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July 2011 Archives
July 31
Dr. Rob Dobrienski is a Manhattan therapist who blogs with honesty and humor on
shrinktalk.net about his practice and topics interesting to both laypersons with an interest in psychology and therapy as well as therapists in current practice.
[more inside]posted by sweetkid at 9:11 PM PST - 19 comments
Freedom to love, tested in Afghanistan. When Rafi Mohammed, a 17-year-old
Tajik Afghani, met and fell in love with his girlfriend Halima, he did not think about the rage that would erupt in her ethically conservative
Hazara neighborhood, or of the lengths to which the local police and religious leaders would go to protect the couple from an angry mob in a region of Afghanistan which
has seen fewer attacks recently and has been restored to local control. Despite -- or perhaps because of -- the violence that ensued, many of the locals have found themselves opposed to the fundamentalists, unwilling to see another pair of young lovers executed,
as happened under Taliban rule. (
video, NSFW)
""I feel so bad. I just pray that God gives this girl back to me. I'm ready to lose my life. I just want her safe release. . . It’s the heart. When you love somebody, you don’t ask who she is or what she is. You just go for it.”posted by markkraft at 2:50 PM PST - 35 comments
Holy Smoke - "The process of having cremated ash placed in live ammunition begins when you contact us. You tell us what type of hunting or shooting that the decedent practiced and we can help you decide what will best suit your needs....1 Pound of ash is enough to produce 250 shotshells."
posted by madamjujujive at 2:10 PM PST - 46 comments
July 30
The African Presence in India: A Photo Essay :
The questions we pose here are simply these: Who are the African people of India? What is
their significance in the annals of history? Precisely what have they done and what are they
doing now? These are extremely serious questions that warrant serious and fundamental
answers. This series of articles, "The African Presence in India: An Historical Overview," is
designed to provide some of those answers.posted by infini at 11:58 AM PST - 14 comments
2 Tone was both a British music genre and a record label where black met white; fired by the great Thatcher divide.
The Two Tone story
I;
II;
III;
IV;
V;
More Music inside: -
[more inside]posted by adamvasco at 10:59 AM PST - 58 comments
"You never hear, “Famous author Neil Gaiman caught with seven stewardesses in a Wichita bus depot.” Chuck Wendig says,
"We need literary rock star heroes to swoop in and save publishing." Well, perhaps... But can you picture this?
"The authorial world demands this. And we’re not talking about some little Twitter snit, some online battle oozing across a handful of Livejournal comments. It’s not enough for Stephen King to talk to Entertainment Weekly and be all like, “Well, Stephenie Meyer is no J.K. Rowling, pfft.” I’m talking, Terry Pratchett needs to go and take a shit in Dan Brown’s mailbox."posted by jenfullmoon at 8:55 AM PST - 144 comments
Most of the talk about renewable energy is aimed at electricity production. However, most of the energy we need is heat, which solar panels and wind turbines cannot produce efficiently. To power industrial processes like the making of chemicals, the smelting of metals or the production of microchips, we need a renewable source of thermal energy. Direct use of solar energy can be the solution, and it creates the possibility to produce renewable energy plants using only renewable energy plants, paving the way for a truly sustainable industrial civilization. [more inside]posted by Bangaioh at 7:24 AM PST - 31 comments
Gundam Navi: [Via: Comics Alliance] "If you're a Japanese otaku growing bored of your crippling iPhone GPS dependence, Namco Bandai could have the solution for you -- gaming your way to destinations with Mobile Suit Gundam. Gundam Navi, the first of a line of Character Navi programs, is a new GPS app that transforms a user's commute into "battle events" that pit a location marker against randomly generated enemies lined up on a given route." Gundam Navi is available for iPhone 4 and iPhone 3GS. The app costs ¥3,500 for one year of usage.
[Screenshot 1] [Screenshot 2] [Screenshot 3] [Screenshot 4] [Screenshot 5] posted by Fizz at 6:13 AM PST - 28 comments
July 29
Aptiquant (PDF) has correlated browser choices with IQ scores for online IQ tests and found that IE users in 2011 score well under average. IE6 users had an average IQ of 82. Opera users rated 124.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 11:17 PM PST - 79 comments
25 years in and I had nothing. I was sitting alone in my garage in a house I was about to lose because of that bitch -- lets not get into that now -- and I realized. Fuck, you can build a clown, and they might not come. I was thinking, "It’s over. It’s fucking over."
Marc Maron, consummate comedy insider enjoying a career resurgence as a consummate comedy outsider, delivers the
keynote address at the 2011 Just For Laughs Comedy Conference.
[more inside]posted by Pants McCracky at 12:09 PM PST - 42 comments
To celebrate Harrison Ford's 40th credited big-screen appearance in Cowboys & Aliens this weekend, Steve Murray takes
a look back at everyone's favourite acting chameleon.
posted by sweetkid at 10:43 AM PST - 94 comments
A corpus analysis of rock harmony [PDF] -
The analyses were encoded using a recursive notation, similar to a context-free grammar, allowing repeating sections to be encoded succinctly. The aggregate data was then subjected to a variety of statistical analyses. We examined the frequency of different chords
and chord transitions ... Other results concern the frequency of different root motions, patterns of
co-occurrence between chords, and changes in harmonic practice across time. More information, analysis, and explanation
here.
posted by Wolfdog at 10:09 AM PST - 33 comments
Zany Germans have crazy
nose flute fun! But, wait! Surprising and unexpected beauty can be coaxed from the
nose flute as well. And straight outta Vancouver, the
nose flute man will happily show you how it's done. Unfortunately, I've found that pretty much everything else on the internet featuring this particular type of
nose flute is, well... pretty awful. YMMV.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 9:28 AM PST - 16 comments
If you have spent anytime at all on the National Mall in Washington DC, you have no doubt seen the Tourmobile trolleys shuttling tourists around to the major attractions surrounding the National Mall.
Some are now questioning the 40+ year old monopoly that the operator has held on tourist transportation on the Mall, especially in light of the National Park Service's refusal to open up bidding, or even allow more economical or environmentally friendly services to compete.
posted by COD at 6:28 AM PST - 54 comments
July 28
The Last Meals Project Every prisoner waiting to be executed is granted a last meal. Prisoners waiting to die choose their last meal for different reasons. Here's a
list of exonerated death-row prisoners.
posted by modelenoir at 4:39 PM PST - 45 comments
It started with a little girl who had polio, who later became a seamstress and made clothing and little things, like
little pin cushion elephants. They were popular, not as sewing accessories, but as children's toys. The elephants would be joined by a menagerie of stuffed animals,
including tigers and pigs. Some
animals were set on iron wheels,
including bears. But it wasn't until
US political cartoon featuring President Theodore Roosevelt refusing to shoot a small black bear in November 1902 that "teddy" bears became popular, first in 1902 in the United States,
made and sold by Jewish Russian immigrants, Rose and Morris Michtom (who would ride the success of Teddy's Bear to form the
Ideal Toy Company). Back in Germany, Margarete Steiff's array of toy animals expanded to include a jointed, plush bear, 55 cm tall:
55 PB (German Wikipedia page). Margarete's nephew, who came up with the design, took some samples to a German toy fair in the Spring of 1903, where there was no interest in the bears until a representative from a
New York toy company saw the mobile bears and ordered 3,000. A new factory had to be built, and bears were made, most likely shipped across the ocean, but
their fate is a mystery.
posted by filthy light thief at 4:13 PM PST - 25 comments
Evolution 2011, the largest fighting game tournament in the world, starts tomorrow. On its eve, a documentary chronicling one player's run last year,
FOCUS, was released.
[more inside]posted by apathy0o0 at 2:41 PM PST - 33 comments
In 1983,
Ken Hakuta's mother in Japan sent him some toys in the mail for his kids. They were octopus shaped, and when you threw them against the wall they "walked" down the wall. Seeing some marketing potential, he bought the rights to the toys for $100,000, and the Wacky Wall Walker was born. It became a HUGE success after a slow start, being offered as a
prize in Kellogg's cereals and even inspiring a
Christmas special on NBC. Eventually they ended up (according to Hakuta) selling a over 240 million units!
Sometime during this wildly successful period,
Dr. Fad was born. Ken wanted to everybody to invent and create. From 1988 to 1994, the
Dr Fad Show featured a Wall Walker-covered-sweater wearing Hakuta as "Dr Fad" in a kids' gameshow format, with contestants coming on and showing off their inventions, the winner being judged by an applause meter. The show also had a "Golden Gizmo" segment, honouring the great fads of the past - a
young Rodney Mullen accepted the Golden Gizmo for skateboarding, while other "famous" folks responsible (or in some other way related to) the fads appeared to receive the award in other segments.
[more inside]posted by antifuse at 9:49 AM PST - 35 comments
Evan Osnos joins a tour group from China as they traverse Europe. In the front row of the bus, Li stood facing the group with a microphone in hand, a posture he would retain for most of our waking hours in the days ahead. In the life of a Chinese tourist, guides play an especially prominent role—translator, raconteur, and field marshal—and Li projected a calm, seasoned air. He often referred to himself in the third person—Guide Li—and he prided himself on efficiency. “Everyone, our watches should be synchronized,” he said. “It is now 7:16 P.M.” He implored us to be five minutes early for every departure. “We flew all the way here,” he said. “Let’s make the most of it.” [more inside]posted by WalterMitty at 8:38 AM PST - 71 comments
Circa 1850.
A curious document that had been filed away in a box for over a century.
Hundreds of pages of strange, crudely drawn figures, resembling stick figures, many of them appearing to be urinating, copulating, whipping each other, and displaying enormously swollen genitals. An extremely important document that revealed much that was previously unknown about Native American history and culture?? The scribbling book of a German child, "the leisure pencillings of a nasty-minded little boy"?? We may never know.
[more inside]posted by ecorrocio at 8:33 AM PST - 44 comments
July 27
Angry Jane Doe: "I have started to sleep around. I sleep with men I am not dating. I sleep with men and refuse to date them, actually. I come to their houses, fuck them, say thank you for a nice time, and don't let the door hit me on the ass on the way out. You might think this is a pretty good deal, but it is not. Because I fuck and tell. Because I'm pissed." (NSFW.)
