skip to main content
July 2010 Archives
July 31
“There’s a tremendous amount of anxiety among religious traditionalists that when you take one step toward egalitarianism, the floodgates are open and everything that seemed self-evident will no longer be. Men go to work, and women raise children. If you undermine that, you have lost your whole universe.”The Reform, Conservative and Reconstructionist movements of Judaism have been ordaining women as rabbis for decades, but the religion's most traditional sect, the Orthodox, remains a lone, minority holdout against egalitarianism. Last year, Orthodox Rabbi Avraham "Avi" Weiss (political
activist and founder of the
controversial, liberal, "Open Orthodox"
Yeshivat Chovevei Torah Yeshiva in New York)
tried to shake things up by ordaining the first female American Orthodox rabbi.
[more inside]posted by zarq at 9:09 PM PST - 35 comments
"I never know what to call myself really. I call myself a cartoonist because it's what I've wanted to do for as long as I can remember, it's what I always return to, and it's how I think. But I don't really work in that field. I think I'm an artist and a writer, or more appropriately, an artist who writes."
[more inside]posted by oulipian at 8:52 PM PST - 5 comments
With "support for the death penalty in excess of 85% [of the population]", there is normally little fuss in Japan each time the announcement is made that convicted murderers from death row have been hanged (such announcements are only made
after each execution.) But last Wednesday, the disclosure that two executions had taken place early that morning
did raise eyebrows - for two reasons. Justice Minister Keiko Chiba held a press conference to
make the announcement, and added that - in a 'first' for a Japanese Justice Minister - she herself had attended the execution as a witness, after signing the authorization for it to proceed. But what has really caused
a firestorm of protest is the fact that although she lost her Parliamentary seat in last month's election, she "has remained in her ministerial post at the request of Prime Minister Naoto Kan". She is a private citizen.
posted by woodblock100 at 5:16 PM PST - 29 comments
The Flower contrasts a utopian society that freely farms and consumes a pleasure giving flower with a society where the same flower is illegal and its consumption is prohibited. The animation is a meditation on the social and economic costs of marijuana prohibition.
posted by Surfin' Bird at 1:34 PM PST - 56 comments
Puberty Blues - Hayley Smith started developing breasts when she was five. A year later, she had her first period. “It was awful,” her mother says. “There was so much ignorance. People treated her differently—Hayley didn’t really have a childhood. You just don’t expect to have to talk to your six-year-old daughter about having periods.” The evidence from Denmark suggests that Hayley’s experience could soon be commonplace. Most paediatric endocrinologists now agree that the age of puberty is falling fast in developed nations. But there is no consensus on why.
posted by heatherann at 1:21 PM PST - 93 comments
July 30
On July 28, Federal District Court
Judge Susan Bolton issued an
injunction (link to pdf of court order) blocking
several portions of the recent immigration bill
SB1070, which was passed on April 23.
(Previously on Metafilter.)
Among other provisions, the bill would have allowed Arizona police officers to demand proof of immigration status of people suspected of being in the country illegally pursuant to a legal police stop.
Most importantly, the federal ruling blocked the portion of the law that would have allowed police officers to demand proof of legal status.
Opponents of the law, who had already planned demonstrations yesterday, the first day the law was set to take effect, reportedly view the ruling as a victory, though partial and perhaps temporary.
Proponents of the law are predictably
unhappy with the ruling, and react with
disappointment.posted by diocletian at 9:20 PM PST - 127 comments
So, you always wanted to be a musician, but your pops wouldn't send you to music school? And you can't afford a decent instrument? Aw, quit yer whining and go get a
garden hose.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 7:40 PM PST - 25 comments
The Wall Street Journal investigates web snoops. The 50 sites installed a total of 3,180 tracking files on a test computer used to conduct the study. Only one site, the encyclopedia Wikipedia.org, installed none. Twelve sites, including IAC/InterActive Corp.'s Dictionary.com, Comcast Corp.'s Comcast.net and Microsoft Corp.'s MSN.com, installed more than 100 tracking tools apiece in the course of the Journal's test. [more inside]posted by chavenet at 4:32 PM PST - 59 comments
Strange Cargo: Taryn Simon took over 1,000 photographs of items seized or detained at JFK Airport.
Here is a sampling.
Here is some information about the project.
posted by AceRock at 2:06 PM PST - 33 comments
Alexis Soyer lived quite an an amazing life. According to his
wiki, he "was a French chef who became the most celebrated cook in Victorian England" who also "during the Great Irish Famine in April 1847, ... invented the soup kitchen and was asked by the Government to go to Ireland to implement his idea. This was opened in Dublin and his "
famine soup" was served to thousands of the poor for free. Whilst in Ireland he wrote Soyer's Charitable Cookery. He gave the proceeds of the book to various charities. He also opened an art gallery in London, and donated the entrance fees to charity to feed the poor." And then there is also the remarkable story of
Soyer's Magic Stove.
posted by puny human at 12:24 PM PST - 16 comments
Acousmata is a unique music blog devoted to "idiosyncratic research in electronic and experimental music, sound and acoustics, mysticism and technology" with special focus on the early history of electronic music.
posted by speicus at 9:50 AM PST - 16 comments
It has applications in
Economics,
Biology,
Pharmaceuticals, and
is rooted in State Space Modeling, which with
Kalman Filtering (
paper,
breakdown [warning: long]) was used in the
Apollo program.
Dynamic Linear Models are gaining in popularity. There exists an
R package, and both
a short doc and
a really great (read: worth buying) book (sorry, not a download, but
here's chapter 2) by
Giovanni Petris,
Sonia Petrone, and Patrizia Campagnoli with
its own little website.
posted by JoeXIII007 at 8:04 AM PST - 14 comments
Twaggies, turn your tweets into pics. Take random weird tweets and turn them into even weirder visuals. Twaggies, a website by
Kiersten Essenpreis, features illustrations by the extraordinary
@K_Essenpreis. (Essen is the German verb for “to eat” and preis means “praise.” So you better leave some nice comments for her or she’ll twag you most unfavorably.) The other half of the team is
David Isreal,
@resila, who can’t draw a stick figure much less a twaggie, but does all the other stuff for the blog and hit on the idea for it in the first place.
Three additional twaggers have contributed in the past –
@yaelbt,
@mmbemer and
@hsugene.
posted by Fizz at 5:36 AM PST - 13 comments
And how did DVDs get commentary tracks? Let Bob tell you: You have to understand how much of this stuff is accidental. I knew the guy who was the curator of films at the LA County Museum of Art, and I brought him to New York to oversee color correction. He’s telling us all these amazing stories, particularly about
King Kong, because it’s his favorite film. Someone said, “Gee, we’ve got this extra sound track on the LaserDisc, why don’t you tell these stories?” He was horrified at the idea, but we promised we’d get him super stoned if he did, and he gave this amazing discussion about the making of
King Kong, which we released as the second sound track....
[via snarkmarket] [more inside]posted by cgc373 at 5:00 AM PST - 21 comments
July 29
Davis, California is a small town by almost any measure, yet is home to one of the
busiest local wikis in the world. The Davis Wiki chronicles the
mundane and the
bizarre, but also serves more practical information, such as lunch specials, housing guides,
news events, and the hours of the local
bike collective. In recognition of the outstanding success of the Davis Wiki, the founders were recently awarded a $350,000 grant to develop their
Local Wiki software for more general application, including intensive development of wikis in a number of pilot communities.
Many communities already have a wiki, though only a few have really taken off; with luck and a bit of a kickstart, the
experience of the Davis Wiki founders can be applied to make this invaluable resource available in more cities.
posted by kaibutsu at 11:59 PM PST - 46 comments
Portraits by Richard Dumas; a page (one of many) of
actors and directors; a Brooklyn gang (photographed by Bruce Davidson)
in 1959; photographs by
Ernesto Bazan. Clive Limpkin.
Some Warhol Polaroids. Film set photographs and portraits by
Brigitte Lacombe. Photographs by:
Dennis Hopper [nsfw],
Weegee [nsfw],
Jeff Bridges,
Julia Calfee [nsfw],
Ed Templeton [nsfw],
Lauren Dukoff,
Robert Frank,
Sid Grossman and
Allen Ginsberg. A
Princeton Dance Weekend in 1960, an
American family vacation in 1950,
Los Angeles,
Coney Island,
et cetera. A diverse livejournal collection of photographs.
posted by xod at 3:35 PM PST - 14 comments
"In a way I wish it did not require such a formidable technique, because I do not really enjoy sweating over this music." This is virtuoso pianist Marc-Andre Hamelin
speaking of Charles-Valentin Alkan, the Romantic pianist said to have made even Liszt nervous, and whose exhilarating works fell into obscurity due to their rigorous technical demands. For a warm-up, here's
Alkan's major etude "Allegro barbaro", as performed by Jack Gibbons. A machine recording of his piece
Le Chemin de Fer in which you can see the keys being pressed. Recordings of Youtube exist of people attempting his near-impossible
Scherzo focoso (and, for comparison,
a mechanical rendition of the same). And for encore, here is Hamelin again playing
Les Quatre Ages, frequently considered Alkan's most mature work, a sonata depicting the four ages of man.
posted by Rory Marinich at 12:04 PM PST - 20 comments
More women in the developed world are choosing not to have children. 'So why do friends, family, colleagues and even strangers think it's OK to question their decision?' 'A woman's fertility status is still very much considered public property. There are still assumptions about women's role in society, about families and about family size."''US Census Bureau says 36% of American women have no children.''Once this was considered insane or unnatural. Even today, it is viewed with suspicion - women with no desire to procreate say they sometimes face awkward questions and disapproval.'
[more inside]posted by VikingSword at 11:39 AM PST - 301 comments
Ricky Jay had a TV special in 1989 -
Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women - based on the
book of the same name, which featured magic, juggling, amazing feats, stunts, and performances, including a musical performance on wine glasses, a human calculator who could determine cube-routes of numbers in her head, and an antique acrobatic clockwork doll. (
Part 1,
Part 2,
Part 3).
(Previously and previously and previouslier)posted by twoleftfeet at 5:32 AM PST - 18 comments
The 2010 Booker longlist is out, and it seems that most of the buzz in the UK is about who's
not on the list. The Guardian article "
Amis-free Booker prize longlist promises to 'entertain and provoke'" introducing the list of 13 nominees actually devotes its headline, subhead, and most of the first four paragraphs to the subject of who's missing in action: Amis, McEwan, Rushdie. Elsewhere in the Guardian Books section, research professor Gabriel Josipovici pulls no punches in including these (former?) darlings of the glitterati in his assertion that
Feted British authors are limited, arrogant and self-satisfied, compares them to "prep-school boys showing off," calls them "virtually indistinguishable from one another in scope and ambition," and muses that the fact that they have won so many awards is "a mystery."
[more inside]posted by taz at 3:46 AM PST - 50 comments
July 28
Facebook jumps on the Metafilter Bandwagon with
New Q&A Offering.
Other recent entrants in our market include
Ask.com, which is relying on experts to answer questions,
Aardvark which asks your friends to do the work, and our favorite love-to-hate-em, Yahoo
answers which is teaming with both terrible (hilarious)
questions and answers.
The Facebook offering will be totally public and searchable by google, with questions answerable by anyone with a Facebook account. It looks like the questions you ask will be tied to your real profile.
Anyone in the Beta have a screen shot?
posted by paddingtonb at 9:22 PM PST - 68 comments
Catalonia bans bullfighting. Via The NYTimes "Lawmakers in the northeastern Spanish region of Catalonia voted to ban bullfighting on Wednesday, dealing the most significant blow so far to a tradition considered by many Spaniards to be an essential part of their cultural patrimony.
In many ways, however, the ban reflected less on the animal rights than on
a political debate over Catalan identity and a push by local parties for greater independence from the rest of Spain. With the strong support of separatist parties, the ban passed by a larger margin than expected: 68 to 55, with 9 abstentions. It is to go into effect in 2012."
[more inside]posted by Fizz at 9:18 PM PST - 34 comments
Damon Lindelof to
rewrite Alien Prequel?
Collider says "Lindelof reportedly met with Scott and 20th Century Fox to talk about the gig, but also ended up sparking a discussion that “could well turn out to be a free-standing science fiction film.”
