. The second phase began when speed indications returned to normal and the aircraft was at the edge of its flight envelope but under control and not stalled. Phase two also coincided with the captain’s return to the cockpit from an agreed-upon rest.
[more inside]posted by three blind mice at 3:27 AM PST - 66 comments
June 16
"Hey guys, drinks are on me! I finally scored that interview with the Dali Llama. My journalism career is finally about to take off." 30 minutes and 3 rounds later..."Phil, you know what you should do? Tell him the Pizza joke. I'm sure he'll get a kick out of it." "Haha! You're right. That's an awesome idea.
What could possibly go wrong?"
posted by jadayne at 10:51 PM PST - 404 comments
Metaskim: A news aggregator that cuts out a lot of the fat and gives you relevant local and national news.
posted by reenum at 2:24 PM PST - 24 comments
AFSAD: On June 24, 2010 – Midsummer’s Day – the acclaimed British singer Jon Boden launched an ambitious new project –
A Folk Song A Day. Every day for (nearly) a year now he's been posting his performance of a traditional song free online or as an audio podcast. He's now got just eight of his 365 songs to go, so now's your chance to catch up before it's too late.
posted by Paul Slade at 12:00 PM PST - 2 comments
"People have travelled along the Norwegian coastline with
"Hurtigruten" since 1893. The journey is known as "The World's Most Beautiful Sea Voyage". Now everybody can travel along in the world's longest TV program! Spectacular fjords, midnight sun and genuine Norwegian scenery make the setting for a trip from Bergen to Kirkenes. We broadcast the whole trip live minute by minute for 134 hours!"
Watch the whole thing live here.
[more inside]posted by sveskemus at 11:08 AM PST - 26 comments
It was music to be heard, not listened to. It was the soundtrack to the relaxed, sophisticated, mature vision of the good life. It was music for lovers. It was upbeat, elaborately arranged, chart-toppingly popular, and yet has been almost written out of the popular music history books, dismissed as “elevator music”; soulless, toned-down, pre-chewed, limp cover-versions of popular songs for old people. So sit back, put aside the politics and angst, slip into something comfortable (preferably with someone of similar description), and allow yourself to experience
The Joy of Easy Listening [2, 3, 4, 5, 6]posted by Pirate-Bartender-Zombie-Monkey at 9:43 AM PST - 42 comments
The much-beloved
Arrested Development was characterized by its complex, multilayered narrative jokes;
here the A. V. Club analyzed a 50-second-long clip and tried to map out all its references (including one very subtle three-part joke about eggs). Luckily for you, there’s a very exhaustive web site,
The Balboa Observer-Picayune, which documents the show’s obscurest jokes (
H. Maddas,
Blackstool,
GOB’s ice obsession), its cleverest callbacks (
Hello’s revenge,
”Mom says”,
pilot/
finale callbacks), its visual gags (
yearbooks,
newspapers,
cartoons,
Amazon), and its longest-running gags (
I’ve made a huge mistake”,
“Her?”,
Cloud Mir,
”Hey, brother!”, and the
chicken dance). Complete index of references at the
Bluthcyclopedia.
Complete transcripts of every episode. Bonus songs!
All You Need Is Smiles.
Yellow Boat.
Big Yellow Joint.
Hot Cops.
It Ain’t Easy Being White.
Discipline Daddy.
Motherboy.
Balls in the Air.
You Here With Me.
I Get Up. Finally,
Fonzie jumps the shark again.
[more inside]posted by Rory Marinich at 7:59 AM PST - 301 comments
June 15
"
Davis didn’t have time to ponder their motives. The intersection of Jail and Ferozepur roads was packed with cars, bicycles, rickshaws, and pedestrians; the motorcycle pulled around his car and stopped just ahead of it. Shamshad, on the back of the bike, turned. He raised his pistol. He cocked it." [
Black Ops and Blood Money] (
previously and
previouslier)
posted by vidur at 9:40 PM PST - 30 comments
What would a pro sports playoff drive be without a fan-written tribute song? For those anticipating Game 7 of the Stanley Cup playoffs tonight, here for your enjoyment is
Canucks Waleyan Ne, a Bhangra song written by members of Vancouver's large South Asian community. English lyrics available
here (pdf), pasted below the fold for your convenience.
[more inside]posted by PercussivePaul at 10:25 AM PST - 81 comments
William Temple Hornaday was an early--and probably a founding--member of the American conservation movement, and was also director of the National Zoological Park. He wrote a tremendously bitter and accurate report for the U.S. National Museum in 1894 on the extermination of the American bison, an absolute head-shaker, detailing the history of the bison in North America and its destruction at the hands of sportsmen, hunters, mindless dolts and many others who massacred tens of millions of the animal ("murdered" is the word Hornaday uses constantly). To put the whole issue in perspective, Hornaday issued a famous map showing the shrinkage of the North American bison herd, setting out the enormity of the issue instantly on one piece of paper, a summary of hundreds of pages of bad stories and big numbers.posted by Trurl at 9:59 AM PST - 18 comments
The Triumph of New-Age Medicine "Medicine has long decried acupuncture, homeopathy, and the like as dangerous nonsense that preys on the gullible. Again and again, carefully controlled studies have shown alternative medicine to work no better than a placebo. But now many doctors admit that alternative medicine often seems to do a better job of making patients well, and at a much lower cost, than mainstream care—and they’re trying to learn from it." [more inside]posted by zarq at 9:44 AM PST - 278 comments
"Starting in an austere room where they are made to sit quietly, symbolizing Europe, the children will pass through an obstacle course to arrive at a brightly decorated party room (the New World). Red-white-and-blue confetti will be thrown. But afterward the kids will have to clean up the confetti, learning that with freedom comes responsibility."
This, and many other fun activities from The Paideia School of Tampa Bay's
Tea Party Summer Camp.
posted by XQUZYPHYR at 8:50 AM PST - 125 comments
Welcome to Boney Borough, a place where the unit of currency is credits or creds; the most popular (and illegal) sport is DieBall, a game in which the players rub an adhesive, gooey, and brain-damaging substance called Die Gunk on their hands and bodies to help them hold on to the ball; and where one itinerant, nicotine-patch addict, self-proclaimed botany professor, Professor Panther, spreads his knowledge of hallucinogenic plants throughout the town like wildfire. Oh, and did I mention that Boney Borough and its inhabitants are also being watched over by aliens, who are using the townsfolk as guinea pigs in a single-minded experiment? Or, it might be best to say, like ants in a colony.... This is
BodyWorld, a comic by
Dash Shaw. And it's
all online.
[more inside]posted by filthy light thief at 8:08 AM PST - 9 comments
It's not the objective environment that influences people, but their constructs of the world. You have to get inside people's heads and see the world the way they do. You have to look at the kinds of narratives and stories people tell themselves as to why they're doing what they're doing...
Many policy makers, if they're thinking about a problem turn to economists... When economists think about how to solve a problem such as closing the achievement gap in education, or reducing teenage pregnancy, their inclination is to use incentives... To a social psychologist, it is a little naïve to think that adding external incentives is all you have to do. Not to say that incentives can't work, but they can sometimes backfire if you look at it through the eyes of the person who is getting that incentive.