[more inside]posted by velvet winter at 11:13 PM PST - 339 comments
MurdochAlert warns you whenever you visit one of the 100+ Murdoch Family-controlled websites. If you're not ready to block them all, MurdochAlert can warn you instead. Also it's handy for identifying news sources controlled by the Murdoch Family. Users of Chrome might try
Murdoch Block.posted by Ahab at 10:41 PM PST - 25 comments
For 100 years, Buddhists and Muslims lived side by side in southern Thailand. In 2004, a small fraction of the Muslims started killing the Buddhists indiscriminately. This conflict is now the
most violent in Asia, with murders of Thai civilians, including children, monks, and Muslims who refuse to cooperate, occurring on a daily basis.
[more inside]posted by shii at 9:19 PM PST - 54 comments
Chuck Klosterman
breaks down Edgar Winter Group's 1973 Old Grey Whistle Test performance of Frankenstein. Unlike
zzazazz's previous post, there is no bonus, because
"Edgar Winter's finest nine minutes" is its own crazy good reward.
posted by davejay at 7:14 PM PST - 82 comments
253 is a novel written for the Internet. Originally published in 1996, it is composed of 253 stories of 253 words about each of the 253 passengers on a London Underground train, headed for a
crash.
posted by yellowbinder at 3:37 PM PST - 29 comments
"We now have a smallish house in a nondescript working class Seattle neighborhood with no sidewalks. We have one car, a battered old minivan with a large dent on one side where you have to bang it with your hip to make the door shut. Our boys go to public schools. Our jobs pay enough to support our lifestyle, mostly anyway. If we wanted, we could both do the "next thing" on our respective career paths..... Fact is, we just don't want to work that hard! We already work harder than we feel like working. We enjoy having time to lay around in the living room with the kids, reading. We like to watch a little TV after the kids are in bed. We like going to the park and visits with friends and low-key vacations and generally relaxing. Going further down our respective career paths would likely mean more work, greater responsibilities, higher stress, and less time to lay around the living room with the kids. So why do it?" David Roberts in
Grist on satisficing, voluntary non-affluence, and
the medium chill.
posted by escabeche at 2:10 PM PST - 179 comments
Every spectator area was full with people. There were just so. many. people.
Then someone started the wave.
The wave.
For me, that's the moment e-sports made it in the west. I was there. The second you do the fucking wave at a StarCraft match in NORTH AMERICA, e-sports has come to fruition.
-
Reddit user Kevinflo recalls the StarCraft 2 match ups (
1,
2 and
3) between
MC and
LosirA at this June’s
MLG Columbus.
[more inside]posted by Loser at 12:32 PM PST - 97 comments
In America, the typical black household had just $5,677 in wealth (assets minus debts)
in 2009, the typical Hispanic household had $6,325 in wealth and the typical white household had $113,149. These lopsided wealth ratios are the largest since the government began publishing such data a quarter century ago. Data from the US Census:
Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP).
posted by cashman at 10:25 AM PST - 167 comments
"The call to the Sheriff's Office came on Nov. 18, 2010, just before noon. The townhouse, deputies learned, had
belonged to a woman named Kathryn Norris, and the 1987 silver Chevy Nova was registered to her, too. She had used a normal amount of electricity in July 2009 and much less in August and none after that. She had paid her mortgage in August and then stopped. Her head was on the floor and her feet were on the seat. The corpse, deputies wrote in their report, was wearing a dress."
posted by Chrysostom at 8:54 AM PST - 80 comments
Doppelgänger Dinners. That was the seed of an idea that grew into our most recent dinner: a 7 course meal with an omnivore and vegetarian option where each corresponding course looked identical across the meat/vegetable line. [...] We also wanted to challenge ourselves by not simply creating a bunch of meat dishes and substituting each meat with tofu or some other protein stand-in. So no repeating of ingredients: if we used basil puree in the veggie dish, then we had to use parsley puree in the meat dish. Studiofeast commits culinary counterfeiting. [
via]
posted by shakespeherian at 8:01 AM PST - 26 comments
On July 9, the Japanese public broadcaster NHK aired a documentary on the earliest days of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear crisis. There appears to be precisely one place on the internet where it can currently be viewed:
here.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 6:50 AM PST - 44 comments
July 26
Did a case of 15th C. royal adultery mean that every King and Queen of England since Henry VI to sit on the throne was not the legitimate heir according to the rules of royal succession? And if the Tudors, Stuarts, Hanoverians, and
Saxe-Coburg von Gothas Windsor-Mountbattens are not properly the ones to be occupying the positions they have/are, who is
Britain's Real Monarch?
[more inside]posted by Pirate-Bartender-Zombie-Monkey at 8:02 PM PST - 109 comments
AFP photographer Juan Mabromata recently visited the
ruins of Villa Epecuén in Argentina, a small touristic village that started slowly re-surfacing after the rising waters of the nearby lake left it completely underwater nearly 26 years ago.
[more inside]posted by palbo at 1:18 PM PST - 18 comments
Social consensus through the influence of committed minorities: We show how the prevailing majority opinion in a population can be rapidly reversed by a small fraction
p of randomly distributed
committed agents who consistently proselytize the opposing opinion and are immune to influence. Specifically, we show that when the committed fraction grows beyond a critical value
pc ≈ 10%, there is a dramatic decrease in the time,
Tc, taken for the entire population to adopt the committed opinion.
[.pdf] [more inside]posted by troll at 12:28 PM PST - 56 comments
Stitches From the Soul: Elizabeth Parker's Confession. Elizabeth Parker's cross-stitch sampler reveals the story of a young woman, who when employed as a housemaid for a cruel employer, was thrown down the stairs when she spurned his sexual advances. She later attempted suicide: "I acknowledge being guilty of that great sin of self-destruction." Her story is meticulously recorded in the circa 1830 sampler, part of the
sampler collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum.
posted by marxchivist at 6:35 AM PST - 22 comments
These days, the term
Movable Type is more likely to make people think of a blogging platform than anything involving paper, but it used to refer to the letters, words, and graphics typically cast in an alloy of lead, tin and antimony or carved from wood, that could be rearranged by a letterpress printer for each individual job. In an environment where toner serves most of our current printing needs, the endangered art of letterpress printing now has a roving champion. Her name is Kyle Durrie, and she is the proprietor of
Power and Light Press in Portland, Oregon. Back in March
she bought herself a 1982 Chevy step van, gutted it, and then installed a work area and a couple of printing presses in the back. She stocked it with a variety of type and ornaments and she is now driving it all over the U.S. teaching folks about the joys of printing with pressure. Maybe if you ask nicely,
she'll stop by your neighborhood and show you how to print, just like
Bi Sheng first did over a thousand years ago.
posted by Toekneesan at 6:12 AM PST - 12 comments
"I was unaware, in my awe of adults playing folk songs, that they would push me into a different world altogether, a world in which only some would ultimately be deemed worthy to publicly perform music: those who were ‘musically talented’. And that talent was determined by one’s ability to imitate, precisely, music written by others."
How I Learned To Play Guitarposted by mippy at 3:09 AM PST - 48 comments
July 25
Two and a half years ago, we explored
the early history of Cartoon Network... but it wasn't the only player in the youth television game.
As a matter of fact,
Fred Seibert -- the man responsible for the most inventive projects discussed in that post -- first stretched his creative legs at the network's
truly venerable forerunner:
Nickelodeon.
Founded as Pinwheel, a six-hour block on Warner Cable's innovative
QUBE system, this humble channel struggled for years before Seibert's innovative branding work transformed it into a national icon and capstone of a media empire.
Much has changed since then, from the mascots and game shows to
the versatile orange "splat." But starting tonight in response to popular demand, the network is
looking back with
a summer programming block dedicated to the greatest hits of the 1990s, including
Hey Arnold!, Rocko's Modern Life, The Adventures of Pete & Pete, The Ren & Stimpy Show, Double Dare, Are You Afraid of the Dark?, Legends of the Hidden Temple, and
All That.
To celebrate, look inside for the complete story of the early days of the network that incensed the religious right, brought doo-wop to television, and slimed a million fans -- the golden age of Nickelodeon.
(warning: monster post inside) [more inside]posted by Rhaomi at 1:33 PM PST - 116 comments
New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority has just finished the initial drilling phase of the
East Side Access project to bring the Long Island Railroad to Grand Central Terminal. What are they doing with the
tunnel boring machine?
Giving it a funeral. (NYTimes link, use this if you need to get past the paywall) Instead of removing the $8 million machine, the contractor responsible for this portion of the project has decided it will be cheaper to leave it in place at the end of the tunnel. This is not without precedent; some of the TBMs used for the
Channel Tunnel were turned off the tunnel mainline and left buried.
posted by spitefulcrow at 12:40 PM PST - 45 comments
Zombie proof your doors IF AN invading zombie army is staggering towards your front door, don't worry: a fingerprint-activated door lock could save your bacon. That's because one group of researchers has worked out how a biometric scanner can keep the undead at bay. Fingerprint scanner to spot the living dead
In NewScientist 25 July 2011 by Paul Marks
posted by naight at 9:44 AM PST - 41 comments
"A difficult situation or problem whose seemingly alternative solutions are logically invalid." The tragicomic 1961 novel that sprang from Joseph Heller’s experience as a W.W. II bombardier mystified and offended many of the publishing professionals who saw it first. But thanks to a fledgling agent, Candida Donadio, and a young editor, Robert Gottlieb, it would eventually be recognized as one of the greatest anti-war books ever written. In an adaptation from his Heller biography, Tracy Daugherty recalls the tortured eight-year genesis of Catch-22 and its ultimate triumph. [more inside]posted by WalterMitty at 6:02 AM PST - 38 comments
Collusion is a firefox add-on that visualizes in real-time which data collection companies track you across different websites on the web and what they're learning about you.