Thumbs up? Down? I wasn't a fan of 'Lost', but
Ultimate Hulk vs. Wolverine did the trick for me...
posted by vhsiv at 8:00 PM PST - 87 comments
Feeling like you need something to balance the scent of sandalwood and musk after reading this list of
famous man caves (including Jefferson's study, Douglass' office, Edison's library, and Roosevelt's trophy room)? If so, you may be interested in seeing the inner sanctums of some of history's most influential women. Check out Eleanor Roosevelt's living room (
picture/
info), Marie Curie's laboratory (
picture/
info), Margaret Mead's room in Samoa (
picture/
info), Maya Angelou's parlor (
picture/
info), Susan B. Anthony's
study and
bedroom (
more pictures and info), Georgia O'Keefe's sitting room (
picture,
info), Helen Keller's childhood bedroom (
picture,
info), and Frida Kahlo's studio (
picture 1,
picture 2/
info).
[more inside]posted by emilyd22222 at 4:57 PM PST - 23 comments
"Since the beginning of time, there has been struggle. The epic clash of being against being. Tyrannosaurus Rex vs. Triceratops. Giant Squid vs. the Sperm Whale. The Circle vs. the Square. The struggle is forever. It makes the world turn around... This is a chronicling of some of the greatest confrontations in FILM HISTORY. The greatest moments of melee. These are the
GREAT SHOWDOWNS.
[more inside]posted by carsonb at 10:38 AM PST - 21 comments
Shared social responsibility -
When customers could pay what they wanted in the knowledge that half of that would go to charity, sales and profits went through the roof ... Gneezy describes the combination of charitable donations and paying what you like as 'shared social responsibility', where businesses and customers work together for the public good. (via
mr) [also see
1,
2,
3]
posted by kliuless at 7:49 AM PST - 19 comments
July 27
I'm Basil Marceaux dot com, the
Republican candidate for
Governor. I like to recall all
permit, and registration, for guns. Everyone carry guns. If you kill someone though, you get murdered,
you go to jail, and uh, I'd like to put...
plant grass or vegetation across in the state on any vacant lot, and
sell it for gas, so we can use it for
our expenses. Also, I'm gonna
remove all gold fringe flags from the state and fly the
real flag with three stripes. I also wanna stop traffic stops; set it up like the Supreme Court ruled in
Knowles v Iowa: you can't find
innocent car,
you can't look. I want you all to
vote for
Basil Marceaux. I want to say the Pledge of Allegiance to a Republic in the morning when you
come out... and
we all pray to God and say Amen and everyone... have a nice day. And
I'll see you all at
the polls. Thank you...
have a nice day.
[more inside]posted by joannemerriam at 10:08 PM PST - 93 comments
Keeping Cool at Lower Cost. A fine summary of the latest innovations in the technology of air conditioning. e.g.
"If [fan] blades were designed for better aerodynamic efficiency, instead of being stamped from sheet metal as cheaply as possible, the electricity consumption of many cooling systems could be cut by a third.". Includes a look at how to cool a building using hot water in a device called a thermal cooler.
posted by storybored at 8:40 PM PST - 26 comments
These images,
by photographers of the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information, are some of the only color photographs taken of the effects of the Depression on America’s rural and small town populations.posted by KevinSkomsvold at 8:00 PM PST - 83 comments
Math Is No Match for Locust Swarms. "Mathematicians have now figured out the dynamics that drive locusts across the landscape, devastating everything underfoot — and the math says people will never be able to predict where the little buggers will go.
The new analysis, reported in an upcoming issue of Physical Review E, suggests that random factors accumulate and influence how swarming locusts collectively decide to change course.
“These swarms are driven by intrinsic dynamics,” says team member Iain Couzin, a biologist at Princeton University. “In all practical terms, predicting when a swarm is going to change direction is going to be impossible."
More information here.
posted by Fizz at 3:37 PM PST - 27 comments
Paper receipts - including receipts from McDonald’s, CVS, Whole Foods, Wal-Mart, and the U.S. Postal Service - are
a major source of endocrine-disrupting bisphenol-A. The total amount of
BPA on
tested receipts was 250 to 1,000 times greater than other, more widely discussed sources of BPA exposure, including canned foods, baby bottles and infant formula. BPA transfers readily from receipts to skin and can penetrate the skin to such a depth that it cannot be washed off.
posted by stbalbach at 11:42 AM PST - 111 comments
With a population of 36,664 and 2.5 square miles in size
Bell, California is number thirteen in the
twenty-five smallest cities in the United States. Median annual household income is about $36,000; per capita income for the city is $9,905 with 24.1% of the population below the poverty line. Residents of this tiny city "
have a higher property tax rate than homeowners in Beverly Hills." A recent
L.A. Times investigative report has revealed that exorbitant salaries are being paid to city officials. Chief Administrative Officer
Robert Rizzo collects an annual salary of $787,637 with 12% increases scheduled every July. Assistant City Manager, Angela Spaccia collects $376,288 with a similar 12% annual pay increase. Police Chief Randy Adams who runs a 46-person department earns $457,000, which is 33% higher than that of his Los Angeles counterpart. And ... part-time city council members collect almost $100,000 a year each.
* The
District Attorney is investigating why the part-time council members take-home $8,083 per month while a $400 monthly stipend was expected.
[more inside]posted by ericb at 10:53 AM PST - 87 comments
Kich-Gorodok. Olya Ivanova went to a locality in the
Vologda Region of Russia in order to "photograph the inhabitants of dying Russian villages." The results are striking and occasionally reminiscent of Depression-era photographs of America.
[more inside]posted by languagehat at 6:48 AM PST - 43 comments
The
ACLU of Maryland is
defending Anthony Graber for violating Maryland wiretap laws because he recorded a
video of a plain clothes officer drawing a gun during a traffic stop without first identifying himself as a police officer. The Maryland State Police raided Graber's parents' after learning of the video on YouTube. Another person has since been similarly charged under the same statute.
[more inside]posted by jeffburdges at 5:01 AM PST - 141 comments
No one asks or answers this question: How does such an escalation benefit the drug smuggling business which has not been diminished at all during the past three years of hyper-violence in Mexico? Each year, the death toll rises, each year there is no evidence of any disruption in the delivery of drugs to American consumers, each year the United States asserts its renewed support for this war. And each year, the basic claims about the war go unquestioned. Who Is Behind the 25,000 Deaths In Mexico?posted by HP LaserJet P10006 at 12:12 AM PST - 60 comments
July 26
I maintain that only an encyclopedic-archaeological turn can save an aging person's attachment to popular culture from descending into ridiculousness.
Against Eighties Music by Justin E.H. Smith
posted by xod at 12:56 PM PST - 144 comments
Chelsea Baker throws like a girl. Of course, she is a 13 year old girl, so that is to be expected. She is a pitcher that went 12-0 with 2 perfect games in the Plant City FL Little League this season. She hasn't been tagged with a loss in 4 years. Her secret is the knuckleball that was taught to her by a former coach, retired MLB pitcher
Joe Niekro.
posted by COD at 10:47 AM PST - 142 comments
How Do You Treat Rabbit Phobia? With rabbits. A German student who claimed her teacher was terrified of rabbits was
exonerated in a defamation suit on Tuesday when the judge determined that the teacher did, indeed, have a raging case of
leporiphobia. The bizarre story began when a chalk drawing of a bunny caused the teacher to cry and flee her classroom. How do psychologists treat rabbit phobia?
posted by Fizz at 10:40 AM PST - 65 comments
What should medicine do when it can't save your life? Atul Gawande looks at the system of final-stage treatment for terminal patients, which, despite
more than 40 years of a hospice movement for better end of life care, often ensures that patients die exactly how they least want to: in a hospital, hooked up to machines. Gawande tries to envision how, "when the chemotherapy stops working, when we start needing oxygen at home, when we face high-risk surgery, when the liver failure keeps progressing, when we become unable to dress ourselves" medical care can focus on quality of life, rather than prolonging it.
[more inside]posted by ocherdraco at 9:53 AM PST - 36 comments
(1) Can James Franco possibly be for real? (2) If he is, then—just logistically—how is all this possible? He’s just flown back from Berlin this afternoon, he says, and he has a 35-page paper due tomorrow. Next weekend he has to shoot a student film, because in two weeks he’ll be flying out to Salt Lake City to start acting in a movie called 127 Hours, director Danny Boyle’s follow-up to Slumdog Millionaire, in which Franco will play a hiker who gets pinned by a boulder and has to amputate his own arm. Revisions are due soon on his book of short stories, which will be published in October by Scribner. He’s trying to nail down the details of an art show that will be based, somehow, on his recent performance on the soap opera General Hospital. Also, he has class every day, which—since he’s enrolled in four graduate programs at once—requires commuting among Brooklyn, Greenwich Village, Morningside Heights, and occasionally North Carolina.
posted by geoff. at 7:58 AM PST - 152 comments
The New Science of Morality: An
Edge seminar featuring talks (with
full video, audio and text transcripts) by Paul Bloom, Roy Baumeister, Joshua Greene, Jonathan Haidt, Sam Harris, Marc Hauser, Josua Knobe, Elizabeth Phelps, and David Pizarro.
posted by AceRock at 7:22 AM PST - 24 comments
Old School Color Cycling with HTML5 This was a technology often used in 8-bit video games of the era, to achieve interesting visual effects by cycling (shifting) the color palette. Back then video cards could only render 256 colors at a time, so a palette of selected colors was used. But the programmer could change this palette at will, and all the onscreen colors would instantly change to match. It was fast, and took virtually no memory. [more inside]posted by crunchland at 2:38 AM PST - 40 comments
July 25
The Web Never Forgets. Are
youthful indiscretion verboten in this digital age? As we grow and move forward - we make mistakes, we say things we later regret, or we change our mind about stuff all the time. But in era where even the things we actrually mean to say, can be taken out of context, posted, and used as
a political weapon, is there room for just being
silly online anymore?
posted by helmutdog at 12:02 PM PST - 105 comments
The Rehabilitation of Ernest Gellner -
It is easy to imagine why Ernest Gellner would be one of the universally known figures in Anglophone intellectual life. A polymath whose work ranged across anthropology, history, philosophy, and sociology, his mind wrestled with an encyclopedia's worth of nagging questions about nationalism, modernity, civil society, imperialism, Islam, psychoanalysis, ethics and epistemology ... All of this, to repeat, should explain Gellner's monumental prominence – except for the fact that he has no such prominence. (via
mr)
[more inside]posted by kliuless at 9:45 AM PST - 7 comments
July 24
Aaron Copland. If you think you've never heard his music,
you're wrong (here's the same piece
played on the organ). You can hear an interview with the composer
here. And, though it's really hard to see a live performance of his opera, "The Tender Land," you can watch it on YouTube:
1,
2,
3,
4,
5,
6,
7,
8,
9,
10,
11,
12. If you want to know more about Copland, watch this
documentary. Then there's
this analysis of "Billy The Kid." Oh, I could go
on and
on. I could even post this link to a
cool animation set to Copland's "Hoedown." (Yeah, yeah: "Beef. It's what's for dinner.") But the real reason I made this post was to talk about my favorite Copland piece, "
El Salon Mexico." I found this clip of Ricardo Montalban playing it. Yes, THAT Ricardo Montalban. And he's
RIPPING UP THE PIANO.
[more inside]posted by grumblebee at 9:57 PM PST - 29 comments
These are all the Twinkie Denial Conditions described in my “Bad Game Designer, No Twinkie!” Designer’s Notebook columns. Each one is an egregious design error, although many of them have appeared in otherwise great games.posted by Joe Beese at 12:51 PM PST - 110 comments
Perhaps, if you are in your 30s, you have remembered a tiny catchy tune all your life, but can't put your finger on what exactly it was. Perhaps it is the theme to the adventures of two French toddlers left alone with a superbly jazzy little soundtrack in a surreal stop-motion land of Mondrian:
Chapi Chapo.
Avec
un tresor!
Une perruque! Un Martien! Et un tribute album! And many more!