Pioneering investigator of the unconscious Timothy Wilson on the
state of social psychology and its practical applications – including government attempts to shape public behaviour, and the futility of the self-help industry.
[via]posted by AceRock at 7:34 AM PST - 21 comments
June 14
It's no secret that throughout their long career, the Rolling Stones have covered
lots of tunes by black singers and bands from the worlds of soul, blues, R&B, reggae and early rock'n'roll, and have, of course, been heavily influenced by these various genres in their own performance and songwriting. Perhaps a bit lesser known is that several of the most iconic and legendary figures in black music have covered Stones songs as well. Here's
Brown Sugar by
Little Richard,
Satisfaction by
Aretha Frankilin and
Otis Redding,
Under My Thumb by
Tina Turner,
Start Me Up by
Toots and the Maytals and, rather unexpectedly,
Let's Spend the Night Together by blues great
Muddy Watersposted by flapjax at midnite at 8:40 PM PST - 52 comments
Berlin, circa 1921: The painter Hans Richter turns his talents to film and produces one of the earliest abstract films, Rhythmus 21. Clocking in at just over three minutes, it's a significant departure from the newsreels, romances, cliff-hangers, and penny-dreadfuls that made up the bulk of film production in the early ’20s—the first decade in which the film industry began to play a major economic and cultural role around the world. [more inside]posted by scody at 1:33 PM PST - 9 comments
Sunspots, first observed by Galileo, normally follow an 11-year cycle. We are into a few years into (recorded) cycle number 24 but according to NASA it's looking rather
underpowered. Nobody is certain exactly what the consequences will be, but one distinct possibility is a
cold period; a previous low in solar activity, the
Maunder minimum, is correlated with a brief
Little Ice Age. Nobody really knows how this unusual solar weather pattern might interact with human-caused climate change.
Previously, albeit somewhat controversially.
posted by anigbrowl at 1:29 PM PST - 28 comments
Burzynski, the Movie is the story of a medical doctor and Ph.D biochemist named Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski who won the largest, and possibly the most convoluted and intriguing legal battle against the Food & Drug Administration in American history.
A documentary by Eric Merola.
posted by xmattxfx at 11:50 AM PST - 12 comments
As time has gone by, though, Touch of Evil has acquired a large cult following, and it now regularly appears on lists of the best films of the century. What is not generally known is that the film never accurately reflected Welles's intentions for it. In July 1957, the studio took over the editing of the film and prevented him from participating in its completion. In an odd turn of events, however, a 58-page memo that Welles wrote in 1957 was recently rediscovered, and a small team on which I was film editor and sound mixer has used that remarkable document to bring Touch of Evil
as close as possible to Welles's original concept. - Walter Murch, 1998
posted by Trurl at 9:56 AM PST - 37 comments
Your Sweet Justice story for the day: In February, K.C. was riding her bike home from work. While waiting at a stop light, she felt a slight bump from the car behind her, followed by laughter from within. K.C. wasn't looking for a fight, and did her best to ignore this. Disappointed with his failure to elicit a response, the driver bumped her again, this time a bit harder. This is when K.C. pulled out her police badge, and
things started to get weird...posted by schmod at 9:33 AM PST - 94 comments
Is this the future of the bicycle? The Bezerra Corportation believe that their 'Stepper Mechanism' holds the future of bicycling for the new millenium.
Bezerra Corporation's revolutionary cycle feature is its pedal-crank mechanism, referred to as the "Stepper Mechanism". When placed in its bicycle application, it operates in a vertical, up-and-down, "stepper" motion, and is designed to replace the 6.0" to 7.5" conventional rotary crank arm
posted by SyntacticSugar at 8:38 AM PST - 73 comments
A Terrible Legacy More than 60,000 Americans were sterilised, many against their will, as part of a eugenics movement that finished in 1979, aimed at keeping the poor and mentally ill from having children. Now, decades on, one state is considering compensation.
posted by modernnomad at 8:15 AM PST - 24 comments
Smash Hits! was a UK music magazine, first published at the end of 1978. It charted the progress of pop styles, including
the rise of 2-Tone, and
included a number of freebie discs, first as
flexi discs, and later on CDs. The magazine faltered in the 1990s, and
closed shop in 2006. Since then there have been a few one-off "special editions," first
a 2009 tribute to Michael Jackson, and then
a Lady Gaga special in 2010. 30 years after the first issue went on sale,
a fan posted the first issue online. So far,
new scans have been posted fort-nightly, following the original release schedule. 73 issues are online to date, each three decades after they first were sold. (
via MetaChat)
posted by filthy light thief at 7:45 AM PST - 20 comments
"Horror vacui - 'fear of emptiness' or empty space is a term I love. The phrase carries with it intimations of mania and compulsion —covering every surface, interweaving pattern atop pattern. Perhaps it can be as loosely interpreted as Collyer Brothers piles or the noisy and noisome claustrophobic streets of Dickensian London. Somehow, though, I relate the term to an overall sensibility. A complex density with an awareness of the whole, not an open-ended haphazardness."
A blogger explores the artistic notion of
horror vacui.posted by Lovecraft In Brooklyn at 5:28 AM PST - 40 comments
"
Using pejorative terms like "handouts" and "doling out", some parts of the media are mounting a campaign to suggest Britain should be embarrassed by our level of aid giving. But the idea that aid is generous is absurd. Some families, inspired by religious tradition, think it is appropriate to give 10% of what they have to charity, £10 in every £100 of earnings. In 2010, the UK gave not £10, not £1, but 56p ($0.91) in overseas aid for every £100 ($163) we earned as a country. On average, since 1990 we have given even less, 35p ($0.57)." [
Giving aid to poor countries is hardly a great act of generosity]
[more inside]posted by vidur at 12:42 AM PST - 59 comments
June 13
Think making beer at home is legal? Depends where your home is.
In 1978, US President Carter signed H.R. 1337, which, among other things, provided an exemption from excise taxes on up to 100 gallons of
homemade wine and beer annually. It was still up to the individual states to decide whether or not to allow their citizens to brew.
33 years later,
homebrewing is a very popular hobby, legal almost all states.
Except
Mississippi and
Alabama. [more inside]posted by Marky at 8:38 PM PST - 70 comments
Today, Judge Donovan of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Central District of California in Los Angeles
ruled [link is to pdf of decision] that
DOMA is unconstitutional. 19 judges join his opinion.
[more inside]posted by insectosaurus at 8:24 PM PST - 35 comments
De Nyew Testament. Gullah [also,
previously] is a creole language spoken by about a quarter-million people in the Eastern United States. For decades, Bible translators
worked to translate the Bible into the Gullah language. The full,
HTML New Testament is available online, but a print copy can be
ordered online.
So den, oona mus go ta all de people all oba de wol an laan um fa be me ciple dem. Oona mus bactize um een de name ob de Fada God, an de name ob de Son, an de name ob de Holy Sperit. 20Oona mus laan um fa do all wa A done chaage oona fa do. An fa sho, A gwine be dey wid oona all de time til de time end.