Atul Varma describes
how this project came about. Safari meanwhile has
ghostery, an extension that gives you a roll-call of the ad networks, behavioral data providers, web publishers, and other companies interested in your activity.
[more inside]posted by krautland at 5:57 AM PST - 17 comments
"I can’t imagine a nonfiction writer who wasn’t influenced by the fiction he or she had read. But the “thriller-like pacing” you find in my writing may come more from my own beat than from thrillers. I walk fast and am impatient. I get bored easily—no less with my own ideas than with those of others. Writing for me is a process of constantly throwing out stuff that doesn’t seem interesting enough. I grew up in a family of big interrupters."
Janet Malcolm interviewed by Katie Roiphe in The Paris Review.
posted by escabeche at 5:54 AM PST - 6 comments
Nisha Sondhe, a portait photographer and photojournalist, has been documenting similarieis between New York and Bombay (Mumbai) since 2008:
An art director once told me, “I know you can shoot exotic things abroad and make them look beautiful, but can you take pictures of familiar things and make them look beautiful as well.” Which was interesting to me because when I would show work for jobs in India, people would ask me why they needed to see “photos of boring everyday things in India.” New York art directors are just like Bombay art directors. In fact, New Yorkers in general are just like Bombayites and the more I looked around the more I realized that the two cities are exactly the same. (
via)
posted by ChuraChura at 5:14 AM PST - 10 comments
July 24
Senator Leahy's
Protect IP Act would require that U.S. ISPs impose an 'internet death penalty' upon domain after merely a preliminary injunction from a U.S. court that suspects the site of being 'dedicated to infringing activities', even if the domain's owner had never been notified and was not subject to U.S. jurisdiction. There is concern that the legislation would fragment the DNS system and
facilitate DNS spoofing by
obstructing DNSSEC (
pdf). There is also an
open letter opposing the bill signed by 108 Law Professors who study intellectual property law.
[more inside]posted by jeffburdges at 11:27 PM PST - 29 comments
Early this morning,
the law that legalized Same-Sex Marriage in New York State
went into effect, with many couples choosing to tie the knot
at the stroke of midnight. In New York City, the city clerk will be working overtime to process marriage licenses for the 823 same-sex couples expected to wed there today, having adding extra capacity to ensure that all couples who signed up in advance would not be turned away. LGBT weddings are
expected to bring an additional $155 million in tourism revenues into the state over the next 12 months, and governor Andrew Cuomo's
approval ratings are currently the highest of any US state governor following the passage of the bill.
posted by schmod at 12:33 PM PST - 149 comments
Corey Starliper of Tewksbury, Massachusetts
believes he has solved the last
Zodiac serial killer cipher and has identified the person who terrorized northern California in the late '60s. "Zodiac sent encrypted communication to area newspapers, taking credit for the killings and warning of more to come ..." His most famous: a 340-character cipher, "was mailed to the San Francisco Chronicle, according to
zodiackillerfacts.com. To this day, the cipher has not been completely cracked. Starliper, however, believes he has found the solution to that code."
[more inside]posted by ericb at 10:07 AM PST - 56 comments
The talks between President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner
"collapsed" Friday with little more than a week to go before the United States may effectively default on its debt. The two parties have been in ongoing negotiations for months over GOP refusal to raise the legal limit on national debt unless tied to a significant package of spending cuts - with some members and activists
opposed to any increase whatsoever [more inside]posted by crayz at 6:58 AM PST - 3228 comments
Bret Victor on WorryDream The power to understand and predict the quantities of the world should not be restricted to those with a freakish knack for manipulating abstract symbols.
When most people speak of Math, what they have in mind is more its mechanism than its essence. This "Math" consists of assigning meaning to a set of symbols, blindly shuffling around these symbols according to arcane rules, and then interpreting a meaning from the shuffled result. The process is not unlike casting lots.
posted by naight at 6:47 AM PST - 19 comments
The Bomb That Didn't Go Off. Since September 11, 2001, we have finely honed our fear of the other. But the truth is, the overwhelming majority of our terrorism has always been homegrown. And it is times like these — times of anger and disaffection — when we turn on ourselves, and kill. [more inside]posted by WalterMitty at 5:53 AM PST - 38 comments
Fluid Radio stream experimental frequencies into the ether.
Channel 2 is especially worth a listen, flowing forth a fairly constant warm wash of haunting melancholy and mellow fruitiness in post folk and post rock form.
The reviews on the site appear to be written by an offspring of Monty Cantsin and Rrose Sélavy: I don't know what they're saying, but the reading of them brings zen-like quietude.
posted by titus-g at 1:08 AM PST - 13 comments
July 23
British manned space flights; an insidious threat from outer space; a man mutating into an evil alien, his human consciousness being eaten away; and a scientist - utterly anti-Establishment, courageous and cerebral - the only man who can fight it. No, not Doctor Who, but his highly distinguished predecessor, Prof Bernard Quatermass. A decade before Doctor Who first aired, the
The Quartermass Experiment was the first science-fiction TV serial produced for adults, and a
live-to-viewers BBC production, to boot. The show ran for six episodes in 1953, of which
only the first two episodes are known survive. The short sci-fi series spun off
three original sequels and
a radio drama-documentary, along with movie re-makes of the
first three series by
Hammer Films. BBC brought back live TV with a
2005 adaptation of the original 1953 series. You can watch the various series on online (in parts on Daily Motion), thanks to
fans of The British Rocket Group.
[more inside]posted by filthy light thief at 1:01 PM PST - 21 comments
Two Chinese bullet trains have
collided with two coaches
falling off a bridge after a lightning strike disabled the first train and signaling failed to alert the second in time. A few months previously the railways ministry
expressed and subsequently
retracted concerns that builders had ignored safety standards to complete construction more quickly.
[more inside]posted by jeffburdges at 11:21 AM PST - 42 comments
It turns out that a bunch of the bodies in Viking burial sites that were categorized as male because they were buried with swords, etc, are actually
female if you look at the bones.
More details.posted by rmd1023 at 11:10 AM PST - 52 comments
Alan Bennett returns to the library.
I have always been happy in libraries, though without ever being entirely at ease there. A scene that seems to crop up regularly in plays that I have written has a character, often a young man, standing in front of a bookcase feeling baffled.
posted by adamvasco at 10:52 AM PST - 3 comments
The latest heat wave set dew point records at Minneapolis-St. Paul, where the dew point reached 82 degrees on July 19th. Similar dew points in the low 80's were observed at numerous east coast locations on July 22. The highest dew point ever recorded was 95 on July 23, 2003, along the Persian Gulf at Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. You will hear people claim on the most torrid days that the temperature is 100 degrees and the humidity is 100%. That has never happened in the USA as it would require a dew point of 100 degrees. Learn more about the difference between dew point and relative humidity
here and
here. And this
table shows the relationship between air temperature, dew point, and relative humidity.
[more inside]posted by Seymour Zamboni at 6:28 AM PST - 114 comments
There is no paradigm for this kind of place. Accidental Norbiton is contingent, marginal, superfluous, an ugly necessity; it is like the wires coiled under your desk, behind your bookcases; it is like the suitcases gathering dust under your bed, on top of your wardrobe; an adjunct to living, part of the logistics, the bureaucracy, never what you might call life itself, the movement and centre and focus of which seem to prevail elsewhere.
Perfect, then, for a life of accidental failure.
Welcome to Norbiton.
[more inside]posted by carsonb at 6:20 AM PST - 16 comments
July 22
Riccardo Muti was conducting Nabucco at the Opera di Roma, until -to his delight- he was forced to interrupt the performance by pressure from the crowd.
[more inside]posted by Cobalt at 11:29 AM PST - 61 comments
Scott Kurtz draws and writes one of the Internet's oldest webcomics,
PvP. He launched it in 1998 and, since then, has won two Eisner Awards and a Harvey Award for his work. Scott has been a trendsetter for webcomics before, infamously (and frequently controversially) brash in defense of its business model, especially in the face of criticism from old media. Today, he announced that he will be
selling product placement in his strips, starting with an arc focused on
Magic: The Gathering. This is a webcomics first. Will it prove a boon to the financial success of artists, or a burden on the freedoms they've won? Or will it catch on at all beyond PvP?
posted by gilrain at 7:17 AM PST - 75 comments
Jan Svankmajer’s
Bonecreatures - Bones, dolls and a very peculiar interpretation of Alice in Wonderland together with three other short videos Et Cetera, Flora and Table Manners.
posted by adamvasco at 6:04 AM PST - 5 comments
My Life with Science, Art and Food: "Using scientific laboratory photo equipment, I journey over the surfaces of both organic and processed foods: my own favorites and America’s over-indulgences. The closer the lens got, the more I saw food and consumers of food (all of us!) as part of a larger eco-system than mere sustenance."
[more inside]posted by bwg at 4:03 AM PST - 4 comments
July 21
Actor Jim Meskimen reads Clarence's monologue, slightly adapted, from Shakespeare's Richard III [
text] in
25 celebrity impressions. Bonus points for using Ron Howard's voice for the line "Though 'twere to buy a world of happy days," and Barack Obama's for "Such terrible impression made the dream." (via
@craigyferg)
[more inside]posted by maryr at 6:39 PM PST - 28 comments
Kudzu and the California Marriage Amendment
Proposition 8
Eliminates Right of Same-Sex Couples to Marry: Initiative Constitutional Amendment
SECTION I. Title
This measure shall be known and may be cited as the "California Marriage Protection Act."
SECTION 2. Article I. Section 7.5 is added to the California Constitution, to read:
Sec. 7.5. Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.
The biggest problem is that laws like the California initiative will make the courts decide who is male and who is female — and all available decision criteria create unavoidable miscarriages of justice that will, or should, dismay initiative proponents.
You're probably thinking, about now, that I'm going to exaggerate the sex-definitional 1 problem: Probably, you and everyone you know is unambiguously male or female — or at least has always believed himself or herself to be so, and nobody's challenged that, and nobody's likely to.