[MLYT, sweet]
posted by Countess Elena at 11:58 AM PST - 28 comments
Obituaries editors probably belong by the sea. The cries of seagulls are their music, fading into infinity, and the light-filled sky bursts open like a gateway out of the world. The elderly gravitate there, shuffling in cheerful pairs along Marine Parade or jogging in slow motion past the Sea Gull Café, intent on some distant goal. Their skin is weathered and tanned, as if they have fossilised themselves in ozone to keep death at bay. They wear bright trainers, young clothes. But they have shifted to the shore here, or in Bexhill, or in Eastbourne, as if to the edge of life, and each flapping deck-chair reserves a waiting-place.
Ann Wroe, obituaries editor of The Economist, muses on mortality and the sea in the latest
correspondent's diary, a series of articles by various Economist writers. You can read the magazine's obituaries
here, including a recent one of former obituaries editor
Keith Colquhoun.
[Ann Wroe previously]posted by Kattullus at 8:08 AM PST - 8 comments
Thierry Henry is one of the biggest stars in Association Football. With
AS Monaco,
Arsenal,
FC Barcelona and the French national squad, he's won about every trophy that there's to win:
1996-97 French Ligue 1,
1998 World Cup,
Euro 2000,
2003-2004 English Premier League, and the unprecedented
2008-2009 "perfect season" for Barcelona: Spanish Copa del Rey, Liga, and Supercopa, European Champions' League, European Supercup, and Club World Cup. He's also won a large number of French, English and worldwide "Player of the Year" accolades. However...
[more inside]posted by Skeptic at 5:52 AM PST - 54 comments
In a pilot Phase II
study of PTSD sufferers with a median of 19 years since diagnosis, MDMA-assisted therapy resulted in 10 out of 12 patients no longer meeting the diagnostic criteria.
[more inside]posted by daksya at 12:33 AM PST - 88 comments
July 23
Susan Bell, mild-mannered secretary, thinks that pirates, space aliens, and lesbians are only found in pulp adventure novels. Until she is
Kidnapped by Lesbian Pirates from Outer Space! And finds out that she's one of them!
You don't have to be a lesbian, a pirate or a space alien to read this web comic, but it helps.
posted by CrunchyFrog at 10:05 PM PST - 22 comments
The BBC Proms season is underway, and this year also they are running some 'late night Proms', second concerts held after the first concert of the evening is over. A couple of days ago, the Portuguese pianist Maria João Pires (
Wikipedia) took over the cavernous Royal Albert Hall at ten in the evening for an all-Chopin, all-Nocturnes late night recital, attended by nearly 6,000 people. That may sound like a recipe for disaster, but she pulled it off wonderfully; it was an unforgettable experience, and you have until next Wednesday to
hear it, on the BBC iPlayer.
[more inside]posted by woodblock100 at 8:04 PM PST - 24 comments
Poetry in Hell contains a complete collection of poems recovered from the Warsaw Ghetto's
Ringelblum Archives. The project, which took ten years to complete, gives English translations of poems that are shown in their original Yiddish.
[more inside]posted by zarq at 6:37 PM PST - 9 comments
Mila's Daydreams: "This is my maternity leave hobby. While my baby is taking her nap, I try to imagine her dream and capture it." Almost too cute.
posted by hoskala at 10:48 AM PST - 69 comments
Unf**k the Gulf has lots of swearing, lots, they're mad as f**k and are not going to take it anymore. Spend 13 on a Tee and 5 go to unf**king the gulf.
posted by dabitch at 9:18 AM PST - 36 comments
The Kleptones work their mashup magic on The Beatles' Come Together vs. a whole slew of other songs, and then Crumbs Chief turns it into a dance extravaganza. Celebrate your Friday with
Come Again. (SLVimeo, 8m17s)
posted by hippybear at 9:12 AM PST - 14 comments
The Dream Machine is a flash point and click adventure game
done entirely in claymation. A beta for chapter 1 is available if you sign up with an email address and password, a demo is available without signing up.
(via JiG) [more inside]posted by juv3nal at 2:15 AM PST - 10 comments
Skid MK is a fiendishly addictive and entertaining Mario Kart clone which has already taken up far too much of my week. Developers
Conix Games also made a top-down zombie shooter in the Robotron tradition called
Daytraders of the Dead, which is just about as addictive.
posted by Kattullus at 12:49 AM PST - 8 comments
July 22
Cow Clicker is a Facebook game about Facebook games. It's partly a satire, and partly a playable theory of today's social games, and partly an earnest example of that genre. [more inside]posted by Joe Beese at 10:38 PM PST - 22 comments
Computer security experts have recently discovered vulnerability/design flaw with Microsoft Windows that has been part of their operating system that effects all versions of Windows since Windows 2000, including XP, Vista, and Windows 7. (
1,
2,
3,
4)
"The vulnerability exists because Windows incorrectly parses shortcuts in such a way that malicious code may be executed when the icon of a specially crafted shortcut is displayed. This vulnerability can be exploited locally through a malicious USB drive, or remotely via network shares and WebDAV. An exploit can also be included in specific document types that support embedded shortcuts." --
Microsoft [more inside]posted by crunchland at 8:52 PM PST - 84 comments
It was the time, when I was eating sashimi at a bar, fiddling with my iPad.
A slice of Tuna accidentally dropped on the iPad.
At that time, I hurriedly got rid of the sashimi, wiped it off,
Later I found that suddenly. In the first place,
If iPad were a dish, there are no problemposted by desjardins at 8:07 PM PST - 53 comments
Earlier this week news bubbled up that a hedge fund manager with a Bond-villain nickname had made a Bond-villain move: "Choc Finger" bought a whopping 241,000 tons of cocoa beans -- 7% of the world's cocoa supply and enough to make 5 billion chocolate bars
-- driving prices to 33-year highs.
[more inside]posted by chavenet at 2:55 PM PST - 46 comments
"In our need to restore our sense of self-control are we actually going to reward politicians who are not working to bring us together, but instead are forsaking America's beautiful 234-year history of diversity?" Another Op-Ed from a national newspaper? No, it's the
note from Bill in this month's
Penzeys Spices catalog (.pdf), introducing a new blend called
Arizona Dreaming, which combines the flavors of South of the Border "in ways Americans love so much."
posted by JoanArkham at 2:14 PM PST - 35 comments
On 1st April 2009, a newspaper seller called Ian Tomlinson was returning to his home, through the middle of the G20 protests. He was not part of those protests. He was struck from behind, by a masked policeman who had covered up his identity numbers, and fell to the ground. A few minutes later, Ian Tomlinson was dead (
previously on mefi)
Today, the
Crown Prosecution Service (motto 'Fair, Fearless and Effective') announced that there would be no criminal charges against the policeman
(CPS statement ,
Guardian coverage).
[more inside]posted by reynir at 1:29 PM PST - 59 comments
Lessons from a Tailor — directed by
Galen Summer and filmed by
Ed David.
The inspiration for this film came directly from the man himself. When I first met Martin Greenfield at his factory, with the intention of interviewing him for a lifetime achievement award he was receiving for his efforts as an employer and business owner in Bushwick, Brooklyn, it became clear that there was more to his story than mere success in business. Here was a man who had pulled himself up from tragedy and hardship, who had survived one of the most horrific events of the 20th century, the Nazi holocaust, and yet still possessed a lightness of spirit. [more inside]posted by netbros at 11:18 AM PST - 2 comments
July 21
In those years I imitated him, to the point of transcription, to the point of devoted and impassioned plagiarism. I felt: Macedonio is metaphysics, is literature. Whoever preceded him might shine in history, but they were all rough drafts of Macedonio, imperfect previous versions. To not imitate this canon would have represented incredible negligence.
From Jorge Luis Borges' eulogy for Macedonio Fernández. Borges' relationship with Macedonio was complicated, as recounted in
The Man Who Invented Borges, a fine essay by Marcelo Ballvé. Macedonio's most famous work, the posthumous-by-design work (he believed literature should be aged like good whiskey) The Museum of Eterna's Novel has finally been translated and published in English translation,
here is an excerpt from the novel (one of the ninety or so prologues). The introduction to the novel, written by its translator Margaret Schwartz, has been put online by the publisher (parts
1,
2,
3,
4,
5). Schwartz also sat down for a
short interview. You can download an mp3 of a
great hour-long panel discussion on Macedonio and a
master's thesis on Macedonio by Peter Loggie [pdf]posted by Kattullus at 11:55 PM PST - 7 comments
The Canadian Government created a
stir recently by announcing plans to scrap the compulsory long form census and replacing it with a voluntary questionnaire. Today, the Chief Statistician from Statistics Canada
resigned in protest.
[more inside]posted by phyrewerx at 10:24 PM PST - 47 comments
Playdead's
Limbo released today, and the
reviews are glowing. Following on the heels of a spate of well-received independent video game titles like
Braid,
World of Goo, and
Machinarium, we may be seeing a major shift in
the habits of video game reviewers. The trinity of
duration (short games = bad games),
sheer intensity (slow-paced, non-violent games = bad games), and
graphical 'realism' (non-3D, non-photorealistic games = bad games) seems to be giving way (somewhat) to a recognition of the value of
feel,
expressivity, and game mechanics that fit within a
holistic experience that integrates art direction, sound design, and storytelling elements.
Previously.
[more inside]posted by macross city flaneur at 7:08 PM PST - 45 comments
Mau Piailug passed away last week at 78 years old. He was a
Master Navigator from the tiny island of
Satawal. In the seventies, he traveled to Hawaii to help the
Polynesian Voyaging Society revive the
wayfinder's art, navigating by the sun, moon, stars, animals, waves and clouds. In 1976, he steered the Hokule'a, a
traditional sailing canoe, from Hawaii to Tahiti without even so much as a compass. He began teaching a new generation of navigators and
helped launch a revival of Polynesian culture. To honor him, the Polynesian Voyaging Society is
raising money to assist the people of Satawal, while also preparing for a world wide voyage on the Hokule'a, to use their
ancient wisdom to help imagine a new relationship to the planet we share.
posted by cal71 at 3:16 PM PST - 18 comments
Where can you find the Sun, the Moon, nine giraffes, a lion and lamb lying together, the Archangel Michael holding a sword in one hand and the severed head of Satan in the other, all atop a giant crab which is itself standing on a double helix? Well, there is
this one statue.
[more inside]posted by davidjmcgee at 9:04 AM PST - 50 comments
July 20
When a long train of abuses and usurpation, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security. Such has been the patient sufferance of the women under this government, and such is now the necessity which constrains them to demand the equal station to which they are entitled. 152 years ago yesterday was the last day of the
Seneca Falls Convention when the
Declaration of Sentiments along with an accompanying set of resolutions were signed by
68 women and 32 men.
[more inside]posted by Deathalicious at 10:56 PM PST - 12 comments
What Really Happened to Phoebe Prince? Six teens remained charged--
down from the original nine--in the death of Phoebe Prince, who committed suicide after
bullying at school. Legal writer Emily Bazelon of Slate.com continues her investigation of the case with a new three part series:
I've wrestled with how much of this information to publish. Phoebe's family has suffered terribly. But when the D.A. charged kids with causing Phoebe's death and threatened them with prison, she invited an inquiry into other potential causes. The whole story is a lot more complicated than anyone has publicly allowed for. [more inside]posted by availablelight at 10:19 PM PST - 103 comments
Platt Rogers Spencer was born in 1800 near the Hudson River. His family was too poor to afford paper so Spencer practiced on whatever was handy – leaves, bark, snow and sand – everything was a canvas for handwriting.
[more inside]posted by Sara C. at 8:57 PM PST - 7 comments
Is laundering Mexican drug cartel money too big too fail? Wachovia/Wells Fargo are discovered to be laundering many many billions of dollars. As in
$380,000,000,000. Charles Bowden, in a
recent interview with Amy Goodman, discusses the everyday reality of what life is like in the border town of Ciudad Juarez, and his most recent non-fiction account of the "Global Economy's New Killing Fields", in the just published book
Murder City. Meanwhile, the drug violence now involves
car bombs in Ciudad Juarez, the city across the border with El Paso. Guns go out of America, and drugs come in.