--De Good Nyews Bout Jedus Christ Wa Matthew Write, 28:19-20
This post was inspired by recently reading that Clarence Thomas grew up speaking Gullah, and thinking about the implications of growing up with very little written tradition in your own language.posted by Philosopher Dirtbike at 12:48 PM PST - 88 comments
A Doctor World: A beautiful mashup of Doctor Who and A Softer World. (Note that some posts contain major spoilers for "A Good Man Goes to War.")
posted by rhiannonstone at 12:42 PM PST - 29 comments
Using a fake Facebook profile, Angela Voelkert
got her ex-husband David to admit that he “planned to move somewhere warm with his kids, that he was still going to his next court dates, and would take off soon after” and ask his new teen-aged friend “to find someone at your school, there should be some gang bangers there that would put a cap in her ass for $10,000. I am just done with her crap!” Unfortunately for Angela, David
was a step ahead and
thoroughly played his ex-wife. All charges
have been dropped and they are still Facebook friends.
posted by -->NMN.80.418 at 12:25 PM PST - 139 comments
Italy's PM: can I privatize water supply, guarantee private investors a minimum 7% ROI on investments in water supply infrastructure, avoid showing up at scheduled court hearings and build a few nuclear plants, please?
NO, you can't, answered nearly 30 million italians (
95% of the voters, 57% of the people that held the right to vote) in the latest italian national referendum, whose final results are just about to be
published (italian).
[more inside]posted by elpapacito at 11:39 AM PST - 22 comments
Space Rubbish Take asteroids, add in an upgrade system and more realistic rock fracturing and you get the frantic experience of Space Rubbish. (Flash)
posted by boo_radley at 10:40 AM PST - 19 comments
The Federal Bureau of Investigation is giving significant new powers to its roughly 14,000 agents, allowing them more leeway to search databases, go through household trash or use surveillance teams to scrutinize the lives of people who have attracted their attention.posted by Trurl at 9:27 AM PST - 46 comments
Project Thirty-Three "The seemingly infinite number of vintage record jackets that convey their message with only simple shapes and typography never cease to amaze me. Project Thirty-Three is my personal collection and shrine to circles and dots, squares and rectangles, and triangles, and the brilliant designers that made them come to life on album covers."
posted by OmieWise at 7:55 AM PST - 19 comments
The Football Pantheon is a new website by football journalist Miguel Delaney. The aim of the website is to "present objective lists of the greatest clubs, players, countries, managers and so much more." The first entry is a very impressive list of
The 50 Greatest European Club Sides, which breaks down the various legendary teams, from the late 19th Century until today, and ranks them according to their achievements.
posted by Kattullus at 7:34 AM PST - 17 comments
Terry Pratchett starts process to take his own life. Sir Terry Pratchett, the fantasy writer who was diagnosed with Alzheimer's in 2008, said yesterday he had started the formal process that could lead to his own assisted suicide at the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland. The fantasy writer Terry Pratchett says he has received consent forms requesting assisted suicide but has not yet signed them.
[Previously] [Previously]posted by Fizz at 5:56 AM PST - 132 comments
June 12
"Internationally, the league has never been stronger: It's the only American sports league that attracts stars from every corner of the world. Digitally, the league has been light years ahead of everyone else, embracing the revolution and staying ahead of the curve with social media and video content. It's also spent the past two decades carefully (and successfully) selling mostly black players to a mostly white audience, an ongoing conundrum that nearly submarined the league in the late-'70s and early-'80s. Throw in a killer 2011 Finals and everything looks fantastic on paper … except for the part that the league is losing money." -
Bill Simmons analyzes the NBA labor dispute for his new website,
Grantland.
posted by beisny at 11:42 PM PST - 86 comments
Where’s @towerbridge? Even for non-Londoners the account
@towerbridge was a bit of "London flair" in their twitter stream. It was a bot mostly posting when the famous landmark opened and closed due to ships passing by, run by game designer Tom Armitage. Now it has been taken from him by Twitter and given to the official Tower Bridge museum, apparently on the basis of
trademark infringement. Twitter users both in the UK and abroad
are not happy.
posted by dominik at 10:43 PM PST - 44 comments
Iori Tomita:
New World Transparent Specimens "If you’re a fish, Iori Tomita can see right through you. Or at least he can after he’s worked you over in his lab. A lifelong fisherman who studied ichthyology as an undergrad, the Japanese artist uses marine life he receives from fellow fishermen to create what he calls New World Transparent Specimens—sea creatures that have been transformed into DayGlo shells of their former selves. He first saw a sample of a fish that had been turned transparent at a university lecture six years ago, and since then he has used the same preservation technique to make thousands of hypercolored cadavers, which he sells at the Tokyu Hands department store."
posted by puny human at 1:19 PM PST - 10 comments
Listen to a conversation between legendary American crime novelist Raymond Chandler and James Bond inventor Ian Fleming recorded by the BBC in 1958. The talk ranges from Mafia hits to the nature of villainy to the difference between English and American thriller.
posted by Bookhouse at 12:38 PM PST - 25 comments
Lorem Pixum — A placeholder image generator for web and print designers for any size or topic. Speed up your workflow during the development process.
posted by netbros at 8:38 AM PST - 24 comments
The two year long
saga of how McDonalds engineered the perfect cottage cheese filet for the McSpicy Paneer burger. McD has a
turbulent history in India where its processes, practices and products, successfully developed over decades, have been turned upside down and
redesigned, often from scratch.
[more inside]posted by infini at 1:03 AM PST - 116 comments
June 11
Starlite: Ineffective for Car Bonnets, Great Against Nuclear Blasts. In the late 1980s, an English amateur inventor and hair-dresser
released a plastic which, he claimed, had unusual heat-resistant properties. BBC Television demonstrated the material, dubbed Starlite, keeping an egg cool despite a five-minute onslaught from a blowtorch; here
the inventor provides links to the
footage. After initial skepticism, the reception from industrial and military players was rapturous. But while Starlite apparently stood up to the heat of 10000 Celsius lasers, its inventor, wary of being cheated, proved equally stubborn in negotiation, and Starlite seems never have been brought to market or mass production.
[more inside]posted by darth_tedious at 1:31 PM PST - 62 comments
No time to read a babillion nineties Batman comics in the run-up to the
Dark Knight Rises? Cooking With Comics will
explain Knightfall for you in less than nine minutes! (SLYT) (
via)
posted by EatTheWeak at 12:35 PM PST - 24 comments
Before
John Ross died this January, he asked his family and friends to do the following with his ashes:
1) Scatter them along the #14 bus route in San Francisco’s Mission District, where Ross lived on and off for much of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. 2) Sprinkle them in the ashtrays in front of the Hotel Isabel in downtown Mexico City, Ross’s home base from 1985 to 2010. 3) Mix them with marijuana and have them rolled into a spliff to be smoked at his funeral. A certain half-baked logic ran through much of
Ross’s life and writing. For a few years during the Carter era, as he recounts in his (mostly true) memoir
Murdered by Capitalism, he spent his afternoons drinking Gallo wine and smoking pot and PCP in the
Trinidad cemetery in Humboldt County, California. It was there that he met the ghost of
Edward B. Schnaubelt...
posted by jim in austin at 9:17 AM PST - 17 comments
Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick recently decided that the state would not participate in a federal program to deport illegal immigrants accused of crimes. Several Republican state Representatives have been very vocal about opposing Patrick's decision. One is
Ryan Fattman (really), who says that
all illegal immigrants should be deported. When asked if a woman who was raped and beaten on the street should fear deportation, Fattman
replied, "“My thought is that if someone is here illegally, they should be afraid to come forward."