That's true, absolutely: Only maybe one live birth in 100 has some non-standard sex anatomy, and genetic anomalies are slightly rarer than that. However, let's talk about those 1-in-100 or 1-in-1000 cases — because those could be you, or your aunt, or your best friend — and because our system of law has to deal with 1-in-1000 situations, too.posted by robbyrobs at 5:35 PM PST - 50 comments
Is the epic saxophone solo returning to pop music? With recent good time summer radio hits by ubiquitous hit makers Katy Perry and Lady Gaga featuring an unexpected saxophone solo, is this a hint towards a return of the woodwind as a staple in rock/pop music or just ironic posturing from vapid "tastemakers"?
posted by mediocre at 4:16 PM PST - 135 comments
Amp Radio Calgary's controversial "Breast Summer Contest Ever", which provoked complaints to the Ad Standards Council and the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council, has
awarded its prize of $10,000 towards breast augmentation surgery to Avery Mitchell, a 23-year-old transgendered woman. Mitchell received 76% online votes in the contest, supported by notorious "boobies"-loving website
FARK.com.
posted by Zozo at 3:06 PM PST - 27 comments
Could Rupert Murdoch really not have known about phone-hacking? Veteran Canadian journalist and TV producer Howard Bernstein thinks it’s possible, because something almost as bad happened at CTV News, which “produced a story on Chinese students keeping Canadians out of Canadian universities. It was a crock, fabricated by a senior producer on the show.... I am certain [the] then-president of CTV had absolutely no idea.... So why is it so hard to believe that Rupert and son didn’t know about the telephone hacking?”
posted by joeclark at 12:58 PM PST - 84 comments
Initially the conventional wisdom was that spacesuits “would be like rockets: adamantine, metallic, armored and smooth.” But in practice, rigid spacesuits repeatedly failed under testing. So when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the Moon they were protected from the vacuum of space by flexible spacesuits crafted from twenty-one layers of fabric, “each with a distinct yet interrelated function, custom-sewn for them by seamstresses whose usual work was fashioning bras and girdles” for the Playtex Corporation.
The Spirit of the Spacesuit ,
Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo [more inside]posted by Herodios at 9:14 AM PST - 25 comments
July 20
Why Development Aid won't solve Radicalism "The data revealed
four findings that undermine common wisdom about support for militancy in Pakistan...Overall, the findings suggest that arguments tying support for militancy to individuals’ socioeconomic status -- and the policy recommendations that often flow from this assumption -- require substantial revision."
posted by stroke_count at 10:52 PM PST - 6 comments
Divorce rates are higher than ever?
Think again.
A large majority—92%—of children whose families make more than $75,000 a year live with two parents (including step-parents). At the bottom of the income scale—families earning less than $15,000—only 20% of children live with two parents.
Of those who first tied the knot between 1975 and 1979, 29% were divorced within ten years. Among those who first married between 1990 and 1994, only 16.5% were.
posted by lohmannn at 4:53 PM PST - 40 comments
Gamers, have you ever looked in the sci-fi aisle of your bookstore and wondered how there could possibly be
novels set in the worlds of "Gears of War" or "Doom," but nothing in the
richly imagined distopia of Bioshock? Have you fed your Art Deco obsession with
Ryan-inspired fan fiction, wishing for something more? Wish no longer: Bram Stoker Award winner, sci-fi novelist, punk rocker, Blue Oyster Cult lyricist, etc.
John Shirley has written the first official BioShock novel, "
BioShock: Rapture," which hit store shelves yesterday. An excerpt of the book, which is a prequel to the first game, is
offered here from publisher Tor.
[more inside]posted by jbickers at 12:16 PM PST - 63 comments
Mohamed Elshahed
writes in Jadaliyya about the many problems with the museums of Egypt, including their conflation of "Egyptian history" with "ancient Egypt", their tendency to address themselves to tourists rather than Egyptians, their recent domination by the influence Zahi Hawass (who has
resigned as Minister of Antiquities for the second time in five months, after having first left his post in March over
the looting of archaeological sites during the recent uprising), their poor organisation and shadowy finances and, not least, the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities' use as a torture site during the protests in Tahrir Square.
posted by Dim Siawns at 10:42 AM PST - 12 comments
Although
Apple's OS X operating system is making inroads with power users, providing Apple style and usability over a FreeBSD-derived UNIX-certified architecture, many find the built-in terminal emulator sadly lacking both UNIX feel and Apple polish. Fortunately, MeFi's own
jewzilla has picked up the ball on the most popular third-party Terminal replacement, iTerm, and rolled out something altogether new and wonderful:
iTerm2. [via
mefi projects]
posted by Mr. Anthropomorphism at 8:04 AM PST - 86 comments
Pop Pilgrims : "When the AV Club Travels, we always make time to visit pop culture landmarks. If something memorable happened in the world of film, tv, books, or music, we want to go there. We're not just tourists, we're
POP PILGRIMS."
[more inside]posted by crunchland at 4:51 AM PST - 13 comments
July 19
Proust is a way for you and your family to share and preserve your stories, one question at a time.
The site takes its name from the
Proust Questionnaire. Stories can be viewed in several different ways and be set as private or
public.
posted by unliteral at 10:06 PM PST - 17 comments
Howard Stern and Robin Quivers sat down for a 90 minute interview with Lady Gaga. In it, they talk about sex, drugs, music, success, personal history, trials and tribulations, and whether or not her parents call her Stephanie or Gaga. It was posted to Soundcloud, and
you can listen to it here.
posted by hippybear at 7:55 PM PST - 130 comments
I feel I am able to express an - atmosphere- that is a part of the complex world in this age.
Katsuyo Aoki was born in 1972 in Tokyo, JAPAN, he work principally with ceramics, incorporating various decorative styles, patterns, and symbolic forms.
posted by at the crossroads at 7:38 PM PST - 10 comments
Robin Williams and his daughter Zelda are in
two commercials promoting the re-release of
The Legend of Zelda, Ocarina of Time for the Nintendo 3DS.
Zelda William's name is not coincidental, as she was named after the video game princess.
posted by SpacemanStix at 6:00 PM PST - 70 comments
Pop quiz! What do these musicians have in common: Lou Reed, E Street
Band keyboardists Roy Bittan and Danny Federici, rhythm section Andrew Bodnar and Stephen
Goulding of The Rumour, dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson, erstwhile
SNL bandleader G.E. Smith, session horn section the Brecker Brothers, LaBelle alum Nona Hendryx, guitar virtuoso Adrian Belew, and David Johansen of the New York Dolls? Answer: they were (most of) the studio band on the 1981 album
Escape Artist by
Garland Jeffreys. Which raises the question,
"Garland who?" [more inside]posted by FelliniBlank at 12:09 PM PST - 22 comments
Honest Tea has an unmanned iced tea stand set up at 5th and Market ih Philly today. You can
watch a web camera to see if people are being honest and leaving a dollar for their tea or grabbing that iced tea and running.
[more inside]posted by yeoz at 11:28 AM PST - 204 comments
NY Times reports that
Aaron Swartz, co-founder of Reddit, co-author of the RSS 1.0 spec, founder of
Demand Progress, former fellow at Harvard's Center for Ethics, and founder of
theinfo.org, a site "for people with large data sets" was indicted today on charges of stealing a large data set from MIT:
JSTOR, an archive of academic papers. He faces up to 35 years in prison and $1 million in fines.
[more inside]posted by scottreynen at 11:15 AM PST - 243 comments
July 18
Cult books come and cult books go - that's part of what it means to be a cult book. A few keep reappearing, however. They get discovered over and over by successive waves of admirers. After the third or fourth reappearance, the suspicion begins to arise that this isn't a cult book, after all. It's a masterpiece with problems. Islandia is such a book. - Noel Perrin,
"The Best of All Imaginary Islands" [more inside]posted by Trurl at 7:40 PM PST - 15 comments
"I decided I had to do something to save this person’s life. That killing someone in Dallas is not an answer for what happened on Sept. 11."
Rais Bhuiyan petitions the state of Texas to
stay the execution of a white supremacist who shot him and murdered two others in a hate-motivated
crime.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 7:04 PM PST - 87 comments
What with
Borders going belly-up and
no new books being written ever, avid readers fear that their chief means of edification and entertainment may no longer be viable. Fear not, and look backwards. Over at
The Guardian,
Chris Power has spent the last few years telling giving us A Brief Survey Of The Short Story.
A
lot of my favourites are there, and I am discovering others I am keen to try. What about you?
posted by tumid dahlia at 6:44 PM PST - 23 comments
Marissa is an adorable toddler with a rare and terrible medical problem:
West Syndrome, a.k.a. infantile spasms. Her father Mike has been active in the online Special Needs community, chronicling her story for years now at his blog
Marissa's Bunny. Last year, his readers raised almost $30,000 through a ChipIn fundraiser to offset the costs of Marissa's neurosurgery. As a sort of 'thank you', and with the help of matching funds from his employers, Mike
offered to give away and/or raffle 40 iPads to the special needs kids of his blogger friends, to be used as assistive technology devices for many of their non-verbal kids. This follows on the heels of several other
iPad raffles he's held in the past year.
Guess what happened next. The Special Needs Parenting blog community is on the case:
Ellen Seidman (and her commenters),
Rob Rummel-Hudson,
Sarah and Joyce Hely,
Shannon Des Roches Rosa and others are putting together the pieces right now.
(previously on MetaFilter: the unravelings of Kaycee Nicole, JT LeRoy, Kodee Kennings, Alexa DiCarlo, and Amina Arraf)posted by Asparagirl at 2:01 PM PST - 183 comments
Digital news is broken. Actually, news itself is broken. Almost all news organizations have abandoned reporting in favor of editorial; have cultivated reader opinion in place of responsibility; and have traded ethical standards for misdirection and whatever consensus defines as forgivable. And this is before you even lay eyes on what passes for news design on a monitor or device screen these days. Suggestions for clarifying online news sites from Andy Rutledge. [more inside]posted by netbros at 1:48 PM PST - 20 comments
"We certainly cannot follow the example of Odysseus and, going down to Hades, tempt with a bowl of blood a representative sample of native speakers to label particular areas of the standard Munsell color continuum ..."