[more inside]posted by tarantula at 7:16 PM PST - 48 comments
Tucson's own
Calexico has made one of their concerts
available (Nuremberg 2009) for streaming and downloading. Calexico's Joey Burns has also been very busy lately with
Artists For Action, an Arizona organization that is actively speaking out
against AZ's controversial SB 1070. Calexico has a
history of hosting benefit concerts in support of various border issues.
[via]posted by .kobayashi. at 5:51 PM PST - 18 comments
"Facebook is
expected to announce that it has reached the 500 million user mark this week. That's half a billion people in just six years." "...the most visited site on the Internet, may also be the most despised: A new poll says the site scored 64 on a 100-point scale, which 'puts Facebook in the bottom 5 percent' of private sector companies 'and in the same range as airlines and cable companies, two perennially low-scoring industries with terrible customer satisfaction,' according to
results of a survey [PDF] released today.
* [more inside]posted by ericb at 4:23 PM PST - 97 comments
Breitbart strikes again. Conservative media activist and propagandist Andrew Breitbart made news again this week, bringing to light apparent
video evidence of racism among the NAACP's ranks, in the form of USDA official Shirley Sherrod, who was allegedly caught on tape in a speech to the NAACP, admitting that race had influenced her decisions not to provide assistance to white farm workers. But despite the fact that Sherrod was summarily dismissed from her USDA post as a result of Breitbart's accusations,
the complete, unedited footage of the speech reportedly confirms Sherrod's claims that "her comments were taken out of context... that the anecdote was part of a larger story, one in which she explains how she overcame her initial prejudice" and that in fact, the reported incidents took place before Sherrod worked for the USDA, when she worked for the Federation of Southern Cooperative/Land Assistance Fund. The white farmers described in the story have since confirmed to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that,
in fact, Sherrod saved them from bankruptcy. [
Via]
[more inside]posted by saulgoodman at 11:07 AM PST - 291 comments
Today mammals are the only surviving members of the Synapsids, but several hundred million years ago, they had company. Meet the
dicynodonts: beaked, sabre-toothed herbivores that look like nothing you've seen before.
[more inside]posted by Catseye at 5:23 AM PST - 21 comments
July 19
If you don't mind installing
Steam and are running a version of Windows, you can download and play
Alien Swarm for free. It's a top-down shooter with four-player co-op of you and your friends against the aliens.
posted by demiurge at 8:24 PM PST - 72 comments
Conrad Black has been granted
bail. Some are saying that he might be free as early as this week, and that he might not end up back in jail again -- instead, being sentenced to time served. He
gave up his Canadian citizenship in 2001 so that he could serve in the British House of Lords: where, oh where, will the poor guy live?
Here he is either packing, or removing boxes that helped get him into trouble in the first place.
posted by anothermug at 6:41 PM PST - 16 comments
Retratos Pintados "Since the late 19th century through the 1990s, hand-painted photographic portraits were a common feature in homes in the rural areas of the northeastern Brazilian states. At a time when black-and-white photographs were not considered dramatic enough, the retratos
pintados (“painted portraits”) glamorized and idealized their subjects. Black-and-white family photos were enlarged and painted, conferring status on members of the family and portraying them as icons or saints. Using oil washes and other techniques specific to the region, local artisans embellished clothing with pattern and color, smoothed wrinkles, added jewelry or resurrected deceased relatives, illustrating the fantasies and desires of their customers."
posted by puny human at 4:38 PM PST - 7 comments
"All three of the 'Appeal' segments make fun of those pre-movie trailers where celebrities used to ask you to donate money. It's a little shocking to see them using Christopher Reeve begging for money for medical research until you remember this was written years before his accident. Spooky. More celebrities interrupt Chris, arguing over what the point of the Walter Sternberg Foundation is, all of them asking for money, but none of them agreeing on why. Charlton Heston, Robert Vaughn, Clint Eastwood, Mary Tyler Moore, and others show up to argue. They return later to yell at the audience for not giving enough money, accusing them of not caring. Finally, in the third appeal, Chris Reeve just snaps and loses it, furious at the audience. 'I don't know what to say. Words cannot express my contempt for you people. You sit there stuffing your faces in your Reeboks and your Levis 501s. You don't care about the children. You just want to beat the crowd out of the parking lot at the end of the movie. Well, as far as I'm concerned, you can all go f*** yourselves.' Then for the rest of the film, Reeve just randomly shows up in the background of scenes, glaring at the audience with naked disgust." From the never-filmed
The Saturday Night Live Movie, written in 1990 by Greg Daniels, James Downey, George Meyer, Tom Davis, Al Franken, Conan O’Brien, and Robert Smigel.
posted by (Arsenio) Hall and (Warren) Oates at 4:12 PM PST - 17 comments
You know about
TED, but do you know about the
WGBH Forum Network? A project of the venerable Boston
public TV station, the Forum is a web platform which aggregates lectures from cultural institutions, museums, libraries, bookstores, and colleges across the US - everything from current research in social science and hard science to author and poet talks. Presentations vary in topic, length, format, and level of eggheadiness, but if you love ideas, you'll find some good stuff here. Streams on demand, downloads often available if you register.
posted by Miko at 9:09 AM PST - 11 comments
"I wasn't sued, I was never fired, and I survived it. That's my great achievement." Idiosyncratic auteur
Todd Solondz speaks about his newest film
Life During Wartime, which will finally get a (limited) theatrical release on Friday. The film, originally titled
Forgiveness, is ostensibly a sequel to his acclaimed 1998 film
Happiness; however, every role has been recast and some details have been consciously ignored. For example, Philip Seymour Hoffman's character
Allen [NSFW] is now played by black actor Michael K. Williams of
The Wire fame, a tactic Solondz also employed in
Palindromes, his
divisive fairy tale about abortion. This is the
Welcome to the Dollhouse director's fifth feature (he disowned his first one) and
his first in six years.
posted by Houyhnhnm at 8:06 AM PST - 42 comments
Dearest
Max, my last request:
everything that can be found in my posthumous papers (thus in
boxes, cupboards, desks, at
home and in the office, or wherever else they may be that you come upon them) of diaries, manuscripts, letters,
my own and those written to me, sketches and so on, should be burned unread and without remnant,
even all the written or drawn things that you or others have, that you might have asked for in my name. If there are letters that people
will not turn over to you, at least they should promise to
burn them themselves.”
posted by griphus at 6:51 AM PST - 37 comments
Top Secret America: The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.
[more inside]posted by ryoshu at 6:29 AM PST - 113 comments
Lasers 4, UAVs 0. It's easier to hit things at the speed of light. Raytheon tests a naval anti-aircraft laser, and you can watch it go at the link.
posted by Ella Fynoe at 3:48 AM PST - 58 comments
July 18
Yet Another YouTube Script, by
eugenox. Unlike nearly every other predecessing YouTube userscripts that erratically worked or broke with site revisions, this userscript interfaces with the
YouTube Player API to globally control autoplay and playback quality to stop the repeated web annoyance of YouTube autoplay. (It also lets you pick a lower or higher quality video as your default.)
[more inside]posted by WCityMike at 7:44 PM PST - 8 comments
Space Project from photographer
Vincent Fournier.
"Playing on the stylised notion of a sci-fi utopia, Fournier’s otherworldly photographs of the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre, the Mars Desert Research Station in Utah and the Atacama Desert Observatories in Chile – alongside a series of surprisingly stringy trainee astronauts - offer an alternative view of the world, unseen by many and known by few."
posted by puny human at 4:05 PM PST - 11 comments
Kirtland's Warbler (Dendroica kirtlandii) is a small songbird that lives almost exclusively in the lower peninsula of Michigan. During the 1970's they were on the verge of extinction, partially due to the fact that they prefer young jack pine trees as a nesting place, and improved fire safety efforts had led to a lack of new growth in the forests. To address the lack of young jack pines, the Forest Service started a controlled burn on May 5, 1980. The fire quickly got out of control, and the resulting wildfire lead to the death of local firefighter Jim Swiderski, and the destruction of 64 homes. A
recent Radiolab segment has again raised the question: how much is a species worth?
[more inside]posted by ivey at 3:11 PM PST - 17 comments
New Maps of Science Fiction
The first question that naturally comes to mind about stories and authors is "How much do you like them?" Literary critics try to go far beyond this simple query, but it is the one that people ordinarily care most about, and for us it is the most important sociological question. Using modern techniques of analysis we can recover a tremendous amount of hidden information from statistics of people's likes and dislikes.
Analog Yearbook, 1977, pages 277-299. (
via)
posted by P.o.B. at 2:02 PM PST - 45 comments
"They are the earliest painted portraits that have survived; they were painted whilst the Gospels of the New Testament were being written. Why then do they strike us today as being so immediate? Why does their individuality feel like our own? Why is their look more contemporary than any look to be found in the rest of the two millennia of traditional European art which followed them? The
Fayum portraits touch us as if they had been painted last month." The Fayum mummy portraits were painted between the first and third centuries AD, in Roman Egypt, and preserved by the dry Egyptian climate.
Wikimedia Commons. According to
Wikipedia, 900 portraits are known to have survived.
John Bavaro has been creating
modern versions using the Brushes app on the iPhone.
Via the Brushes Gallery on Flickr.posted by russilwvong at 11:58 AM PST - 39 comments
AirBnB is a web site that allows you to find or offer rooms, couches, apartments, houses, backyard tents, treehouses, castles, islands... for rent. Terrific for travellers on the cheap or who want unique experiences in lodging. There are some fantastic properties on here--many of them reasonably priced.
posted by dobbs at 11:32 AM PST - 20 comments
Broken Secrets is all about things you may not know but might find useful. These secrets are not things you shouldn’t know; more likely, they’re just interesting things you might not know yet.
[more inside]posted by netbros at 11:14 AM PST - 19 comments
CSS3 Pie. Google's
Frame requires users to install Frame in order to get the benefits of CSS3 support (among other things). CSS3 Progressive Internet Explorer aims to bring support for CSS3 in IE versions 6 through 8 via a server side script. It's early days for the extent of supported properties but there are more to come. If it's ultimately functional and useful long term remains to be seen.
posted by juiceCake at 8:42 AM PST - 21 comments
"Facebook's popularity is based on the reality that human beings are social creatures. Staying connected with people we know is innate to us. But maintaining separate social groups that we don't want to clash is also innate."
The Five Stages of Facebook Grief.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 4:43 AM PST - 87 comments
The next morning I recalled a question the woman had asked me the night before: of the two ingredients of wabi-sabi, the Japanese aesthetic of impermanence, did I prefer wabi, the rusticity, simplicity, and irregularity of things in their created state, or sabi, the patina of age, the wear and tear that comes with constant use, the intimations of transience. I'm in the sabi camp: sabi as a concept is in all probability etymologically related to the verb sabiru, to rust, and for us lusters after rust, Yubari is sacred ground.
Spike Japan is the blog, or ongoing essay, of Richard Hendy, a long-time resident of Japan, about urban decay and population decline in Japan. The writing is digressive, knowledgable, opinionated, witty and engaging. The longest series is a
travelogue of Hokkaido, in which the
section on Yubari is the most stunning, though I also like
the tour of Kuril Islands' dispute tourist attractions. There's much to read on Spike Japan, but let me point you towards the melancholic
Requiem for a Railway, about Hendy's trip along an abandoned railway line.
posted by Kattullus at 12:18 AM PST - 20 comments
Inception (WARNING: SPOILERS FOLLOW) (
trailer) (
prequel comic) (
cast interviews), the new film about shared dreaming by
Christopher Nolan, has shocked audiences into
gasps of delight and confusion. Two days in, the film,
having impressed critics, is already inspiring elaborate debates about its complex and surreal plotline, with theories and heated discussions
here,
here,
here,
here,
here,
here, and
here.
posted by shivohum at 12:13 AM PST - 468 comments
July 17
Every person is assigned a role at the start of the
game. You are randomly sided with either the village, the mafia, or a third party. During the night, the mafia secretly meet and discuss to decide who they want to kill, while other power roles decide what to do. During the day, the village players must figure out who is not sided with the village and get rid of them.