[more inside]posted by waitingtoderail at 3:18 AM PST - 47 comments
Some sixty-five countries have some form of
compulsory military service - the Republic of China (Taiwan) is one of them. Haitien, an American-born, college-educated person of Taiwanese decent who recently returned to Taiwan, is writing about his experience fufilling his service on his blog
Bala daily 巴樂日報.
[more inside]posted by sudasana at 1:52 AM PST - 37 comments
June 10
Internet K-Hole is an image blog consisting mostly of anonymous snapshots and Polaroids from the 1970s through the 1990s presented at random without description or context that go on for ever and ever and ever. (Some images NSFW.)
posted by Hey Dean Yeager! at 8:01 PM PST - 121 comments
The Rutt-Etra-Izer is a WebGL emulation of the classic Rutt-Etra video synthesizer created by
Felix Turner. It requires a recent version of Chrome or Firefox. If you can't get the synthesizer to work, there is a video of the audioreactive version made with Processing in the author's
announcement. YMMV. Do not taunt Rutt-Etra-Izer.
posted by mkb at 7:21 PM PST - 10 comments
Voters Have Up to Five Times More Influence in Early Primaries. 'Voters in states with early primary races such as Iowa and New Hampshire have up to five times the influence of voters in later states in selecting presidential candidates, according to research by Brown University economist Brian Knight. The paper, the first to quantify the effects of early victories in the race for the presidential nomination, is co-authored by Nathan Schiff and published in
The Journal of Political Economy."Evidence that early voters have a disproportionate influence over the selection of candidates violates 'one person-one vote' -- a democratic ideal on which our nation is based."'
[more inside]posted by VikingSword at 1:31 PM PST - 53 comments
Space Girl
My mama told me I should never venture into space.
But I did, I did, I did.
She said no Terran girl could trust the Martian race.
But I did, I did, I did.
A rocket pilot asked me on a voyage to go.
And I was so romantic I couldn't say no.
That he was just a servo robot how was I to know?
So I did, I did, I did.
A multisource fanvid by
Charmax, music by
Imagined Village. [more inside]posted by severiina at 12:40 PM PST - 27 comments
Toronto's new alt-weekly The Grid has kicked up a storm of controversy this week with their cover story
Dawn of a New Gay, which focuses on a new breed of "post-mos" who sneer at the traditional trappings of homosexuality and gay activism. Torontoist
responds, and one of the subjects of the article has
denounced his involvement in the piece.
posted by yellowbinder at 10:12 AM PST - 126 comments
"
I performed to MADONNA's "VOGUE" in the summer of 1991 when my parents took me to Hampton Beach Casino in Hampton Beach, New Hampshire. A business in the casino at the time gave tourists the chance to lip-synch to their favorite pop songs in front of a blue screen background, and I was lucky enough to partake that summer."
posted by hermitosis at 10:12 AM PST - 73 comments
"
Mother Jones [and, later, other media outlets] requested [Sarah] Palin's
gubernatorial emails during the 2008 election. Almost three years later, the wait is over. ... Today, at [1:00 pm ET] in Juneau, the state of Alaska is scheduled to release 24,199 pages of emails Sarah Palin sent and received during her half-term as governor of the Last Frontier. State workers will distribute six-box sets and hand trucks (which must be returned) to representatives of
a dozen or so media outfits" "Volunteers from the League of Women Voters and the Retired Public Employees of Alaska will be at Juneau's Centennial Hall convention center ... look[ing] for
any significant or interesting emails, stick a post-it note on the page, and pass them to journalists, who also will be reading through the 24,000 pages. Exact copies of the best of those emails will be posted online immediately. ... In the same room ... a second set of the documents will be scanned for msnbc.com by Crivella West, an analytics and investigative-research company from Pittsburgh, returning the records to their original electronic form, allowing anyone anywhere to join in the crowdsourcing. That free, public, searchable archive will go online, sometime later on Friday, at
http://palinemail.msnbc.msn.com." "The
Washington Post is looking for '100 organized and diligent readers' to work with reporters to 'analyze, contextualize, and research the emails.'
The New York Times is employing a similar system.'"
* [more inside]posted by ericb at 9:25 AM PST - 158 comments
In the early 1990s, Adam West starred in two short-lived television series:
Lookwell and
The Clinic.
Lookwell, created by Conan O'Brien and Robert Smigel, centered around West's character, Ty Lockwell, a washed up actor whose previous gig as a TV detective led him to believe that he was capable of solving crimes. Owner of an honorary detective badge, Lookwell ropes his acting students into playing various characters as he tracks down leads. Only the pilot episode ever aired. The other show,
The Clinic, was a short-lived soap opera spoof that aired briefly (five episodes) on Comedy Central. It featured West as the overly dramatic Dr. Horton Van Hoon, an alcoholic in charge of a failing health clinic.
The Clinic also featured radio cult personality
Joe Frank in one of his very few acting roles.
posted by (Arsenio) Hall and (Warren) Oates at 8:00 AM PST - 17 comments
"Over the past few decades, 160 million women have vanished from East and South Asia — or, to be more accurate, they were never born at all. Throughout the region, the practice of sex selection — prenatal sex screening followed by selective termination of pregnancies — has yielded a generation packed with boys. From a normal level of 105 boys to 100 girls, the ratio has shifted to 120, 150, and, in some cases, nearly 200 boys born for every 100 girls. In some countries, like South Korea, ratios spiked and are now returning to normal. But sex selection is on the rise in Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East." American journalist Mara Hvistendahl's new book: "
Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men," examines and tries to predict the actual and potential effects of unequal sex ratios on men, women and the social economies of the affected regions, including the recent spike in sex trafficking and bride-buying across Asia.
More.
[more inside]posted by zarq at 7:36 AM PST - 65 comments
The A. V. Club has an exhaustive and revealing
four-part interview with Dan Harmon, creator of Community, in which he discusses the conception and production behind every episode of the show's ambitious and flawed second season.
posted by Rory Marinich at 5:48 AM PST - 88 comments
June 9
Brian Wood is a comic book writer, best known for his subversive
DMZ, which explores the city of New York in the aftermath of a second American civil war. He is now offering a 132-page artbook entitled "
Public Domain 2" in its entirety as a free download on his site.
posted by chmmr at 4:51 PM PST - 14 comments
The official Google Earth plugin is one free download that makes all sorts of cool stuff possible in your browser. There's
a full screen version of the program (complete with underwater views and 3D buildings) which can be searched by entering queries at the end of the URL. There's
a framed version with support for layers, historical imagery, day/night cycles, and the Google Sky starmap.