David Wharton's
Latin Color Bibliography collects quotations from ancient literature and modern research on how languages classify colors, and tries to work out the meanings of color words in classical Latin.
[more inside]posted by nangar at 1:00 PM PST - 15 comments
July 17
Pompeya is a band that is hard to describe, especially if you go by their videos and sound. For example, if you started with
Power (Simple Symmetry & Lipelis Remix), you might think it's an act from the the late eighties, complete with break dancing and dated fashions. If you first came across
the Barbarella Chisinau Teaser, you might imagine that they're something from the early 1990s, or a new band goofing with vintage video. And then they drop
Power II, which could be some kids playing neo-disco akin to the US band
VHS or Beta (
wiki). But wait! Check out
Cheenese (NSFW moment of nudity 2:58 to 3:05), and you think they might be professional musicians with a sharp-looking video. In fact, Pompeya is a mix of various things:
they're four young Russian guys who play indie-disco. [more details after the break]
[more inside]posted by filthy light thief at 10:05 PM PST - 22 comments
"... Al Qaeda was forcing local affiliates (or at least its Iraqi one) to sustain themselves financially. If local groups must make their own money, governments and counterterror operatives can use Al Qaeda’s need to raise money - often using illicit means and pressure against local citizens - against the organization. That kind of counterterrorism would look less like war, and more like careful police work against what amounts to a criminal syndicate or mafia." [
Inside Al Qaeda’s hard drives]
posted by vidur at 6:30 PM PST - 47 comments
"A giant gust of wind picked up a tarp and garbage from across the field and flung it toward the audience and lifted the whole stage — where Cheap Trick had been playing — and almost like a convertible in a car, just folded it backwards in the same direction."
The
main stage at the Ottawa Bluesfest
has collapsed in a sudden storm, during a performance by
Cheap Trick. Injuries are reported to be minor. The
annual festival brings thousands of music fans into downtown Ottawa.
Photos of the
aftermath.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 5:51 PM PST - 43 comments
One day in 1984 character actor
Stephen Tobolowsky (
Groundhog Day, the original, unaired pilot of
Buffy The Vampire Slayer) was walking down the street when
Jonathan Demme pulled up and asked if he wanted to see a movie he was finishing. Tobolowsky accepted: taking his girlfriend
Beth Henley, they went to the
Academy Linwood Dunn Theatre to watch the rough cut of the movie,
Stop Making Sense. The audience in the otherwise empty theatre consisted of
Tobolowsky, Henley, and Demme, along with members of
Talking Heads, including
David Byrne and
Tina Weymouth. Later,
Byrne passed
Tobolowsky on his
bike and asked if he wanted to work on a
new movie. Interest sparked again, and during the ensuing collaboration Tobolowsky shared his past experience of psychic phenomena. Inspired, Byrne went on to write
Radio Head. The song was heard by
Thom Yorke and became the name of his
band. All of this is a true story, based on
puzzling evidence.
[more inside]posted by Bora Horza Gobuchul at 5:47 PM PST - 46 comments
July 17th 1959: "Billie Holiday died in a New York City hospital from cirrhosis of the liver after years of alcohol abuse, aged 43 (while under arrest for heroin possession, with police officers stationed at the door to her room). In the final years of her life, she had been progressively swindled out of her earnings, and she died with $0.70 in the bank." Still, the world remembers her for her music, her voice that changed lives. Some of her best:
Nice Work If You Can Get It,
Fine and Mellow,
Strange Fruit,
I'll Be Seeing You,
Good Morning Heartache,
Summertime,
I'm A Fool to Want You,
As Time Goes By,
Solitude,
Come Rain or Come Shine and
The Man I Love.
[more inside]posted by pleasebekind at 9:50 AM PST - 30 comments
July 16
Jim Babb first appeared in the ARG scene as Tim Scribbles, roommate to a
robot in search of love. More recently, he's been honing his skills with a family-friendly production called
Socks Inc., where the only barriers to entry are an old sock, a webcam, and some imagination.
Now what happens when he applies his unique blend of quirky humor and unself-conscious style to the real world in a heartfelt proposal to his partner in crime?
Julie, will you marry me? [more inside]posted by SpaceBass at 5:52 PM PST - 5 comments
Attention all units, please respond to Central and Broadway, reference a large crowd. It's a war on drugs.
Just Say No: a music video featuring former Albuquerque sheriff
Darren White. On vocals.
posted by NoraReed at 5:17 PM PST - 29 comments
Fancy yourself a rocket scientist? Want to build rockets and shoot little green guys into space? Comfortable with your rocket flying apart and exploding into a thousand fiery pieces? Able to press the space bar? Try
Kerbal Space Program. [more inside]posted by Lord_Pall at 1:38 PM PST - 26 comments
Agony and Ivory. "Highly emotional and completely guileless,
elephants mourn their dead—and across Africa, they are grieving daily as demand from China’s 'suddenly wealthy' has driven the price of
ivory to $700 a pound or more. With tens of thousands of
elephants being slaughtered each year for their tusks, raising the specter of an 'extinction vortex,' Alex Shoumatoff travels from Kenya to Seattle to Guangzhou, China, to expose those who are guilty in the
massacre—and recognize those who are determined to stop it."
posted by homunculus at 12:34 PM PST - 26 comments
Insane, inscrutable, and angelic, Montreal artist
Grimes's vocal melodies float on a barely subdued monster beat that threatens to uproot buildings and put holes in the ground.
[more inside]posted by Nomyte at 10:19 AM PST - 19 comments
July 15
#crashtags. Why,
MeFi’s own Adrian Holovaty asks, would one need to add hashtags – designed for space-economical Twitter, where every character counts – to Google+, which has orders of magnitude more space to express oneself? And should Twitter really be influencing our online behaviour thus, given “how limiting (and, frankly, silly) Twitter is”?
[more inside]posted by joeclark at 1:06 PM PST - 98 comments
This weekend, the busiest freeway in the United States,
Interstate 405 in Los Angeles, will close for bridge demolition to allow for a northbound carpool lane. The stretch handles 375,000 cars on a typical day and up to 500,000 on the weekends. This event has been dubbed "
Carmageddon."
[more inside]posted by Mister Fabulous at 12:19 PM PST - 211 comments
The Brain on Trial. Advances in brain science are calling into question the volition behind many criminal acts. A leading neuroscientist describes how the foundations of our criminal-justice system are beginning to crumble, and proposes a new way forward for law and order.
"We may someday find that many types of bad behavior have a basic biological explanation—as has happened with schizophrenia, epilepsy, depression, and mania."
[more inside]posted by Eideteker at 11:43 AM PST - 99 comments
Attention well-dressed gentlemen: Looking for affordable business attire, suitable for tropical climates, extended bike rides, and living out of a suitcase? Want to buy a high-quality suit for under $200? Looking for wash-and-wear polyester ties? Dress shirts for twenty bucks? Shop at one of the
online boutiques that outfit
Mormon missionaries and all this can be yours. (Mormon ladies' wear
also available.)
posted by AngerBoy at 9:45 AM PST - 107 comments
"It signals what’s wrong with the so-called charter school community. Somebody who doesn’t deserve a charter gets a charter. Somebody who doesn’t deserve a building gets a building. And then somebody who doesn’t care about the communities can turn their head and walk away." Venture capitalist and blended learning 'evangelist' Tom Vander Ark committed to opening several charter schools in New York City and Newark, NJ, stringed the Department of Education along until the last possible moment, and then
walked away (NYT link).
posted by Nomyte at 9:33 AM PST - 48 comments
Tarol Hunt, author of webcomic
Goblins, was recently
informed that the house he and his family rent had been allowed to fall into foreclosure by its owners, forcing him to make a choice: raise thousands of dollars to buy the home, or be evicted. On July 10th, Thunt
appealed to his fans as a last resort:
Raise $30,000 by August 20th, as part of his
Tempts Fate spin-off, and Tempts Fate will survive the most fiendish, dangerous adventure he's ever faced.
His fans raised the money in
four days.
posted by Silverdragonanon at 6:29 AM PST - 35 comments
Captain Awesoooome! SLVimeo; 8.12; "Captain Awesome is about to save the day once again, when an upset stomach threatens to ruin it all. A story of a superhero’s race against time to save his image or humanity before it all goes down the drain!" Tip: bonus joke at 5.51.
[more inside]posted by bwg at 4:55 AM PST - 2 comments
July 14
Everyone knows that Sean Bean is, in fact, the balls. In addition to being Boromir, Ned Stark, and 006, the man has had unnumerable classic roles, yet has flown mostly under the radar for much of his career. But if you need a tough but good looking dude to glower menacingly and hurt people, either for the angels or the devils, then Sean Bean is your man.
The downside is that, well, he dies a lot. A LOT.posted by Slap*Happy at 7:03 PM PST - 83 comments
Everybody likes earning badges. It's what built
scouting and what drives the
Khan Academy. Now Google has introduced "
Google News Badges". Is this a benevolent attempt to get more people to be aware of what's going on in the world, or is something deeper and/or darker going on? It's an unusual move, whatever the reason.
posted by strangeguitars at 6:28 PM PST - 41 comments
For more than 50 years,
Mr. Potato Head toys have been a hit among American children - and increasingly, collectors. This collector's website has everything Potato Headian, whether you want to see
2008 Presidential Candidates holding Mr P or the "psychedelic"
Mr. Potato Bug, Bird, and Fish from the early 1970s or read about how it almost became a forgotten
cereal premium instead of a "funny face kit" for unused fruits and vegetables. Then there are the
pictures from 2002 when Rhode Island distributed 5 foot fiberglass Mr. Potato Head statues which were decorated by artists through the state. There's more. A lot more.
posted by julen at 4:38 PM PST - 21 comments
Saving Valentina. A group of five friends out boating on the Sea of Cortez discovered a young humpback
whale entangled in fishing net and possibly near death. After about an hour of hard work they were able to free the whale, who proceeded to put on an amazing show for her rescuers.