[more inside]posted by GooseOnTheLoose at 8:30 PM PST - 38 comments
In 1992, on a rainy night in Palm Springs, a drunk driver took the life of Jilly Rizzo, long-time pal of Frank Sinatra. Jeffrey Perotte (then 28) was an alcoholic "who had the papers for court-ordered alcohol rehabilitation sitting in the glove box of his car". He ran from the scene as Rizzo burned to death, and then attempted to convince officers that it was not him who had been driving, but his girlfriend.
Sentenced to life, Perotte (
website) 'turned his life around' in prison, earning three degrees along the way. He has come up for parole four times, with "a file full of testimonials from prison guards, counselors and even, twice, the judge who sentenced him," but has been denied each time.
"What we've been dealing with all along," [his father-in-law] said, "has been the hidden hand of the Sinatras."posted by woodblock100 at 7:30 PM PST - 104 comments
Zenyata may be the greatest mare ever. Even if your not normally into race horses, it's worth seeing this one, there may not be another like her. Laura Hillenbrand, who wrote
Seabiscuit, explains
why (NPR 6min).
[more inside]posted by stbalbach at 12:18 PM PST - 44 comments
July 16
The United States was engaged in the largest two-front war of its, or any nation's history. Though victory was not yet certain, there were discussions on a multi-national level regarding the future peace, and on the President of the United States was looking to the post-war prospects for the nation. With that in mind, the annual address of the President to Congress and the nation was summed up in one word: Security. "And that means not only physical security which provides safety from attacks by aggressors. It means also economic security, social security, moral security -- in a family of nations." This was Franklin D. Roosevelt's third-to-last
Fireside Chat, presented on Tuesday, January 11, 1944, which included what he proposed to be the
Second Bill of Rights.
[more inside]posted by filthy light thief at 3:06 PM PST - 67 comments
The immodestly named Versailles
1 in Florida is possibly the largest home in America. At 90,000 sqft it is nearly twice the size of the White House and includes 23 bathrooms, a 10 car garage and 10 Segways to get around. The WSJ reports on
Touring the (Almost) Largest Home in America. Of course the owners ran out of money and now the hulking shell of Versailles, sitting precariously for the ages a few feet above sea level, is
for sale (click through for virtual tour).
posted by stbalbach at 11:58 AM PST - 76 comments
Flash Friday:
Mardek 3 is an rpg similar in style and length to the Final Fantasy or Earthbound games from the SNES days. But that's not all!
[more inside]posted by Lemurrhea at 6:58 AM PST - 11 comments
July 15
The writer has—has been stricken with the—the passion and beauty of life, the world, and a—a demon-driven need to—to express that, to put it down on paper or cut it into marble or into music, and with that foreknowledge that he has only a limited time to do it, he may be dead tomorrow—he's got to do it all while he can still breathe, and it's a—a desire, a need, to put the whole history of the human heart into any and every word, every paragraph that he writes, and the obscurity comes from a belief which I hold, that—that there is no such thing as "was."
In the late 1950s William Faulkner was
writer-in-residence at the University of Virginia.
Extensive recordings of readings, reflections, and classes are now online.
NPR summarizes.
[more inside]posted by jjray at 9:34 PM PST - 15 comments
Forget the
Ewings, the
Carringtons, or the
Channings and Giobertis, France is in the grip of the real-life soap opera of the
Bettencourts, heiresses to the
L'Oréal cosmetics empire, featuring a suave gigolo, a scheming wealth manager, a paradise island, feuding lawyers, embarrassed politicians, squabbling magistrates, New Media, another major multinational, and even a butler with a tape recorder...
[more inside]posted by Skeptic at 4:34 PM PST - 25 comments
Next weekend, thousands of runners will take to the streets of San Francisco to run the
SF Marathon, on a course with hills that skate a 300 ft. elevation about
six times over 26.2 miles. However, the non-corporately sponsored marathon attracts few than a third of the runners who tackle New York City and Chicago. While the organizers are trying to
re-brand the race, offering
two different half marathon courses, they have shied away from making the course any easier.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 9:06 AM PST - 26 comments
For the first time, research shows that American creativity is declining. What went wrong? Can we fix it? 'Nobody would argue that Torrance’s tasks, which have become the gold standard in creativity assessment, measure creativity perfectly. What’s shocking is how incredibly well Torrance’s creativity index predicted those kids’ creative accomplishments as adults. Those who came up with more good ideas on Torrance’s tasks grew up to be entrepreneurs, inventors, college presidents, authors, doctors, diplomats, and software developers. Jonathan Plucker of Indiana University recently reanalyzed Torrance’s data. The correlation to lifetime creative accomplishment was more than three times stronger for childhood creativity than childhood IQ.'
[more inside]posted by VikingSword at 9:02 AM PST - 88 comments
Alarming digital drugs get Oklahoma teens high! "I heard it was like some weird demons and stuff through an iPod and he was like freaking out," said Mustang High School student Meghan Edwards.
Psychology Today examines the analog origins, "In 1839, Heinrich Wilhelm Dove discovered that two constant tones, played at slightly different frequencies in each ear, cause the listener to perceive the sound of a fast-paced beat. Calling this phenomenon "binaural beats," Dove helped launch two centuries of legitimate research and, as is almost always followed by exciting empirical study, money-grabbing pseudoscience." Parent Kelly Johnson does not approve, "Well it's just scary, definitely scary. Just one more thing to look out for."
posted by geoff. at 8:08 AM PST - 100 comments
Music video for Tim Halperin's song "She Runs" - one continuous shot. Cute with a homemade feel. I can't believe people have the energy to make things like this in the Texas heat!
posted by sparky at 7:19 AM PST - 14 comments
July 14
Cat-Scan.com is one of the strangest sites I've seen in some time. I have no idea how these people got their cats wedged into their scanners, or why
.posted by The Devil Tesla at 6:18 PM PST - 238 comments
Possibly having tired of reviewing blockbusters such as Avatar, Phantom Menace, and Attack of the Clones (previously:
1,
2,
3, respectively),
RedLetterMedia has taken a different approach and posted a video review of John Hughes' 1994 family comedy,
Baby's Day Out.
Then, in a visual you might find more creepy than anything you've seen in The Shining, the baby's little hand reaches down and starts grabbing at his cock. He actually squeezes his dick over and over again with the creepy little baby hand.
Not to be missed are Plinkett's other reviews, including several
Star Trek films. RedLetterMedia also dabbles in comedic
shorts.
posted by Christ, what an asshole at 1:40 PM PST - 31 comments
So it's the middle of July and you say you haven't found your perfect summer jam yet? Does Ga Ga make you gag? Are you maxed-out on MIA? Then what you need is the petite princess of Swedish electra-pop,
Robyn, doing
Fembot. So hot. Still need convincing? Then would you believe Robyn with Staygold, and a live version of
Backseat.
posted by puny human at 1:22 PM PST - 53 comments
Kristin Hersh is well-known to many as a founder of legendary 80s indy/alt band
Throwing Muses, as well as for her own successful solo albums and alt-punk 3-piece band
50 Foot Wave, is having a good 2010. A new solo album,
Crooked, is due out later this year -- a follow-up to the collection
Speedbath, which was released on the web under a Creative Commons license, and
demos for a forthcoming new Throwing Muses collection have been appearing on the band's
CASH page (
previously);
Crooked has also appeared in the UK in
book format through HarperCollins' Friday Project imprint. A nice additional tidbit for fans is the just-released live collection,
Cats and Mice. As if all that wasn't enough, stories that Kristin came up with
for her sons while they accompanied her on tour over the years inspired a children's book,
Toby Snax,
published in 2007, and Hersh will be publishing a memoir,
Rat Girl (
Paradoxical Undressing, in the UK edition) detailing her early days with Throwing Muses -- a time in which she struggled
with mental illness and figured out what it meant to front a touring rock band while pregnant (excerpts of
Rat Girl arrived in periodic email installments to
Hersh's subscription supporters, whose support
has enabled much of Hersh's current productivity). Hersh has been taking advantage of various social media as well: you can follow her doing in the
Throwingmusic fan forums,
Facebook, or via her often-curious
Twitter feed.
posted by aught at 12:40 PM PST - 30 comments
Choice of Broadsides is a choose-your-own-adventure game set in an alternate 19th Century world that is much like our own, where Albion and Gaul fight for naval supremacy. You can choose to be a gentleman in a standard patriarchal society, or a gentlewoman in a matriarchal one. Later on in the game you can choose your sexual orientation. Originally there were no options for a same-sex relationship, but after demands from players,
it was added in. Spoilers below the cut.
[more inside]posted by Kattullus at 12:21 PM PST - 42 comments
Yesterday was the birthday of
Dr. John Dee (1527-1609) (
wiki). This
extraordinary and brilliant man was a
mathematician,
astrologer, astronomer, navigator, map maker, alchemist, hermetic philosopher,
and adviser in matters practical
and arcane to Queen
Elizabeth 1st.
History has sometimes
been unkind to him because he
embraced science and mysticism together (
previously), believing both to be facets of the same universal thing. His unfortunate
experiments in conjuring angels
with the alchemist
Edward Kelley are probably to blame. Kelley
asserted that the angel Uriel had instructed him to swap or share wives with Dr. Dee. This, unsurprisingly, led to the end of their association.
16th century celestial wife-swapping was going too far.
However, Dr. Dee was a
true Renaissance man and a
gifted scholar. You can visit his black obsidian
magic Aztec mirror at the British Museum.
posted by infini at 10:03 AM PST - 50 comments
During the past 4 days, the
Cockrell Butterfly Center at the
Houston Museum of Natural Science has stayed open 24 hours to accommodate the
record crowds filing into the museum at all hours. Why? A rare
Amorphophallus titanium, aka
“Corpse Flower,” named
Lois is
finally about to bloom. Now, Lois is
not your average, run-of-the-mill
stinky plant.
Only 28 Corpse Flowers have bloomed in the US, so Lois has become a
local celebrity with
her own blog,
Flickr feed,
live webcam and
cupcakes. She even has
her own playlist, with songs such as “That Smell” by Lynyrd Skynrd, “I’m Comin’ Out” by Diana Ross and the classic “Smelly Cat” by Phoebe from Friends. And like any trendy Corpse Flower, Lois also has
her own Twitter account. She's also a
bit of a diva. Yet despite predictions, Lois
still hasn't bloomed as of Wednesday morning. In response, Lois
makes excuses,
bad jokes,
complaints and
snarky comments.
posted by yeoja at 9:47 AM PST - 30 comments
I Write Like... Check what famous writer you write like with this statistical analysis tool, which analyzes your word choice and writing style and compares them to those of famous writers.
posted by swift at 7:51 AM PST - 376 comments
The RIAA paid Holmes Roberts & Owen $9,364,901 in 2008, Jenner & Block more than $7,000,000, and Cravath Swain & Moore $1.25 million, to pursue its "copyright infringement" claims, in order to recover a mere $391,000. ... for a 3 year period, they spent around $64,000,000 in legal and investigative expenses to recover around $1,361,000. (via Slashdot)posted by Joe Beese at 7:28 AM PST - 63 comments
Saint Taffarel who is in goal
Like a guardian angel
Sweet like honey
Defending our goal, our hope, our happiness. - Carlos Drummond
A literary roundup of the mysterious keeper, from Nabokov to Camus to Dante. A little more football for those of us getting the twitches.
posted by Hiker at 6:44 AM PST - 6 comments
July 13
The Oil Spill Commission held its first hearing on the BP Oil Spill in the Gulf of Mexico Monday at the New Orleans Hilton. During the public comment portion, local residents came forward to tell their own stories of loss and fear and frustration over the oil spill and the moratorium.