Less useful but more fun are Google's collection of "experiments" demonstrating the possibilities of the Earth API, including
a "Geo Whiz" geography quiz,
an antipode locater,
a 3D first-person view of San Francisco,
a virtual route-follower, and
MONSTER MILKTRUCK!, a crazy fun driving simulator that lets you careen a virtual milk truck through the Googleplex campus, ricochet off the Himalayas, or explore any other place you care to name.
Lots more can be found in the
Google Earth Gallery -- highlights include
a look at mountaintop removal mining,
a real-time flight tracker,
a guide to trails and outdoor recreation,
a 360 panorama catalog,
geotagged Panoramio photos,
and the comprehensive crowdsourced
Google Earth Community Layer.
And while it's too large to view online, don't miss loading
the Metafilter user location map into a desktop version of Google Earth!
[more inside]posted by Rhaomi at 3:27 PM PST - 15 comments
"A
short film chronicling the legendary Johnny Canuck, his years of triumph and turmoil, and how they mirror the history of the Vancouver Canucks franchise and their Stanley Cup run in 2010-2011." [SLYT]
[more inside]posted by Felicity Rilke at 2:59 PM PST - 28 comments
Star of the popular sitcom
30 Rock, Tracy Morgan, allegedly told a Nashville audience
during his comedy routine on June 4 that " gay is a choice," "there is no way a woman could love and have sexual desire for another woman, that's just a woman pretending because she hates a .... man", and that "gay was something kids learn from the media and programming, and that bullied kids should just bust some @## and beat those other little fuckers that bully them, not whine about it. "
Truth Wins Out, a self-described "a non-profit organization that fights anti-LGBT religious extremism" is calling for Morgan to respond to the allegations
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 2:43 PM PST - 230 comments
The search for the puck that scored the Stanley Cup winning goal last year
(previously) finds new hard evidence that linesman Steve Miller
picked it up. The hall of fame is
calling for changes to ensure this doesn't happen again. And as two storied franchises
fight for their first Cups in quit a while, Steve Miller is
on the ice again, a linesman for games 1 and 3 of the finals so far.
posted by jermsplan at 9:59 AM PST - 27 comments
Dolphin Paratroopers "The most bizarre Soviet marine mammal system was a dolphin paratrooper. A dolphin wore a harness attached to a parachute, and could be dropped from heights up to 3,000 meters." Not a computer game, but Brian "Skeptoid" Dunning on the military's killer dolphins in the US and elsewhere. All the more fascinating for being soberly researched and bullshit-free.
posted by Paul Slade at 9:04 AM PST - 37 comments
Alice Pyne, a UK teenager with cancer, recently started her blog,
Alice's Bucket List, with a personal wish-list. Top of the list is 'To make everyone sign up to be a bone marrow donor'. Her request has been brought up
in parliament and helped by likes of
Charlie Brooker (NSFW) has since become a top trend on twitter.
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 8:31 AM PST - 31 comments
"How is one to know which
aspect of a person counts as that person’s
true self?" Does it lie "precisely in our suppressed urges and unacknowledged emotions, while our ability to reflect is just a hindrance that gets in the way of this true self’s expression?" Or is "the most distinctive and essential to a human being is the capacity for rational reflection?" Or is the authentic self "the
ideologically-validated self"?
posted by AceRock at 8:27 AM PST - 51 comments
Glee's Chris Colfer is writing a children's book. The Land of Stories, aimed at middle grade readers, will
come out next year. He joins
many other famous folks who have decided to write for younger readers.
Perez Hilton is doing one. Madonna's done
many. Even the "stars" of Donald Trump's Celebrity Apprentice
got in on the kidlit craze. Of course, many of these authors
don't actually write the books they publish. Even if/when they do, many readers find the results underwhelming.
"If you are looking for the next Beatrix Potter or Maurice Sendak, you will not find it here," claimed the Guardian. There are
exceptions, but it seems that for a lot of celebrities, literature for children has become merely another form of
brand extension. Author, Adam Rex has countered with "
An Open Letter to Everyone Who Thinks it Must be Easy, Writing Kid's Books" Or, as
EB White said, "You have to write up to children, not down..."
posted by cal71 at 8:15 AM PST - 31 comments
Kranium is a bike helmet that is made from cardboard and out performs the standard polystyrene-filled lids.
posted by jeffmac at 7:43 AM PST - 41 comments
Facebook Espionage. Weiner did it to himself. But that doesn't mean there aren't people out there looking to do it to you.
Henry Copeland,
blogads founder, has uncovered suggestive evidence of bot-spies on facebook being used to track personal information of influential people. All you need is the photo of a hot chick.
posted by Diablevert at 7:28 AM PST - 37 comments
June 8
"We have assembled objects in the form of a
human figure, objects of all types that we found here each day and selected for their form and color, to obtain a familial nucleus that is the unity through which the individual forms itself and develops its ability to live and realize itself in the world."
Artworks by Dario Tironi.
via iGNANTposted by unliteral at 5:26 PM PST - 4 comments
Book rescue turns nightmarish. A Saskatchewan couple saved 350,000 books from being burned by a neighbor, but now the house they bought just to store the collection is collapsing from the weight. What to do?
posted by Tsuga at 3:19 PM PST - 113 comments
It is a stunning image and one that is bound to be reproduced over and over again whenever they recall the history of the US space shuttle.posted by Trurl at 7:06 AM PST - 83 comments
June 7
The past century . . . is rich with examples, both poignant and tragic, of technological possibilities not realized. On 1 September 1939, a decision was . . . taken by our species to spend five trillion dollars and expend ~72 million human lives. This decision was followed in 1947, and repeated at intervals until 1991, to expend an additional ~12 trillion dollars, and perhaps another 1-2 million human lives. . . . In the midst of the first of these costly escapades, on 15 March, 1944, the architect of the German V-2 rocket, Wernher von Braun, was arrested by the Gestapo on charges of high treason for having privately expressed regret, after dinner at a colleague’s home one evening the previous October, that he and his team were not working on a spaceship . . .
From a wide-ranging essay by Mike Darwin on
the future that wasn’t.
(Note: Site doesn't seem to display properly in Internet Explorer)posted by Jasper Friendly Bear at 11:14 PM PST - 47 comments
Is there a new geek anti-intellectualism? by Larry Sanger of Wikipedia fame.