[Via]posted by homunculus at 4:01 PM PST - 43 comments
"If they simply professed unusual beliefs, movement leaders wouldn’t be remarkable. But what makes the New Apostolic Reformation movement so potent is its growing fascination with infiltrating politics and government. The new prophets and apostles believe Christians—certain Christians—are destined to not just take 'dominion' over government, but stealthily climb to the commanding heights of what they term the 'Seven Mountains' of society, including the media and the arts and entertainment world. They believe they’re intended to lord over it all. As a first step, they’re leading an 'army of God' to commandeer civilian government. In Rick Perry, they may have found their vessel. And the interest appears to be mutual."
Previously. Via.posted by brundlefly at 3:29 PM PST - 136 comments
Today would have been Woody Guthrie's ...99th birthday, and the beginning of his centennial year.
"Woody is just Woody. Thousands of people do not know he has any other name. He is just a voice and a guitar. He sings the songs of a people and I suspect that he is, in a way, that people. Harsh voiced and nasal, his guitar hanging like a tire iron on a rusty rim, there is nothing sweet about Woody, and there is nothing sweet about the songs he sings. But there is something more important for those who will listen. There is the will of a people to endure and fight against oppression. I think we call this the American spirit." - John Steinbeck
For fans, there's a
webpage to organize events and such around his centennial. And here's something for those that don't know his work, and those that want to remember:
This Land Is Your Land
Biggest Thing Man Has Ever Done
Talking Dustbowl Blues
So long it's been good to know youposted by Stagger Lee at 12:50 PM PST - 48 comments
"Welcome to CDOI. This website is interested in the armorunit blocks of breakwater. Shape and the situation are taken in the photograph and researched." [more inside]posted by alby at 12:44 PM PST - 11 comments
Willie Soon Ph.D. is a member of the
Solar, Stellar, and Planetary Sciences (SSP) group at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. He is also the go to guy for cloaking climate denial in "science". A regular blogger at conservative web sites, he can be counted on to provide anti-global warming talking points such as
here and
here. He has also been linked to conservative
funding sources and recently spoke at Heartland Institute's "denial fest". His scientific work has been the target of
some dispute. Recently, RealClimate was able to access his publically accessible website where he has posted papers, emails, calculations and reviews going back to 2003. There seems to be evidence that Soon
has been playing a little loose with the dataposted by Michael_H at 12:41 PM PST - 19 comments
ALEC Exposed is a wiki site set up by The Center for Media and Democracy which posts and chronicles leaked documents including more than 800 model bills drafted and approved by corporations during ALEC meetings. The documents have been analyzed and
marked-up for clarity. Journalists along with the general public are invited to
download the documents and sift through the
bills in order to help map the connections back to their own state legislation and legislators.
[more inside]posted by stagewhisper at 11:53 AM PST - 22 comments
Every year since 2005, Nicholas Feltron has logged the progress of his life – his meals, locations, conversations, pets, travel, everything – in minute and exacting detail, summarizing his activities in what he calls "Annual Reports" featuring
beautiful infographics.
Last year, Feltron's father died. Rather than talking about himself for the 2010 Annual Report, Feltron memorialized
the entire life of his father.
[more inside]posted by Bora Horza Gobuchul at 11:53 AM PST - 16 comments
This is Zombotron. You can scavenge for items and kill the undead in this Flash game. Your less-advanced mechanical brethren may even shoot you on site, as they are only programmed to detect motion. Welcome to Zombotron.
posted by Smart Dalek at 10:26 AM PST - 29 comments
I remember I went to NBC, and there were about 10 people in the room. [Kevin Reilly] and I looked at each other, and he said, "What do you want to do?" I said, "I want to build up this all-American quarterback, this hero. This wonderful, beautiful kid with his entire future ahead of him. His biggest decision in life was whether he was going to take a full ride to UT or Notre Dame. He's got the hot girlfriend. He's got the loving parents. And he's going to break his neck in the first game. We're going to create this iconic American hero, and we're going to demolish him." An oral history of Friday Night Lights.posted by Pants McCracky at 9:05 AM PST - 131 comments
Use more than 250GB of data in a month twice within the first six months of your contract, and
you will be banned for year. A
first hand account, per Andre Vrignaud.
Wired's analysis. Is Comcast simply trying to provide a better quality of service for its customers
by regulating traffic? Or, as some suggest, is Comcast making moves to protect its core video cable interests in the face of growing media streaming services, like hulu and Netflix? Critics have speculated about the motives of this move
in 2008, when the cap was enacted. Additionally, some, including Vrignaud, have criticized Comcast for removing essential household services, akin to water and electricity. It may seem a bit overstated, until you consider that these days the internet is used for more than convenience and entertainment, but also for full-time work from home and as a phone replacement. Should shutting it off be this easy?
Ongoing discussion here.posted by SpacemanStix at 8:47 AM PST - 118 comments
"Two years after first announcing it,
Spotify is finally coming to the US. The service will be launched later today, at 8 in the morning EST. The company has signed a deal with the fourth and final music label just hours before launch and the service will be virtually identical to the European one, except for the pricing which, while keeping the numbers, is switching pounds for dollars. "
[more inside]posted by incandissonance at 7:56 AM PST - 125 comments
Weekend At Kermie's: The Muppets' Strange Life After Death. Elizabeth Stevens asks:
What if, in 1990, instead of recasting Kermit—something that had been done to Mickey and Bugs Bunny before him—the Muppets had continued on Kermit-less, as "The Simpsons" did after Phil Hartman died. Recall Susan’s words on "Seasame Street" about Mr. Hooper in 1982: “Big Bird, when people die, they don’t come back.” Let’s say Robin showed up saying his uncle Kermit had passed away? Or, if that was too dark for Disney, what if Kermit had left show business to go off to start a family with Piggy? Someone else could lead the gang of weirdoes.
It would’ve made more artistic sense than what happened
.
posted by zarq at 7:29 AM PST - 67 comments
The CIA's Secret Sites in Somalia. Jeremy Scahill at
The Nation reports on a CIA facility at Mogadishu's international airport used for a "counterterrorism training program for Somali intelligence agents and operatives," as well as a secret prison "buried in the basement of Somalia's National Security Agency" where "some of the prisoners have been snatched off the streets of Kenya and rendered by plane to Mogadishu."
[more inside]posted by lullaby at 6:23 AM PST - 39 comments
Greenpeace activists, following through on Greenpeace's opposition of Genetically Modified Organisms, have dismayed Australian scientists by raiding a
CSIRO experimental farm in Canberra and
destroying the station's entire experimental crop of genetically modified wheat.
posted by Silverdragonanon at 5:33 AM PST - 130 comments
Half-Life – Singularity Collapse, Another fan film based off of the Half-Life Universe, with plentiful special effects and action. Interesting how people continue to make films and be inspired by the world of a game from several years ago.
posted by Kaatridge at 4:30 AM PST - 26 comments
"A culture that does not possess this common store of image and allegory will be a perilously thin one. To seek restlessly to update it or make it “relevant” is to miss the point, like yearning for a hip-hop Shakespeare."
-Christopher Hitchens
stands up for the King James Bibleposted by beisny at 3:08 AM PST - 70 comments
Bio Apocalypse (PDF) is a 94 page graphic novel full of body horror, nightmare fuel, and heavy handed symbolism. It tells the story of an Akira-like organism that grows and devours the Earth. Drawn on notepaper with lots of red crayons and purportedly written by a Something Awful Goon when he was in 6th grade, Bio Apocalypse has gathered a small cult following and his inspired a
partial video reading.posted by Lovecraft In Brooklyn at 1:17 AM PST - 22 comments
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 Argyle at 12:17 AM PST - 255 comments
July 13
If you like woodworking and/or learning about vintage tools and their history you will, no doubt, enjoy
The blurfl FAQ.
There IS NO "previous" discussion of the blurfl on MeFi.posted by spock at 8:09 PM PST - 16 comments
It seems that there is increasing
frustration with the current state of email leading some to look for more technical solutions, such as Shortmail - an email client/social networking tool which attempts to redefine what its creators see as a broken relationship with email described on their
blog as a "river of trash." , while
others to turn to
less technological solutions to lessen their email burden.
[more inside]posted by SpaceWarp13 at 1:51 PM PST - 40 comments
They came on strong, "sounding like
The Shangri-Las flying through an electrical storm while having a riot in a speed garage club," but only survived for
an album, an EP, and a hand full of singles. They were
Lolita Storm, a trio of female singers (Romy Medina, Nhung Napalm, and Spex), backed by a guy on the noise-makers (Mr Jimmy Too-Bad), recording and touring from 1998 to 2003. Their brief life totaled around an hour of recorded music, available from YouTube user
Darkcore2008 (lyrics often NSFW).
[more inside]posted by filthy light thief at 9:05 AM PST - 11 comments
"Better a broken bone than a broken spirit". So said the appropriately-named Lady Allen of Hurtwood, pioneer of adventure playgrounds - play spaces which sacrificed a little security in the interests of imagination and creativity. Her work on adventure playgrounds - along with the sight of young Londoners playing in the bombed-out sites of post-Blitz London - inspired a young
Richard Dattner, a New York architect now probably best-known for the
Bronx Public Library Center.
[more inside]posted by running order squabble fest at 5:58 AM PST - 65 comments
He has won more Wimbledon singles titles than Martina Navratilova, Pete Sampras, Bjorn Borg and John McEnroe combined, and yet you have probably never heard of him. Because you don't care about
croquet.