When words failed, music prevailed. posted by nola at 8:53 PM PST - 12 comments
The paradox of good parents with toxic children. 'We marvel at the resilient child who survives the most toxic parents and home environment and goes on to a life of success. Yet the converse — the notion that some children might be the bad seeds of more or less decent parents — is hard to take.' 'For better or worse, parents have limited power to influence their children. That is why they should not be so fast to take all the blame — or credit — for everything that their children become.' But this is not the only family dynamic that is becoming noted. 'Therapists for years have listened to patients blame parents for their problems. Now there is growing interest in the other side of the story:
What about the suffering of parents who are estranged from their adult children?'
posted by VikingSword at 12:04 PM PST - 150 comments
Tuna’s End Adapted from the book "Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food" for the New York Times. A pretty bleak look at the state of world wide tuna fishing.
posted by chunking express at 10:01 AM PST - 55 comments
URL shortening service for twitter. "Senior citizens are the fastest-growing user group for twitter probably. And they don't have time to decipher most URL shorteners. The average senior citizen probably assumes 'bit.ly' is the URL for a Lithuanian overbite clinic; 'tr.im' looks like the homepage of an Islamic transportation consultancy. On the other hand, 'urlshorteningservicefortwitter.com' lays it all out on the table!"
[more inside]posted by eccnineten at 8:47 AM PST - 59 comments
July 12
Merchants of Doubt is a new book that reports how a small group of scientists committed to an extreme free-market ideology have been employed by large corporations over several decades to cast doubt on such different environmental issues as the risks of tobacco smoke, the dangers of DDT, the effectiveness of the Strategic Defence Initiative, the regulation of CFCs, and the causes of global warming.
A review in the Christian Science Monitor calls this "one of the most important books of the year. Exhaustively researched and documented..."
posted by binturong at 3:49 PM PST - 48 comments
Physicist Erik Verlinde proposed in a recent
paper that the force of gravity can be derived from the principles of thermodynamics.
NY Times explains.
[Physicist Lee] Smolin called it, “very interesting and also very incomplete.”posted by jjray at 3:20 PM PST - 55 comments
"Like many paleontologists, I believe that T. rex was a hunter: a forest hunter. More specifically, I believe that T. rex used the very same hunting strategy that millions of forest hunters practice today:
stand hunting from a tree."posted by brundlefly at 2:31 PM PST - 66 comments
When he was 32, his life seemed hopeless. He was bankrupt and without a job. He was grief stricken over the death of his first child and he had a wife and a newborn to support. Drinking heavily, he contemplated suicide. Instead, he decided decided that his life was not his to throw away: it belonged to the universe. Buckminster Fuller embarked on "an experiment to discover what the little, penniless, unknown individual might be able to do effectively on behalf of all humanity." If the architect, author, designer, inventor, and futurist
Richard Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller were still alive, he would be 115 years old today. Though he died in 1983, his legacy grows on through
recordings of his ideas and
the Buckminster Fuller Institute.
[more inside]posted by filthy light thief at 2:17 PM PST - 32 comments
On the coffee table, he's laid out the iconic name tags he and Linda were given, as well as their green seat assignments for the first of two tapings on September 22, 2008, in the Bob Barker Studio at CBS's Television City: 004 and 005 — right down in front, immediately to the left of the four podiums on Contestant's Row. He has the giant white cue card that a stagehand held up — TERRY KNIESS — because most contestants can't hear announcer Rich Fields telling them to come on down above the sound of the crowd. (Terry couldn't.) He also has the operating instructions for the Big Green Egg, "The World's Best Smoker and Grill," which Terry won with a perfect bid of $1,175 from Contestant's Row. It's by the pool out back, and Terry agrees that it's awesome. He has Linda's passport out, just in case, and their marriage certificate, dated April 7, 1972. "I know I would ask to see it," he says.
A great Esquire article about the only perfect Showcase bid in the history of The Price is Right. [more inside]posted by kipmanley at 1:25 PM PST - 59 comments
A Texas company
S2C Global Systems has
announced that it is
moving forward with a plan to ship 2.9 billion to 9 billion gallons of water a year from the small Alaskan town of
Sitka to the west coast of India (near Mumbai). If the company succeeds in carrying out the shipments, the deal would represent the world’s first regular, bulk exports of water via tanker. The water will be redistributed to places in India, southeast Asia and the Middle East. The Alaskan town of about 8,000 people could earn up to 90 million a year in revenue.
posted by stbalbach at 1:20 PM PST - 53 comments
Click judiciously; the site is called
instant epilePSY and not without reason. If you need annoying and occasionally baffling animated GIFs culled from Hungarian music videos, however, you'll be well served. (
Some of the
loopings are fairly clever.)
posted by Wolfdog at 12:23 PM PST - 18 comments
Nomadic Milk. Dutch artist Esther Polak uses GPS, white sand, and a robot to explore traditional versus industrial milk economies in Nigeria.
posted by shakespeherian at 11:13 AM PST - 5 comments
July 11
China's enigmatic car industry. Did you know that China is the biggest
car manufacturer in the world? 'Last year China overtook Japan as the world's biggest carmaker'. Did you know that China is the biggest car market in the world? 'This year it overtook America as the biggest car market'.
Can you name any Chinese car brands? What constitutes a Chinese car brand? Volvo started out Swedish, was bought by Ford, and then sold to a Chinese company. But are Chinese brands merely copy cats? Not at all. 'In technology, one Chinese company is already ahead. With triumphant music, billowing smoke and a troupe of flamboyant dancers in white quasi-military uniforms, BYD launched its latest car, powered by a battery design so revolutionary that Warren Buffet, America's most famous investor, has put $250m (£170m) into the company.'
[more inside]posted by VikingSword at 5:53 PM PST - 36 comments
Srebrenica: Genocide Reconstructed In July 1995 Srebrenica was shelled and occupied by the Army of Republic of Srpska,VRS, despite being declared a protected area by the United Nations. More than 7,000 people were killed, the victims of genocide. Recently a wealth of data has been found in the home of the fugitive Gen. Ratko Mladic, who is still
assumed alive by the Hague Chief Prosecutor in spite of his family petitioning for him to be declared
dead.
15 years on Srebrenica
buries its dead.
Amid a hurricane of killing, rape and 'ethnic cleansing', a movement striving in the opposite direction responded in the most powerful way they knew: with rock'n'roll. Fifteen years since War Child's Help LP, key figures reflect on
the war – and music.
[more inside]posted by adamvasco at 7:15 AM PST - 17 comments
The "Barefoot Bandit"
(previously), crashed an airplane in the Bahamas this month. The
FBI and other law enforcment have been searching for him for over two years. His
Facebook page has nearly 60 thousand friends. After eluding US authorities, he has been
caught in the Bahamas. In other news, his mother is shopping for a
book deal. Carry on.
posted by shockingbluamp at 7:00 AM PST - 136 comments
July 10
Urban gardening and agriculture are becoming increasingly important as our world becomes more urbanized.
Urban Gardening Help is for those environmentally conscious urban dwellers who want to use
hydroponics and other tools to create a green corner devoted to nature in their own home.
Urban Gardens looks for innovative and eco-friendly designs, trends, and ideas for the stylish urban home. See, for example,
tiny herb gardens, where succulent cuttings come in small packages.
Urban Garden Casual works with the constraints of limited-space, light, and micro-climates created from the shadows of neighboring buildings by using unconventional ideas like the
garden pouch.posted by netbros at 5:54 PM PST - 9 comments
It's like a concert tour but with sketchbooks. Get a sketchbook, fill it based on a theme (you can pick one or have one assigned randomly) by a certain date, then let it go on tour and eventually be a barcoded, checkout-able book in the Brooklyn Art Library that you can track. I love this idea.
posted by jragon at 3:09 PM PST - 17 comments
"Eggs? Yeah, we fix 'em. Well, are they broken all the way or are they just cracked? OK, well that's good,
just bring 'em right in..." The year: 1984. The sketch: "Roy's Food Repair". The stars: John Candy, Valri Bromfield, Dave Thomas, Carrie Fisher, and Paul Simon. The show: a short-lived NBC comedy variety program produced by Lorne Michaels called
The New Show.
[more inside]posted by Atom Eyes at 11:42 AM PST - 7 comments
Perspective Matters. The exact same moment in history (the arrival of Union troops in Fredericksburg VA in 1862), as described by a white woman resident of the area, and a black slave. It would be an understatement to say they had diverging viewpoints.
posted by COD at 6:31 AM PST - 27 comments
(Late) Friday Flash Fun:
CellCraft. Build and improve a cell, learn how real cells work, and save the Platypus species!
posted by cthuljew at 2:17 AM PST - 13 comments
July 9
Less than two weeks after a controversial paper came to light advocating the pre-natal treatment of some female fetuses with a hormone to make their behavior more stereotypically female (
previously discussed here) comes news of actual animal research on causing the opposite inclination. By knocking out the fucose mutarotase gene, scientists in South Korea have apparently created "Lesbian mice" who prefer other female mice and who resist the attempts of male mice to mate with them.
Article abstract, and
coverage by The Telegraph.
posted by Asparagirl at 11:58 PM PST - 19 comments
Lost Films, a project of the German Federal Cultural Foundation, is a wiki aimed at identifying the over 3500 films declared orphaned or lost in their archives. Other archivists and the public can go to the
Identify section and look at surviving photographs, film fragments, and documents, as well as comment and upload any materials of your own, just in case you had promo materials for some unidentified 1915 German war buddy comedy just lying around. (Via
Slate).
posted by Weebot at 10:16 PM PST - 6 comments
Cary in the Sky with Diamonds. "Before Timothy Leary and the Beatles, LSD was largely unknown and unregulated. But in the 1950s, as many as 100 Hollywood luminaries—Cary Grant and Esther Williams among them—began taking the drug as part of psychotherapy. With LSD research beginning a comeback, the authors recount how two Beverly Hills doctors promoted a new 'wonder drug,' at $100 a session, profoundly altering the lives of their glamorous patients."
[Via]posted by homunculus at 4:39 PM PST - 12 comments
Chinese Outsourcer Seeks U.S. Workers With IQ of 125 and Up. "A Chinese IT outsourcing company that has started hiring new U.S. computer science graduates to work in Shanghai requires prospective job candidates to demonstrate an IQ of 125 or above on a test it administers to sort out job applicants. In doing so,
Bleum Inc. is following a hiring practice it applies to college recruits in China. But a new Chinese college graduate must score an IQ of 140 on the company's test. An IQ test is the first screen for any U.S. or Chinese applicant."
posted by eccnineten at 1:44 PM PST - 79 comments
io9 decided that
Firefly needed a "tight-ass killer 1980s intro." So they cut one together:
the article, or just
the intro itself.
A fan's end-credits, even with a nice slight soupçon of
MTM at the end.
Firefly fans might find it more interesting, though, that io9
noted a little later in the day that Nathan Fillion had
tweeted on Wednesday night a
picture of Joss Whedon, Alan Tudyk, Nathan Fillion, and Adam Baldwin all looking upward into a bright light, with the text "Together. Again." But ...
no, it doesn't mean
that, unfortunately. [Still, if you need your Simon or Kaylee fix, look to
Warehouse 13 next Tuesday, as Maher and Staite are guest-starring together in "Mild-Mannered" (
trailer).]
posted by WCityMike at 7:35 AM PST - 213 comments
"This post touched me in places I've never been touched" Over at Salon, Laura Miller talks about those little belches of beatification --
Book Blurbs. The Guardian is running a
contest where you (Yes, YOU!) can try to out praise all comers by blurbing The DaVinci Code.
[more inside]posted by Trochanter at 6:54 AM PST - 48 comments
The Toronto 18. "The [Toronto] Star was the first to break the news, just over four years ago, that an al-Qaeda inspired homegrown terror cell had been busted in Toronto. ... Numerous publication bans have kept the full story from the public. Now, with the case over, we can present the complete narrative of the Toronto 18: Who they are, how they met, what they did." This is a great example of how to present long-form journalism online.
posted by chunking express at 6:44 AM PST - 46 comments
July 8
GodBlock is a web filter that blocks religious content. It is targeted at parents and schools who wish to protect their kids from the often violent, sexual, and psychologically harmful material in many holy texts, and from being indoctrinated into any religion before they are of the age to make such decisions. When installed properly, GodBlock will test each page that your child visits before it is loaded, looking for passages from holy texts, names of religious figures, and other signs of religious propaganda. If none are found, then your child is allowed to browse freely.
posted by Obscure Reference at 8:25 PM PST - 128 comments
"
The Interview was not a happy invention.... In the first place, the interviewer is the reverse of an inspiration, because you are afraid of him." An
epic rant by Mark Twain, published for the first time this week.