[via]
You don’t really care about knowledge; it’s not a priority. For you, the books containing knowledge, the classics and old-fashioned scholarship summing up the best of our knowledge, the people and institutions whose purpose is to pass on knowledge–all are hopelessly antiquated. Even your own knowledge, the contents of your mind, can be outsourced to databases built by collaborative digital communities, and the more the better. After all, academics are boring. A new world is coming, and you are in the vanguard. In this world, the people who have and who value individual knowledge, especially theoretical and factual knowledge, are objects of your derision.
posted by destrius at 8:24 PM PST - 157 comments
In the 1970's, the prevailing wisdom was that children with 'pre-homosexual' behavior required therapy to allow them to develop into straight individuals. Jim Burroway of
Box Turtle Bulletin researched the story of "Kraig," a young boy whose journey through therapy was published as a gold standard of such attempts to change what was considered abnormal gender behavior. "Kraig" was in fact Kirk Murphy, and Burroway tells Kirk's real (and tragic) story in seven parts:
What Are Little Boys Made Of? [more inside]posted by Chanther at 5:54 PM PST - 49 comments
In 1971 a children's librarian in Troy, Michigan wrote dozens of letters to various celebrities and political leaders and asked them to send back inspirational messages to the children.
Ninety-seven of them wrote back.
posted by gman at 5:47 PM PST - 33 comments
People who use Sony
don't make very good passwords. "None of this is overly surprising, although it remains alarming. We know passwords are too short, too simple, too predictable and too much like the other ones the individual has created in other locations. The bit which did take me back a bit was the extent to which passwords conformed to very predictable patterns, namely only using alphanumeric character, being 10 characters or less and having a much better than average chance of being the same as other passwords the user has created on totally independent systems."
[more inside]posted by -->NMN.80.418 at 4:00 PM PST - 142 comments
The Newspaper Map: browse thousands of local, regional and national newspapers from around the world, based on geographical location. Filter and translate languages, see newspaper archives back to the early 19th century, and find fourth estate Twitter and YouTube feeds. A
mobile version is also available.
viaposted by Bora Horza Gobuchul at 10:52 AM PST - 7 comments
Mixcloud is a website that allows anyone to upload a podcast/radio show/mix, and anyone else to stream it in-browser. A quick glance at the
categories page should show you that it leans somewhat clubbish, but you can also find a fairly good range of music (e.g.,
musique concrete) and talk (e.g.,
Lithuanian politics) that's not so dancefloor-oriented.
There are some big names posting on the site (
Carl Cox,
FACT mag,
Mary Ann Hobbs), and a pretty good tag and search system for poking around what's available. I've been pleased to find a couple of
dirty south car rap mixes, an
Italian programme offering bitesize chunks of pop from Africa + the African diaspora, and regular postings from a rare soul/funk club night in
Hull. Hopefully you can find something to suit
all most many some tastes.
posted by Dim Siawns at 9:29 AM PST - 17 comments
A visitor to the Rotten Tomatoes site can check out the data for individual Hollywood careers—that's how Tabarrok came up with the Shyamalan graph—but there's no easy way for users to measure industrywide trends or to compare different actors and directors side-by-side. To that end, Rotten Tomatoes kindly let Slate analyze the scores in its enormous database and create an interactive tool so our readers might do the same.posted by Trurl at 6:43 AM PST - 69 comments
While most Westerners are familiar with the Holocaust and Nazi war crimes, fewer Westerners know much about the war crimes committed by the Japanese military throughout Asia, particularly the human medical experiments conducted by
Unit 731. [more inside]posted by The ____ of Justice at 5:14 AM PST - 95 comments
June 6
The three
longest-running scientific experiments are all located in the foyers of physics buildings. The oldest is the
Oxford Electric Bell, which has been ringing continuously (over ten billion times!)
since at least 1840, powered by batteries of unknown composition. In Dunedin, New Zealand, the
Beverley clock has operated since 1864, without the need for winding, as it is
powered by atmospheric changes. The relative youngster in the group is
the Pitch Drop Experiment, which has been measuring the viscosity of pitch since 1927 by recording the time between drops of pitch from a funnel. The experiments has the world's most boring
webcam, though the eighth, and most recent, drop fell in 2000, so the next is due any day now! Atlas Obscura
has some additional candidates for long experiments, including the
Rothemstead Plots, which have been used in agricultural experiments for 300 years.
posted by blahblahblah at 6:56 PM PST - 33 comments
Rob Horning has
a wide-ranging and insightful essay up at n+1 that seeks connections between three apparently disparate phenomena: global fast-fashion retailers with dubious labor practices like H&M and Forever 21; self-presentation on social media web sites; and neoliberal capitalism's new demands for workers to embrace precarity by endlessly reinventing their identities.
[more inside]posted by AlsoMike at 2:44 PM PST - 59 comments
Kamikuishiki was a village in the
Yamanashi Prefecture in Japan that gained unwanted international attention in 1995 as a key location for
Aum Shinrikyo, the religious cult behind a number of acts of violence, including the Sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway. To change the nature of attention given to the picturesque village, a new attraction was built on the former site of the cult complex:
Gulliver's Kingdom,
a mixed up theme park with a Scandinavian town, a petting zoo, a French puppet theater to tell the story of Gulliver, and a
45 meter version of Gulliver himself, pinned to the ground. The park was opened in 1997, but Niigata Chuo Bank was facing
serious problems two years later, collapsing "under the weight of nonperforming loans." The theme park's owners were the largest borrowers from the bank, and
the park closed in 2001. The park was
finally purchased in 2002 in the 3rd auction attempt. In 2006,
Kamikuishiki disappeared, divided and the parts merged into neighboring municipalities. The next year,
Gulliver's Kingdom was demolished, leaving behind
photos (
new and old), and
memories.
posted by filthy light thief at 1:33 PM PST - 4 comments
Larry Gonick is a veteran American cartoonist best known for his delightful comic-book guides to science and history, many of which have previews online. Chief among them is his long-running
Cartoon History of the Universe (later
The Cartoon History of the Modern World), a sprawling multi-volume opus documenting everything from the Big Bang to the Bush administration. Published over the course of three decades, it takes a truly global view -- its time-traveling Professor thoroughly explores not only familiar topics like Rome and World War II but the oft-neglected stories of Asia and Africa, blending caricature and myth with careful scholarship (cited by
fun illustrated bibliographies) and tackling even the most obscure events
with intelligence and wit. This savvy satire carried over to Gonick's
Zinn-by-way-of-
Pogo chronicle
The Cartoon History of the United States, along with a bevy of
Cartoon Guides to other topics, including
Genetics, Computer Science, Chemistry, Physics, Statistics, The Environment, and (yes!)
Sex. Gonick has also maintained a few sideprojects, such as
a webcomic look at Chinese invention,
assorted math comics (
previously), the
Muse magazine mainstay
Kokopelli & Co. (featuring the shenanigans of his
"New Muses"), and
more. See also
these lengthy interview snippets, linked
previously. Want more? Amazon links to the complete oeuvre inside!
[more inside]posted by Rhaomi at 11:20 AM PST - 29 comments
"
Juno" was the beachhead for Canadian forces during Operation Neptune (D-Day). 1/10th the size of the British and American forces, the Canadian units were the first to break through German lines; by the end of the day, Canadian soldiers had penetrated deeper into Normandy than any other Allied force.