[more inside]posted by twoleftfeet at 3:08 AM PST - 34 comments
July 12
PR Industry Fills Vacuum Left by Shrinking Newsrooms - "You would go into these hearings and there would be more PR people representing these big players than there were reporters, sometimes by a factor of two or three" ..it's getting tougher to know when a storyline originates with a self-interested party producing its own story.
posted by thisisdrew at 10:47 PM PST - 43 comments
"Writing about metaphor is dancing with your conceptual clothes off, the innards of your language exposed by equipment more powerful than anything operated by the TSA. Still, one would be a rabbit not to do it in a world where metaphor is now top dog, at least among revived rhetorical devices with philosophical appeal." [
What's a Metaphor For?]
posted by vidur at 6:38 PM PST - 20 comments
“Life is fulfilling when you are rooted in the essential Beingness of ‘I Am.’ . . . Then you bring that state of consciousness—that spacious state of consciousness—you bring that into your interactions with other people of great importance. It’s only then that you will stop treating other people as possible sources of fulfillment or as a threat.” —Eckhart Tolle, spiritual teacher and author, on his June 26
live meditation broadcast.
posted by Houyhnhnm at 5:16 PM PST - 83 comments
OK, so you've partly written a novel, but you're having trouble finishing the damn thing. What to do? Summon stamina, press on, and be proud of your literary success? Or, post your abandonment for all the world to see! Ladies and gentlemen, a
place for your unfini--posted by anothermug at 5:09 PM PST - 39 comments
An Ontario Family Court judge was not very happy with the parties involved in a divorce
case [PDF] before him.
posted by Chrysostom at 3:01 PM PST - 87 comments
Wanna Buy a Record?
A 1951 promotional film in which Mel Blanc takes Billy May on a tour of the Capitol Records studio on Melrose (followed by the somewhat less glamorous Scranton pressing plant) in an attempt to convince him that 85 cents is not too much to charge for a record. [SLYT]
[more inside]posted by mintcake! at 2:53 PM PST - 13 comments
Physicist Freeman Dyson reviews two new books about Richard Feynman, one about the science and one in
graphic novel form.
He never showed the slightest resentment when I published some of his ideas before he did. He told me that he avoided disputes about priority in science by following a simple rule: "Always give the bastards more credit than they deserve." I have followed this rule myself. I find it remarkably effective for avoiding quarrels and making friends. A generous sharing of credit is the quickest way to build a healthy scientific community.
(
previously, previously, and probably in the future, but not predictably so.
posted by cogneuro at 1:40 PM PST - 20 comments
But beyond the disgust element was another more important question concerning borax: was it actually safe to eat? This troubling issue was the reason why squad members were imbibing the compound at Christmas, the reason for the Poison Squad experiments themselves. Established by a famously outspoken, crusading chemist from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Harvey Washington Wiley, the squads were also meant to answer another, larger question: were manufacturers actually poisoning the food supply?
posted by liketitanic at 12:14 PM PST - 19 comments
Getting Away with Torture. "Overwhelming evidence of torture by the Bush administration obliges President Barack Obama to order a criminal investigation into allegations of detainee abuse authorized by former President George W. Bush and other senior officials,
Human Rights Watch said in a
report released today. The Obama administration has failed to meet US obligations under the Convention against Torture to investigate acts of torture and other ill-treatment of detainees."
[more inside]posted by ZenMasterThis at 12:07 PM PST - 67 comments
"I knew that by assembling seven different people and forcing them to live together, the show would have great philosophical implications". Television genius
Sherwood Schwartz,
dies at 94.
posted by mazola at 11:10 AM PST - 81 comments
100 Firefights, Three Weeks: Inside Afghanistan's Most Insane Fight "In its first three weeks in Afghanistan’s Sangin district, the 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines got into more than 100 firefights and sustained 62 casualties. The insurgents managed to negate the Marines’ night-vision gear, and rendered their traditional close-combat tactics useless. Things got so bad, the 3/5’s superior officers even suggested pulling their troops back. That didn’t happen. Instead, the 3/5 went after the militants, hard. When the 3/5 came home, they told counterinsurgency historian Mark Moyar all about their deeply unconventional approach to what was already an unconventional war."
This is an excerpt in Wired of Moyar’s
74-page after action report.
(pdf) [more inside]posted by zarq at 8:52 AM PST - 23 comments
What becomes of your yoga when you are forbidden to do asana? "My chiropractor gave me the ultimate prescription: no asana. Since my practice inspires my teaching, I cut back on my teaching as well, only offering one super gentle community class and working with a few private students. (...) I’ve been in a place of inquiry: What is my practice? What does asana mean to me? What is yoga?"
posted by amusem at 7:38 AM PST - 65 comments
Dog and Deco. My name is Pickles McConchie. I’m a 15 year old Art Deco and camera loving Terrier from Scotland. I like to travel the country with my bitch and pose in front of art deco factories and industrial buildings from the 1920s, 30s and 40s, as well as other twentieth century architectural gems.
posted by The Discredited Ape at 6:34 AM PST - 12 comments
July 11
Fives is a handball sport of British origin. One of the major types,
Eton fives, is played in an area which is a replica of one of the
bays of Eton College Chapel. Eton fives is exclusively a doubles game, but other versions, such as Rugby fives, can be played as singles.
Eton fives is commonly played by
public school boys in Britain, but is very popular with ordinary people in
Nigeria.
posted by winna at 10:13 PM PST - 25 comments
What’s interesting is that over 20 years before sparklines came on the scene, Tufte developed a different type of data visualization that didn’t fare nearly as well. To date, in fact, I’ve only been able to find three examples of it, and even they aren’t completely in line with his vision.
Edward Tufte's
slopegraphs.
posted by Foci for Analysis at 8:51 PM PST - 16 comments
[Michelangelo Antonioni's Chung Kuo] as a documentary film was one which was draped with fascination for both filmmakers as well as an audience, rather than championing anti-whatever sentiments from either side of the world. Not having seen many movies, either features, shorts or documentaries made during the Cultural Revolution era or about that era in question (propaganda included), I think this Antonioni film has more than made its mark as a definitive documentary that anyone curious about the life of the time, would find it a gem to sit through.posted by Trurl at 7:53 PM PST - 3 comments
After Kad & Olivier sign off and the Satisfaction production logo fades, viewing audiences are oftentimes treated to a cold open of an empty talk show set... one that quickly becomes the impromptu dance floor for a shameless Frenchman making an absolute giddy fool of himself while lip-syncing pop songs alongside a menagerie of...
wait, *what*?! That's right.
The Late Late Show's Craig Ferguson appears to have
a not-so-secret French admirer -- one who's not above ripping off both his opening titles and
his signature dance sequences (including
the iconic animal puppets):
"ABC" by The Jackson 5,
"Flashdance" by Irene Cara,
"On the Floor" by Jennifer Lopez and Pitbull,
"Waka Waka" by Shakira,
"Men in Black" by Will Smith,
"Let's All Chant" by the Michael Zager Band,
"Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go" by Wham!,
"It's Raining Men" by The Weather Girls, and
"Vive Le Vent (Jingle Bells)" by Tino Rossi.
Luckily, Ferguson's sense of showmanship is
more prodigious than litigious -- he responded to Arthur's "
homáge" by booking a pair of translatlantic crossover shows, with Arthur visiting LA that week and Ferguson flying out to Paris just last month. Video of both shows (plus lots more) inside!
[more inside]posted by Rhaomi at 3:42 PM PST - 12 comments
Scott Newman's
Jazz Age Chicago is a guide to every major movie theater, department store, sporting arena, amusement park, grand hotel and dance hall that operated in the Windy City during the 1920s.
posted by Iridic at 2:54 PM PST - 13 comments
If we have, at the back of our minds, a stereotype of the censor or the censor type, it is probably of some nondescript male bureaucrat who comes to work punctually at 8:30 in the morning, locks his office door behind him, and spends the day going through piles of books, underlining dirty passages in red ink and stamping pass or fail on the cover, or else pouring over strips of film with scissors at the ready, ready to snip out images of breasts and bums, who, when the clock at last strikes 5:00, emerges into the daylight, catches the bus home to some anonymous suburb and spends the evening watching reruns of sitcoms on television before donning his pajamas and falling into a dreamless sleep. Or if we're thinking not of full time censors, people who dedicate their professional lives to the business of censoring, but of part time censors, people who like to do a bit of censoring on the side, then we might imagine that retired teachers, clergymen and moral busybodies in general would be attracted to the craft. But the records of the South African system don't quite fit the stereotype.
- J. M. Coetzee, Nobel laureate author,
speaks at his alma mater University of Texas Austin about his experiences with censorship in his native South Africa during apartheid. Coetzee mentions
this essay he wrote about his time at UT Austin and a book he wrote on censorship,
here's the preface to it.
posted by Kattullus at 10:59 AM PST - 12 comments
The housing bubble was the last chance most middle-class families saw for grasping the brass ring. Working hard didn’t pay off. Investing in the stock market was a sucker’s bet. But the housing bubble allowed middle-class families to dream again and more importantly to keep spending as if they were getting a big fat raise every year. -
How the Bubble Destroyed the Middle Classposted by Slap*Happy at 10:21 AM PST - 205 comments
The Age of Mechanical Reproduction by Paul Ford.
When it comes to IVF, in-vitro fertilization, nothing is normal. Your world is upside-down. Your doctor compliments your wife on her monkeys. Then, when every dollar and exertion has gone toward a single hour of hope, it begins to snow.posted by foggy out there now at 9:57 AM PST - 98 comments
Odessa, Texas, may be best known for its Permian Panthers high school football team. Their 1988 season was chronicled H. G. Bissinger's non-fiction book
Friday Night Lights, which in turn inspired a
movie and a
tv show. But in 2010, it was another Permian Panthers -- the school's lesser-known basketball team -- that received media attention when it came to light that their star point guard, 16-year-old Jerry Joseph, was in fact a
twentytwo-year-old man named Guerdwich Montimere. Now Montimere is facing up to twenty years in jail, but not for lying about his age on the basketball court. During his time at Permian High, he had sex with a fifteen-year-old girl.
posted by Georgina at 7:57 AM PST - 42 comments
Impasse is a simple flash-based puzzle game that involves getting your object from point A to B.
Notes:
Levels you complete can be scrolled through using "x" to move to the next level and "d" to return the level select button to the first level.