[more inside]posted by ardgedee at 5:09 PM PST - 31 comments
Stanford's library was running out of space for printed books and journals, so they've built a new space ... with even less room for printed titles and issues. It's hastening the move to a digital library.
NPR reports.
posted by anothermug at 4:14 PM PST - 75 comments
CityLights interview with
Pauline Kael --
1::
2::
3::
4 (approx. 40 mins, NSI, 1982) Topics include Cecil B. Demille, Robert Preston, John Boorman’s Zardoz, Sean Connery, Roger Moore, James Bond films, and Lorenzo Semple Jr. More interviews from the National Screen Institute and Brian Linehan
here, including
John Candy,
Eugene Levy,
Christopher Plummer, and
Ian McKellenposted by puny human at 4:00 PM PST - 13 comments
Now! 75 Chart Medley. Brett Domino (
wikipedia,
official site) and Steven Peavis perform a medley of hits from 2010, using: soft drink cans, iPod Touch (using DigiDrummer app), Accordion, Roland E-36 Keyboard, Korg Digital Piano, Stylophone Beatbox, Theremin, Ukulele, Egg Shaker, Roland AX-Synth Keytar, Recorders, Glockenspiel, Kazoos, and
Stylophones (previously). Via the excellent and hilarious
Graham Clark of
Stop Podcasting Yourself.
[more inside]posted by rossination at 3:00 PM PST - 10 comments
Year: 2025. Mission: Save
Moonbase Alpha after critical systems were damaged by a meteor strike. A free
Steam-powered 3D-immersive game from NASA. Windows only.
posted by jjray at 2:42 PM PST - 44 comments
Yesterday, the Spanish national football squad won its first World Cup semifinal. A
distinguished supporter insisted on personally congratulating them
in the locker room. (SLYT, but priceless. Watch in particular the hero of the match enter the frame around 1:16).
posted by Skeptic at 1:45 PM PST - 83 comments
Today Minnesota finalizes a $44 million deal to conserve approximately 188,000 acres of forest, wetlands, and shoreline through what is known as a
conservation easement. In addition to private funds from entities such as the
Blandin Foundation, the easement is being paid for through the
Clean Water, Land and Legacy Amendment to Minneosta's state constitution, which just over a year ago created permanent funding for natural resource, arts, and cultural projects through a 0.375% state sales tax. UPM-Blandin Paper Co., will continue to own the land and be allowed to harvest wood, but the land cannot be developed or subdivided and the public must have access to the land.
[more inside]posted by Muddler at 12:09 PM PST - 31 comments
Canada's next Governor-General will be
David Johnston, currently President of the
University of Waterloo in Ontario, a tech-oriented school.
Johnston is a legal scholar specializing in securities regulation, corporation law, public policy, and IT law. Here's his
CV [pdf]. Why Johnston, instead of a journalist or public figure as has been the trend?
For one, a legal scholar will be better able to navigate potential constitutional issues during minority governments. Johnston has
pledged to be "a stalwart defender of our Canadian heritage, of Canadian institutions, and of the Canadian people".
posted by PercussivePaul at 9:36 AM PST - 65 comments
When "Proto-Pop" artist
Larry Rivers' died in
2002, he left behind extensive archives of his letters, paperwork, photographs and film documenting the New York artistic and literary scene from the 1940s through the 1980s. They chronicle his friendships and relationships with dozens of artists, musicians and writers, from Willem de Kooning and Andy Warhol to Frank O’Hara. Also included: films and videos of his two adolescent daughters, naked or topless, being interviewed by their father about their developing breasts. Now, one daughter, who says she was pressured to participate beginning when she was 11, is
demanding that material be removed from the archive and returned to her and her sister. [more inside]posted by zarq at 8:04 AM PST - 74 comments
Greetings from the Twine Ball, wish you were here: "But you can't see out of the side of the car, because the windows are completely covered with the decals of all the places where we've already been: there's
Elvis-O-Rama, the
Tupperware Museum, the
Boll Weevil Monument, and
Cranberry World, the
Shuffleboard Hall Of Fame,
Poodle Dog Rock, and the
Mecca of Albino Squirrels. We've been to ghost towns, theme parks, wax museums, and
a place where you can drive through the middle of a tree ... "
[more inside]posted by WCityMike at 7:30 AM PST - 41 comments
July 7
He's no Trent Reznor or Radiohead, but Volker Kahl is pushing from the bottom of the sales charts, making his post-Beefcake work (under the nom-de-sampler Kattoo)
available online.
[more inside]posted by ChrisR at 9:23 PM PST - 53 comments
One of the most rhythmically solid, tastefully understated and (all too often) criminally underrated drummers in the history of rock music turned 70 today, and you'll forgive me if I couldn't let the day pass without a nod in his direction. You've probably heard of
him.
[more inside]posted by flapjax at midnite at 5:49 PM PST - 98 comments
Octavia Nasr Canned at CNN. CNN's Chief Middle East correspondent for 20 years, Octavia Nasr tweeted “Sad to hear of the passing of
Sayyed Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah... One of Hezbollah’s giants I respect a lot.” She was fired by CNN shortly afterward because they believed "her credibility in her position as senior editor for Middle Eastern affairs has been compromised going forward".
posted by falameufilho at 3:46 PM PST - 130 comments
Hippie Crack -- The Village Voice profiles the "Nitrous Oxide Mafia" that follows the jam band circuit selling balloons in parking lots.
posted by empath at 11:04 AM PST - 158 comments
"His fiancee smiled and commented, 'Isn't that cute. They have the spirit of giving.' That really set me off, as my regular readers can imagine. 'No!' I exclaimed [...] 'They're giving away their parents' things [...] It's not theirs to give.' I pushed the button to roll down the window and stuck my head out to set them straight. '
You must charge something for the lemonade.'"
posted by WCityMike at 7:19 AM PST - 124 comments
July 6
The Lucretian swerve: The biological basis of human behavior and the criminal justice systemAs de Duve has written, “If … neuronal events in the brain determine behavior, irrespective of whether they are conscious or unconscious, it is hard to find room for free will. But if free will does not exist, there can be no responsibility, and the structure of human societies must be revised”.
Ben Libet & free will, previously on metafilter. (And more on: Lucretius, Dualism, Philosophy of mind, and Free Will 1, 2.)posted by scalespace at 9:20 PM PST - 100 comments
Marine Safety Specialist Mario Vittone
knows what it looks like when someone is drowning, and you probably don't. It's deceptively quiet, undramatic, and happens so fast that bystanders may not even know it's happening. A drowning person's brain kicks into an instinctive mode that prevents yelling for help.
posted by ivey at 9:00 PM PST - 68 comments
Drugs seeped into the band, and were accompanied by an entourage of lowlifes stuck in a dizzying cycle of despair. Theresa was uninterested in the drug world yet she was too afraid to challenge her situation in her role as backup singer and dependent partner of Osborne.
After nine turbulent years, the tension came to a head. Theresa had finally decided to confront Osborne about the drugs during a show at the famed Howlin' Wolf in New Orleans. The conversation predictably turned confrontational and with the usual crowd of partygoers surrounding the backstage area, Theresa snapped. She flung her violin through the window of the club. Glass shattered all over the ground and her violin lay broken beyond repair. It was over.
Such is the life, death and the rebirth of accomplished violinist and singer,
Theresa Andersson's music career.
[more inside]posted by KevinSkomsvold at 8:31 PM PST - 14 comments
What warfighters eat. What's healthier. Video is from an all-day seminar at NIH.
Start around minute 58 through 1:13 to hear the marine presenting in detail what warfighters currently get to eat -- first hand from the guy who handles supplying them, in detail.
Start earlier around minute 12 for what would be better 'nutritional armor' for warfighters (Dr. Bill Land).
Many more parts to the presentation. All worthwhile.
[more inside]posted by hank at 6:17 PM PST - 44 comments
Secret of AA: After 75 Years, We Don’t Know How It Works. "There is evidence that a big part of AA’s effectiveness may have nothing to do with the actual (12) steps. It may derive from something more fundamental: the power of the group. The importance of this is reflected by the fact that the more deeply AA members commit to the group, rather than just the program, the better they fare."
[more inside]posted by netbros at 3:58 PM PST - 145 comments
On Saturday, Cuba issued an unprecedented public report on the status of an imprisoned dissident.
Guillermo Fariñas Hernández began his hunger strike in February, the day after the first Cuban hunger striker death in almost forty years. He is now
near death.
[more inside]posted by hat at 8:18 AM PST - 21 comments
Prince and Kelly Clarkson Marry? Idaho No Longer A State? A Pomeranian Blight? Is this flimflamery? No, it is
LIE BLOG, a place for lies.
[via
mefi projects]
posted by The Whelk at 7:31 AM PST - 22 comments
Nevertheless, many of the gamers I encounter report the same experience of feeling as if they have engaged in some kind of transgression. There’s often a sense of guilt that comes with tales of gaming exploits, as if games were a vice or a character flaw, a symptom of one kind or another. [...]
So my cards are on the table: I’m going to offer some alternative, positive descriptions. This analysis will show how video games have inspired artists, transformed rags into riches, given purpose to empty lives, and entertained bored people on a Sunday afternoon. We’ll see how games turned young people into heroes and how gaming has enabled the realization of previously unimaginable ambitions. We’ll see how games can make us better people, how they dissolve the horrors of boredom—and how they can function as propaganda for a wide range of worthy and unworthy causes.
This Gaming Life by Jim Rossignol (of
Rock, Paper, Shotgun) is a book about gaming, gamers, and how they affect each other - available in full and for free under a Creative Commons licence.
posted by Electric Dragon at 5:57 AM PST - 121 comments
This game is about two lovers named January and September.
No, wait; it’s about a group of people who don’t believe in the sky.
No, it’s about a pantheon of scientific disciplines.
Or maybe it’s about an ancient beast who knew exactly when it was going to die, and how.
It’s about a place. A place called Looming. [more inside]posted by juv3nal at 2:41 AM PST - 27 comments
July 5
"Living under capitalism, I like learning to feel comfortable with activity that does not result in success — since non-success is the norm. Trying your best and making it is not the norm — it’s propaganda. Of course I play with notions of hype, too... The entire
Comatonse website is a sarcastic hype-engine, sprawling forever, overwhelming the viewer with nothingness." -
Terre Thaemlitz, AKA
DJ Sprinkles [more inside]posted by koeselitz at 11:34 PM PST - 27 comments
Year On Earth breaks it down, explaining the complicated mechanics involved in trying to determine how long a year really is, why seasons and ice ages happen, and how not all years are created equal.
posted by loquacious at 10:16 PM PST - 22 comments
Is it possible to have too many books? Legendary Sci-Fi Author and Crankypants Harlan Ellison thinks so (or maybe his wife) so it's time for the
Third Harlan Ellison Book Purge Sale! 289 items of varying levels of collectability, ranging in price from US$4 to US$1200. The eBay-averse Ellisons are only accepting mail orders (mailing deadline already past, sorry) or phone orders via a dedicated phone number at specified times, starting July 6th (today for most of you) at 9:00AM Pacific Time, your timezone will vary. All the offerings and instructions are in this
pdf (also in semi-readable webpage form
here). Mrs. Ellison is standing by!
posted by oneswellfoop at 9:11 PM PST - 61 comments
With their no-frills, earnestly deadpan delivery, excellent pitch and diction, crisp guitar work, impeccable rhythm and sweet harmonies, Fiona and Emily are sure to become your favorite classic rock cover band.