Storming Juno tells their story via an immersive Flash experience that interweaves live recreation, documents, and oral history from veterans. (
Flash, interactive, sound)
posted by Bora Horza Gobuchul at 10:41 AM PST - 33 comments
Denmark is the happiest place on Earth! At least according to
24/7 Wall Street, which has released their list of the
10 "Happiest" Countries in the World. Determined using "11 measurements of quality of life including housing, income, jobs, community, education, the environment, health, work-life balance, and life satisfaction," the United States did not make the cut. The US, however, made it to #1 on the list of the
10 Countries with the Most Millionaires. [more inside]posted by eunoia at 10:21 AM PST - 98 comments
"When a Nobel Prize Isn't Enough." With a sharply-worded rebuke of the congressional GOP, Nobel Prize-winning economist Peter Diamond has announced
he is withdrawing as a candidate for the Federal Reserve's Board of Governors due to GOP obstructionism. Republican Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama, a leading critic of Diamond's appointment,
welcomes the announcement and raises a predictable call for a candidate "capable of garnering bipartisan support in the Senate."
posted by saulgoodman at 8:05 AM PST - 86 comments
June 5
Like a lot of people, I grew up with Theodor Geisel, alias Dr. Seuss, as a huge part of my childhood. Books like Cat in the Hat and Oh, The Places You'll Go helped me learn how to read, and the Chuck Jones version of How The Grinch Stole Christmas! is still a holiday tradition at my house. But until this week, I had no idea that two years before his book was published, Dr. Seuss created a sadly short-lived newspaper comic strip called Hejji -- and it turns out that it's one of his most interesting works. [more inside]posted by hippybear at 9:18 PM PST - 80 comments
Thank God Silvio Exists! A beautiful blond woman, standing in a grocery store beside a pile of bananas, sings, “There’s a big dream that lives in all of us.” A throng of women belt out the chorus together under a cloudless sky: “Menomale che Silvio c’è”— “Thank God there’s Silvio.” Other women in various settings pick up the tune: a young mother in a pediatrician’s office, surrounded by nurses; a brunette in a beauty parlor, dressed for work in a camisole that barely covers her breasts. To American eyes, the ad looks like a parody, or perhaps some new kind of musical pornography that’s just about to erupt into carnality. (
from a New Yorker blog post)
[more inside]posted by KokuRyu at 5:43 PM PST - 43 comments
The Life Zone is an anti-abortion suspense thriller about three women who are kidnapped and forced to carry their pregnancies to term.
posted by EarBucket at 5:21 PM PST - 86 comments
Many hate her, but she is alive in every fandom. She fences with Methos and Duncan MacLeod; she saves the Enterprise, the Voyager, or the fabric of time and space; she fights with Jim Ellison in defense of Cascade; she battles evil in Sunnydale alongside Buffy Sommers. 150 Years of Mary Sue, by Pat Pflieger, exploring vanity fanfic back to the 19th century. Bonus blackhole of content:
TVTropes on Mary Sue.
posted by cortex at 1:32 PM PST - 155 comments
June 4
People, Let Me Get This Off My Chest is a 65 minute compilation of stage banter by Paul Stanley of KISS.
Paul repeatedly reminds the Army that they’re getting their money’s worth... , that the next tune is the first time they’ve played it on tour, that he was talking backstage to someone... about what kind of alcohol that people in the area like to drink, that they’re just getting started, and that he’s got an “uzi of ooze” in his pants.posted by Trurl at 1:37 PM PST - 69 comments
LiberKey is a system for installing and keeping updated over 300 free programs (both open and closed source) on a Windows machine. All of the programs are portable meaning that they can run directly off a USB key without installing anything additional on the computer (this is very useful if you’re working on a computer where you don’t have administrative rights). The programs are organized into the following categories: audio, CD/DVD, education, file management, games, graphics, internet, networking, office, security, system utilities, and video. One great feature Liberkey has is the ability to
temporarily change file associations. Here is the
full list of programs available.
posted by Jasper Friendly Bear at 10:17 AM PST - 14 comments
Warp Prism is a slickly-designed website that makes it easier for you to watch '
eSports'. With streams for all the popular spectator games, including
Major League Gaming (broadcasting live from Columbus today), it makes it easy to switch between streams, and even includes picture-in-picture and embedded chat support.
posted by empath at 9:15 AM PST - 15 comments
June 3
30 and Pregnant "How did this happen?" he said. I couldn't believe he didn't know. "We were so careful." I sighed heavily, twirling a piece of spaghetti around my fork, feeling overwhelmed that now I would officially have to come down on one side of the cloth versus disposable diapers debate.posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 12:51 PM PST - 212 comments
“If you try to do what they do in West Virginia in the Berkshires, the Catskills or the Sierra Nevadas, or in Utah or Colorado, people would just put you in jail. Over the past 10 years, they’ve blown up and leveled an area of eastern Kentucky and southern West Virginia that is larger than the size of Delaware. They’ve blown up the 500 biggest mountains in West Virginia. They explode everyday 2,500 tons of dynamite, or ammonia nitrate explosives. It’s the equivalent of a Hiroshima bomb once a week.”
In the valleys of Appalachia, a battle is being fought over a mountain. It is a battle with severe consequences that affect every American, regardless of their social status, economic background or where they live. It is a battle that has taken many lives and continues to do so the longer it is waged. This is the story of
The Last Mountain.
posted by tallthinone at 12:49 PM PST - 49 comments
The Age of Imperialism is over, but
its impact remains, leaving behind a long-lasting legacy through cultural norms.
Comparing individuals on opposite sides of the long-gone Habsburg Empire border within five countries, it shows that firms and people living in what used to be the empire have higher trust in courts and police.posted by -->NMN.80.418 at 9:56 AM PST - 21 comments
Former U.S. Presidential candidate
John Edwards, the Democratic Party's nominee for Vice-President in 2004,
has been indicted on felony charges stemming from illegal use of campaign contributions to hide his affair with film producer
Rielle Hunter, with whom he
belatedly admitted fathering a child while his wife suffered from an ultimately terminal recurrence of breast cancer.
posted by The Confessor at 7:34 AM PST - 160 comments
June 2
"Schema ...provides a collection of schemas, i.e., html tags, that webmasters can use to markup their pages in ways recognized by major search providers. Search engines including Bing, Google and Yahoo! rely on this markup to improve the display of search results, making it easier for people to find the right web pages. " [more inside]posted by 00dimitri00 at 11:26 PM PST - 20 comments
Meaghan Smith took an unusual route to the music business. She can't read music, for one thing. She went to school to study animation for another. Yet, along the way, she took her hobby of playing the guitar to work with her, giving impromptu performances of her songs in the stairwell of the animation building for her friends. One thing lead to another, and she just won the Pop Album of the Year at the
East Coast Music Awards in Canada for her recording called "The Cricket's Orchestra."
Her sound is a mixture of the music of the 20s 30s and 40s with the pop songs of today.
Her videos often feature animation. A good place to start is
"A Little Love" and also
"I Know." Her song
"Here Comes Your Man" was featured in the film 500 Days of Summer.
She is also a pretty good
artist!posted by Quasimike at 11:26 PM PST - 25 comments
Mind Reading: The Researchers Who Analyzed All the Porn on the Internet. "Searching all the porn on the Internet might not seem like the most scientifically productive activity, but computational neuroscientists Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam did it anyway. For their new book, A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the World's Largest Experiment Reveals about Human Desire, Ogas and Gaddam analyzed the results of 400 million online searches for porn and uncovered some startling insights into what men and women may really want from each other — at least sexually."
[more inside]posted by bwg at 5:39 PM PST - 85 comments
The FHM 100 Sexiest list is an annual feature in the lad's mag that 'ranks' women on their percieved pulchritudinousness. However, this year, the 91st sexiest woman in the world
isn't a woman at all.
[more inside]posted by mippy at 4:10 PM PST - 69 comments
Improving Peptides:
Small firms develop better peptide drug candidates to expand this pharmaceutical class and attract big pharma partners
posted by Blasdelb at 3:02 PM PST - 7 comments
The Survivor. "When your family is murdered, and the home you had made together is destroyed, and you yourself are beaten and left for dead — as happened to Bill Petit on the morning of July 23, 2007 — it may as well be the end of the world. It is hard to see how a man survives the end of the world. The basics of life — waking up, walking, talking — become alien tasks, and almost impossibly heavy, as you are more dead than alive. Just how does a man go about surviving such a thing? How does a man go on? ... Why does one man come undone while the next finds a way to make it through?" [more inside]posted by zarq at 2:10 PM PST - 60 comments
The Black Album is a Prince record that was originally planned for release in December 1987, as the follow-up to Sign o' the Times
. ... The 1987 promo-only release had no printed title, artist name, production credits or photography printed; a simple black sleeve accompanied the disc. ... The album was canceled mere days before its scheduled release, after hundreds of thousands of copies were pressed. A few escaped destruction, and rank among the most coveted Prince collectibles. In addition, the Black Album became the most bootlegged record of all time. [more inside]posted by Trurl at 1:17 PM PST - 70 comments
I have, by now, got rather fond of Mr. James Bond. I like most of the things about him, with the exception of his rather deplorable taste in firearms. In particular, I dislike a man who comes into contact with all sorts of formidable people using a .25 Beretta. This sort of gun is really a lady's gun, and not a really nice lady at that. If Mr. Bond has to use a light gun he would be better off with a .22 rim fire; the lead bullet would cause more shocking effect than the jacketed type of the .25. -
The letter that changed James Bond's gun, and gave his armourer a name.posted by Artw at 9:36 AM PST - 102 comments
June 1
It's rare to find a blog where you want to grab every picture, and click every link, but that's how it is at wonderful little
mwebi, and just a few clicks there leads to these other just as tantalizing micro blogs, such as
The Year in Pictures,
Kitschy Living,
Poculum,
Cool Pictures,
Colorfullthings,
Design Squish and
Fade Away (which has a bit of a squishy design). It leaves one wondering out loud, when did blogging get cool again?
posted by puny human at 8:14 PM PST - 17 comments
Photojournalism in Libya from "a towering perspective": Bryan’s height — somewhere north of 6 feet 6 inches, closer to 7 feet with helmet and boots — is both a perennial joke and a source of wonder among those who cover war and know him. Why would anyone so damn tall take on a line of work where, on many days, you want to be small? Let’s be clear. Bryan is a big target. Correction: he is a very big target. He looks like a walking sheet of plywood out there. [
via]
posted by oxford blue at 7:58 PM PST - 3 comments
The
Global Commission on Drug Policy is the latest group to advocate an end to the drug war - but also an unusually high-profile one,
including former Presidents of Brazil, Colombia, Mexico and Switzerland, Prime Minister of Greece, Kofi Annan, Richard Branson, George Shultz and Paul Volcker. Tomorrow, June 2, sees the launch of their report, which advocates treating recreational drug use (and abuse) as a public health issue rather than a criminal justice one.
[more inside]posted by anigbrowl at 5:06 PM PST - 60 comments
The public’s experience is that we have amazing clinicians and technologies but little consistent sense that they come together to provide an actual system of care, from start to finish, for people. We train, hire, and pay doctors to be cowboys. But it’s pit crews people need. - Atul Gawande’s commencement address at Harvard Medical School.
posted by AceRock at 5:01 PM PST - 18 comments
HUH. Magazine is a media platform with the latest, most relevant news from the worlds of art, fashion, design, music and film. Recent features include:
Harvest by Haroshi: Skate and Destroy, artworks created with old worn, or snapped, skateboard decks |
Disassembly, capturing relics of our past in a unique, dismantled and exposed form |
Murakami at Versailles, knee-deep in controversy since its inception | and
Darren's Great Big Camera, a
short documentary about a camera that shoots on 14" x 36" negatives and measures 6ft. in length.
posted by netbros at 5:00 PM PST - 8 comments
Adshel is an Australian company that provides advertising on street furniture, such as shelters at bus stops or bins. In the last 48 hours they have been at the centre of a public fight between the Australian queer community and the
Australian Christian Lobby. [more inside]posted by MT at 3:59 PM PST - 70 comments
According to Financial Blog TooMuch, a new white paper from AdAge claims that the era of "Mass Affluence is over". This means that because the middle-class no longer have the dominent share of disposable income that marketing directly to the super-rich is the future of advertising. This means that if you're over 35 and make $100,000 to $200,000, Madison Avenue no longer really cares about you.
Apparently no one in America really realised what it meant that "The top 10 percent of American households.. now account for nearly half of all consumer spending, and a disproportionate share of that spending comes from the top 10’s upper reaches."
It reminds me of that Steinbeck quote, that 'Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.'
posted by rudhraigh at 1:03 PM PST - 163 comments
The public pillorying of Janet Malcolm is one of the scandals of American letters. ... why is it Malcolm, a virtuoso stylist and a subtle, exciting thinker, who drives critics into a rage? What journalist of her caliber is as widely disliked or as often accused of bad faith? And why did so few of her colleagues stand up for her during the circus of a libel trial that scarred her career? In the animus toward her there is something almost personal. [more inside]posted by Trurl at 12:51 PM PST - 27 comments
Religious Experiences Shrink Part of the Brain. Scientific American analyses a study which links life-changing religious experiences, like being born again, with atrophy in the hippocampus.
The study, “Religious factors and hippocampal atrophy in late life,” by Amy Owen and colleagues at Duke University, 'is a surprising result, given that many prior studies have shown religion to have potentially beneficial effects on brain function, anxiety, and depression.'
[more inside]posted by VikingSword at 11:30 AM PST - 76 comments
Mycologist James Scott got a contract to investigate a fungus at a distillery.
What he found changed mycological history.
posted by pjern at 10:52 AM PST - 37 comments
In 2008, T: Magazine released a 12-part video series called "
T Takes," (Also on
Youtube) which featured up and coming indie and mainstream actors in short (2 - 3 minute) improvisational roles. A 6-part sequel series
Brooklyn '09 was released the following year -- an episodic love story that was not as celebrity oriented.
[more inside]posted by zarq at 10:02 AM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment
Yog-Blogsoth This blog will be an attempt to draw all the creatures Lovecraft ever wrote about or mentioned. (Poss NSFW - drawn nudity, Def NSFSanity)
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 8:20 AM PST - 53 comments
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