Honky Tonk Woman,
Pinball Wizard,
Ticket To Ride,
Surfin' USA,
House of the Rising Sun,
Help,
Johnny B. Goode, and last but certainly not least,
I Am the Walrus. Woooooooooo!
posted by flapjax at midnite at 8:14 PM PST - 55 comments
Argentina has been eliminated from
The World Cup, but that doesn't mean we aren't free to enjoy
some quotes from the always quotable
Diego Maradona. For example, after Argentina qualified for the finals in South Africa, after looking like they would not make it, he said "To those who did not believe: now suck my d**k - I'm sorry ladies for my words - and keep on sucking it. I am either white or black. I will never be grey in my life. You treated me as you did. Now keep on sucking d**ks. I am grateful to my players and to the Argentinian people. I thank no one but them. The rest, keep on sucking d**ks."
posted by Keith Talent at 12:53 PM PST - 85 comments
Research by an international team led by staff at the ORAU has mapped out an accurate chronology of the kings of ancient Egypt using radiocarbon analysis of short-lived plant remains from the region. The research has now been published in the journal Science (18 June, 2010). [more inside]posted by infinite intimation at 12:03 PM PST - 7 comments
"Young
Bert Stern was already one of the leading fashion photographers of the 1950's when he resolved to shoot his first film before he was thirty. He made it, with two years to spare. The result,
Jazz on a Summer's Day, is a luminously breezy film that brings the rich color palette of Vogue or Harper's Bazaar of those years into the world of the documentary cinema."
[more inside]posted by carsonb at 11:00 AM PST - 19 comments
An
AWESOME collection of sci-fi illustrations by the prolific Shigeru Komatsuzaki (1915-2001), whose fantastic work appeared on plastic model kit boxes and in magazines and picture books in the 1960s to 1970s.
via [more inside]posted by Monkeymoo at 8:48 AM PST - 18 comments
"Free Repair" is a project by Swiss artist Roland Roos, who traveled through Europe for over two years to repair broken, displaced or damaged things in the public space - without an assignment, but also without asking for permission. He documented his endeavor with photographs. (
Coral Cached Link)
posted by starzero at 4:28 AM PST - 25 comments
July 4
Fifteen years ago this week, programmer
Ron Britvich launched version 1.0 of
Active Worlds. Started as an autonomous project of
Worlds, Inc. (a spinoff of educational gamesmaker
Knowledge Adventure), Active Worlds was one of the first and most ambitious attempts to create a 3D virtual community on the web.
Built on the architecture of Britvich's
Worlds Chat beta, Active Worlds
debuted in the form of
Alphaworld, a sunny green infinite plane open to
public building. In its opening years Alphaworld experienced
a land rush of construction, resulting in
an anarchic starfish sprawl larger than the state of California. A sister company, Circle of Fire, was soon founded to craft
additional themed hubs, and once individual ownership of worlds became possible the AW community spawned a veritable universe of
hundreds of worlds.
Although
the company has seen its
ups and downs since those heady times and its fortunes have slowly dwindled, the
Active Worlds platform survives to
this day. Look inside for a simple guide on how to log in to the (free) service, rundowns of the best worlds, links to essays analyzing the program's legacy, and other content summing up
its venerable community.
[more inside]posted by Rhaomi at 5:39 PM PST - 18 comments
When a person graduates high school as one of the top students, all sorts of grand predictions are made for the person's future. But how many of them end up doing the things predicted of them?
The Buffalo News
did a feature in 2007 on what the top students in the Buffalo area from 1987 ended up doing after high school. Some of them have done remarkable things, while others have made their mark in smaller ways, all are interesting in their own way.
posted by reenum at 2:23 PM PST - 57 comments
"The Declaration of Independence in American," by H.L. Mencken. "When things get so balled up that the people of a country got to cut loose from some other country, and go it on their own hook, without asking no permission from nobody, excepting maybe God Almighty, then they ought to let everybody know why they done it, so that everybody can see they are not trying to put nothing over on nobody." Why we did what we did. In American, so everyone can understand.
posted by John of Michigan at 1:05 PM PST - 26 comments
July 3
They were one of history’s greatest teams. But by the late 2000s, Pro Vercelli were entrenched in the lower leagues, their glorious past forgotten. Until one day, a man bought a video game. Read the uplifting saga of a small-town Italian club, an unknown American manager, triumph, betrayal, passion, and several extremely good recipes, from start to finish [more inside]posted by Joe Beese at 6:31 PM PST - 26 comments
(NSFW) Don’t act gay when acting in gay porn? Escort/exotic dancer Devon Hunter describes his experience signing up to “act” in gay porn for Sean Cody, a label specializing in young, trim, hairless guys. But hey – don’t act gay while you’re having gay sex! “ ‘So you guys don’t like gay guys, then?’ ‘No! No, it’s not that. It’s just that straight guys sell better.’ [...N]ow I was suddenly suspicious that I was being paired with [performer Fuller] so that I could be ‘the lucky gay guy’ to bottom for such a hot, straight stud.” It’s only one side of the story, of course, and manifestly NSFW.
posted by joeclark at 10:42 AM PST - 122 comments
Silly old Grace Jones is, what, now -- 62? You remember her. Yeah, but how about recalling this -- her '
Walking in the Rain'? Remember that?
Just a copy, a bad one. Of a
bad song, by eighties New Wave droners
Flash and the Pan.
Yecch. Songwriter? Diminutive George Young, there with the Chinese eyes and cigar. Born in Scotland, he was taken with music and especially the British invasion when he was a teen.
Earlier, he was a guitarist for the mid-sixties group The Easybeats, who recorded an absolute classic, '
Friday on My Mind,' which he co-wrote. He's still the short one there, incidentally. David Bowie famously covered it,
on Pin-ups.
Anyway, his folks moved to Australia while he was still in his teens, which in parts explains why the Easybeats are considered the greatest sixties group
from 'down under.' Hey, who knew?
And who knew
this? George's little brothers did
even better than
he did,
Rock n' Roll wise.
posted by toma at 5:40 AM PST - 58 comments
July 2
Screenwriters find work is dwindling. While screen writers conferences are still
enthusiastically marketed all over the country, and eagerly
reported on, the working reality for screenwriters these days, is that work is growing ever more scarce. 'This week the Writers Guild of America, West reported that while earnings for screenwriters have bounced back to pre-strike levels' (
2007–2008 Writers Guild of America strike), 'there is a lot less work going around: employment has fallen 11% in the last three years, with 226 fewer screenwriters working in 2009 than 2006, the year before the 100-day walkout and the lowest level in at least six years.' '"Except for current A-list writers, the picture is as bleak as I've ever seen it," said former Writers Guild President Dan Petrie Jr.'
[more inside]posted by VikingSword at 6:34 PM PST - 244 comments
On the day that
John Adams thought would be celebrated as the birth of the United States of America, the
Library of Congress reveals that in an original draft of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson referred to "Our fellow
subjects," not "Our fellow citizens."
posted by TrarNoir at 12:18 PM PST - 65 comments
70 years ago today, the
Arandora Star was torpedoed and sunk off the coast of Ireland by Commander
Günther Prien, famous for sinking the HMS Royal Oak at Scapa Flow. Prien had taken its grey livery to mean the Arandora Star was an armed merchant ship. Instead, it was carrying Italian and German internees to be held in Canada for the duration of the war.
[more inside]posted by Dim Siawns at 11:28 AM PST - 25 comments
(
E)nter the realm of the Dragon
(
I)nstructions
(
L)ist Warriors
(
Q)uit back to BBS
Your choice, warrior? [
E]:
[more inside]posted by 256 at 7:37 AM PST - 72 comments
A Nuclear Fireworks Show over Hawaii: With the 4th of July approaching, what could be a more fitting tribute to the American spirit than this awesome pyrotechnical display seen over Hawaii in 1962, when America detonated a 1.45 megaton hydrogen bomb in outer space? Especially considering the circumstances. On the very same day that he announced the discovery of the
massive radiation belt surrounding the Earth that now bears his name,
American scientist James Van Allen joined the American military in planning a secret project (
code named: "Starfish Prime") to see if they could destroy it. According to science historian James Fleming, this all-American project respresents "the first occasion I've ever discovered where someone discovered something and immediately decided to blow it up."
posted by saulgoodman at 7:29 AM PST - 40 comments
The Life of Shelton Doyle Blalock, Everyday American. Doyle Blalock was a son, submariner, husband, mailman, father, gardener, rockhound, artisan, grandfather, and friend: a regular guy with a remarkable life. What makes him particularly remarkable, though, is that his grandson,
Lance Dean, created such a thorough record of his life to share with the internet, from
Doyle's childhood in Golden Grove, Mississippi, his service as
a sailor during World War II, his return to Mississippi and marriage to
the lovely Lodena Alexander, to his post-retirement vocation as an artisan,
creating "sand paintings" and
demonstrating his art.
(Links are to images out of context. See the first link for descriptions.) [more inside]posted by ocherdraco at 6:48 AM PST - 4 comments
July 1
Cardon Copy takes the vernacular of self-distributed flyers and tear-offs... redesigning them, overpowering their message with a new visual language. [
via]
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 8:38 PM PST - 50 comments
Starting today,
Starbucks is offering free wifi in all of their US and Canadian stores. This has computer security folks a little edgy, since it could allow hackers and computer miscreants new opportunities to steal the data of unsuspecting computer users, and prompted
Steve Gibson,
computer security guru, to advise people to "just be afraid. Be very afraid." This applies to people who use laptops, wifi enabled cellphones and pdas. But there are ways to protect yourself.
[more inside]posted by crunchland at 4:40 PM PST - 93 comments
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has shut down nine websites in connection with an ongoing crackdown on internet film and TV piracy. The sites seized are Movieslinks.tv, Planetmoviez.com, ZML.com, Thepiratecity.org, Filespump.com, TVShack.net, Now-Movies.com, NinjaThis.net, and NinjaVideo.net. The feds also seized related Paypal accounts and bank accounts as part of the operation. Ninjavideo was the most notorious of the group, and its admin, Phara,
went so far as to record a manifesto in praise of internet piracy.
posted by Pastabagel at 1:29 PM PST - 197 comments
April 26, 1979, Andy Kaufman performed for a sold-out crowd in Carnegie Hall, who were welcomed to their seat by a
"press kit" containing a bag of jelly beans, a program and flier for the show, and other copied material, supposedly put together by Andy's mother. The show starting off with
an impersonation of Tony Clifton and ending by
taking the audience of 2,800 out for milk and cookies. About 10 months later on February 20, 1981, Kaufman hosted an episode of
Fridays, ABC's attempt to duplicate the success of NBC's
Saturday Night Live. Instead of performing the show as rehearsed, he took the entire cast and crew, the studio audience and
a nation of television viewers hostage. Video links and more details inside.
[more inside]posted by filthy light thief at 12:54 PM PST - 30 comments
Why does Team Jacob always have to lose? Because Eclipse is a movie about rejecting adulthood, not just as a person but also as a culture. It's about rejecting adult relationships between men and women, but also between people of different races and between people from the city (like Victoria's army) and people from Forks. It's about never crossing boundaries, never leaving home.posted by Pirate-Bartender-Zombie-Monkey at 10:46 AM PST - 222 comments
Mortgage financing giant Fannie Mae
announces policy changes designed to encourage borrowers to "work with their servicers and pursue alternatives to foreclosure"...and threatens borrowers with new penalties for strategic default.
[more inside]posted by 2bucksplus at 10:43 AM PST - 44 comments
How I Got Arrested and Abused at G20 in Toronto, Canada We are thirsty again; it's been 15 hours in police custody. Still 39 guys overcrowded. Getting very scary. Awake for around 30 hours. Had one sip of water and cheese bun. People are detained, kept cuffed in cages for 23 hours with insufficient food, water, hygiene, and space. Many of them just happened to be in the wrong part of Toronto and had no connection to the protest.
posted by Zarkonnen at 2:02 AM PST - 110 comments
In February of 2008, Microsoft
acquired the maker of the Sidekick, Danger Inc.,
for $500 million dollars and rolled the company into its Premium Mobile Experiences division, led by
Roz Ho. The Sidekick retained a dedicated following after the merger despite some
hiccups along the way. Twenty-six months after the acquisition, Microsoft
unveiled the KIN One and KIN Two devices which would launch in May. The devices were backed by a huge and
mildly controversial marketing push aimed at the young, hip social-networking addict niche. Reviews were
generally negative and often cited needless complexity, software that was lacking basic functions and no support for third party applications. The devices ran a fork of
Windows Phone 7, Microsoft's rewrite of their aging mobile operating system that had been
rapidly losing ground to RIM, Apple and Google. Just seven weeks after launch,
the KIN is dead. Engadget has some
insight into the failure and the subsequent shake-up at Microsoft.
posted by cgomez at 12:12 AM PST - 98 comments