The browser saves your progress, so you can close your tab/browser and return to it later.posted by lemuring at 7:30 AM PST - 19 comments
The Oregon Health Insurance Experiment: Evidence from the First Year (or, What Happens When You Give Poor People Health Insurance?) "We find that in this first year, the treatment group had substantively and statistically significantly higher health care utilization (including primary and preventive care as well as hospitalizations), lower out-of-pocket medical expenditures and medical debt (including fewer bills sent to collection), and better self-reported physical and mental health than the control group."
[more inside]posted by OmieWise at 6:50 AM PST - 65 comments
July 10
Your Paintings a joint initiative between the BBC, the Public Catalogue Foundation and participating collections and museums from across the UK, is a website which aims to show the entire UK national collection of oil paintings, the stories behind the paintings, and where to see them for real. It is made up of paintings from thousands of museums and other public institutions around the country. Currently the archive contains 63,000 of the approximately 200,000 publically-owned artworks that make up the national collection.
[more inside]posted by dng at 2:35 PM PST - 12 comments
Over 143 episodes of audio, Mike Duncan has covered the founding of Rome through the Crisis of the Third Century in his
History of Rome podcast [
previously], having now reached the last pagan Emperor,
Julian The Apostate. Enlivened by drawing on comparisons to popular culture, from
The Empire Strikes Back (when Hannibal makes his appearance) to
The Godfather (as a metaphor for Rome's social client system), Mr Duncan's work makes for fun, informative 25-minute sessions with the greatest empire of the ancient western world. If you're interested in more, the podcasts could be handily supplemented with...
[more inside]posted by Bora Horza Gobuchul at 2:32 PM PST - 42 comments
Typeface based on sculpture becomes motorized sculpture. The (European) typeface
Jigsaw, “which was inspired by sculpture,” finds a use in typesetting the names of donors to a (U.S.) regional arts council. “A motorized disk contains approximately 2,000 names.... Pushing an initial letter on the control panel allows the viewer to find a particular name. The disk rotates and stops at the requested letter and displays all the names corresponding to the requested letter by backlighting them with white LEDs.” (
Gallery;
Vimeo video.)
[more inside]posted by joeclark at 10:11 AM PST - 12 comments
Joseph Mitchell was a reporter. It's tempting to say his beat was the waterfront, but though he's certainly the poet laureate of the Fulton Fish Market, this would be too literal-minded and geographically limiting. His beat was the margins, including the metaphysical margin of life itself. Mitchell invented a temporal dimension for his stories, a strange and twilit place—Mitchell Time—where a density of historical fact and the feeling of whole eras fading from view are sharply juxtaposed with scenes of cinematic immediacy related in the present tense. A cozy aura of death pervades his work, which often features oldsters experiencing the chilling fear of its approach while gleefully playing hide-and-seek with the reaper. -
The Village Voice [more inside]posted by Trurl at 9:44 AM PST - 6 comments
Book Blogs Search Engine: "Looking for reviews of a book by real-life book bloggers? Tired of sifting through corporate sites in your regular Google search results? That’s why I created the Book Blogs custom search engine – all book bloggers, all the time! Whether you’re looking for other non-commercial reviews of a book you’ve just read, or want real readers’ opinions on a new book you’re considering, this is the place." If you want to include your book blog in the search engine, leave a comment at this
link.posted by Fizz at 7:26 AM PST - 3 comments
July 9
The 1950s Called, and They Want Their Transportation Bill Back. "While the bill’s summary lists few specific programs that would be cut, Chairman John Mica (R-Fla.) announced in a press conference Thursday that the bill will eliminate funding for several bicycle, pedestrian and transit programs, including Transportation Enhancements, the Recreational Trails Program and Safe Routes to School."
League of American Cyclists: "James Inhofe (R-OK), the lead Republican negotiator on the transportation bill, declared that one of his top three priorities for the transportation bill is to eliminate ‘frivolous spending for bike trails.’ "
[more inside]posted by inkyroom at 12:07 PM PST - 115 comments
Neighbor vs. neighbor as homeowner fights get ugly. 'As more are unable to pay homeowners' fees,
associations pit neighbor against neighbor'. Today, one in five U.S. homeowners is subject to the will of the
homeowners' association, whose boards oversee 24.4 million homes. More than 80 percent of newly constructed homes in the U.S are in association communities. And of the nation's 300,000 homeowners' associations, more than 50 percent now face "serious financial problems," according to a September survey by the Community Association Institute. An October survey found that 65 percent of homeowners' associations have delinquency rates higher than 5 percent, up from 19 percent of associations in 2005.'
[more inside]posted by VikingSword at 12:04 PM PST - 167 comments
"But it is the worry that the key source of corporate profitability — Chinese labor — may no longer be docile and cheap for much longer that mainly nags at the country's corporate guests as well as its rising capitalist class. And many fear that the very ruthlessness that Zizek talks about — the iron fist that the Chinese state has deployed over the last three decades in order to achieve the unbeatable 'China price' —
has become a central part of the problem."
posted by notion at 11:53 AM PST - 30 comments
"The story begins unambiguously. A group of IBMers, working on a secret project to build a personal computer, flew to Seattle in August, 1980, to see if [Bill] Gates could supply them with an operating system. He couldn't -- and referred them to [Gary] Kildall [of Digital Research Inc.] When they showed up at DRI's offices the next day ... the company's business manager ... refused to sign their nondisclosure agreement.... [IBM] did get together with Kildall ... a short time later, but they couldn't reach an agreement. At around the same time, [IBM] saw Gates again. [IBM] and Gates both knew of the operating system [Tim] Paterson had built at Seattle Computer Co.... "Gates said: 'Do you want to get [QDOS], or do you want me to?' [IBM] said: 'By all means, you get it."' Gates bought Paterson's program, called QDOS, for $50,000, renamed it DOS, improved it, and licensed it to IBM for a low per-copy royalty fee."
Tim Paterson, the man who created DOS, the operating system that dominated the computer industry between 1981 and 2000, has an occasional
blog that provides a fascinating history of the microcomputer industry:
Is DOS a Rip-Off of CP/M?;
The Contributions of CP/M;
Design of DOS;
The First DOS Machine;
IBM PC Design Antics; and
All Those Floppy Disk Formats…posted by Jasper Friendly Bear at 8:40 AM PST - 77 comments
July 8
HealtH (1980)
[part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10] was the film which ended Robert Altman’s relationship with Twentieth Century Fox, the studio for whom he had made M*A*S*H. ... During the editing of the film Altman’s main supporter, Alan Ladd Jr., left the studio and release was shelved. Altman distributed the film himself to the festival circuit. ... But it has never been released on VHS, DVD or BluRay and thus remains one of the least seen of Altman’s ouvre. This is unfortunate as it is a very entertaining film, even if it falls short of its ambitions as a political satire. Ronald Reagan disagreed - calling it "the world's worst movie".
posted by Trurl at 11:27 PM PST - 18 comments
Have you ever tried to raise seamonkeys? 54 percent of atheists think people on a date should split the costs, compared with 29 percent of people in general. In general, 62 percent of people like spicy food. But among those who think flag burning should be illegal, 78 percent like spicy food. 61 percent of people who filter their tap water prefer credit cards over debit cards, compared with 43 percent of people in general.
posted by Brian B. at 6:05 PM PST - 81 comments
The Illuminated Mixtapes — a running series of playlists for streaming, with hand illustrated covers for each one. Some nice background music while enjoying your MeFi.
posted by netbros at 5:13 PM PST - 14 comments
Jason Zinoman, author of the newly-published
Shock Value, a study of horror films from the late 1960s/early 1970s, presents a four-part essay in which he diagnoses the ills of the modern horror film and presents a few solutions. (
1 2 3 4)
[more inside]posted by kittens for breakfast at 3:27 PM PST - 39 comments
NOON, 22ND CENTURY. The research vessel Pegasus is getting ready for liftoff from a spaceport near Moscow. Its small crew of three comprises interplanetary zoologist Dr. Seleznev, his adventurous nine-year-old daughter Alisa, and the terminally pessimistic Captain Zeleny. As they search for rare animal specimens to expand the Moscow zoo's collection, they will discover which of the ferocious
tigerat's two tails is longer, save a planet of
robots from a paralyzing epidemic, and deliver a modestly sized
birthday cake.
[more inside]posted by Nomyte at 2:18 PM PST - 24 comments
There are precious few 7-footers that can turn into a jump hook while chewing gum at the same time, much less make a living out of it on the pro level. Yet, there Yao was. And he would have been there, even if he was 6 inches shorter than his 7-6 frame. Maybe if it weren't for those extra 6 inches, he and his Rockets would have played into the conference finals last spring.
Yao Ming Retires from the NBA. [more inside]posted by auto-correct at 1:43 PM PST - 40 comments
Hidden Tunnels, Bugs, and Bigamy: A Strange and True D.C. Story: "Reports indicated that the tunnels were long and extensive – that they may have reached as far as Rock Creek Park. Some electric lighting was discovered inside. For days, wild theories abounded – was it a Confederate soldier hideout? A stop on the Underground Railroad? A liquor depot for bootleggers? A counterfeiter’s lair? Or maybe a secret laboratory for 'Dr. Otto von Golph’s' experiments?
None of the above."
[more inside]posted by codacorolla at 11:53 AM PST - 41 comments
Artist
François Abelanet has transformed the courtyard in front of Paris' City Hall into "a new masterpiece of Land Art," on display until July 15.
Who To Believe? is a giant, living
anamorphosis -- a three-dimensional optical illusion that requires the viewer to stand at a specific vantage point to truly appreciate the work.
[more inside]posted by bayani at 11:33 AM PST - 7 comments
What Do You Do When Your Only Online Identity is a Pseudonym? In a move reminiscent of recent Facebook purges, a well-known Second Life user (whose only online presence is pseudonymous) finds his
new Google+ account deleted, allegedly for not being a real person. Whether this move is directly related to the limited-beta status of Google+ or not, questions remain for those who have been 'unpersoned' by Facebook and hopeful that Google's laissez-faire attitude toward personal identification would make G+ a friendlier environment - particularly given Google's encouragement -
as recently as February of this year - to "be who you want to be" when using Google services.
posted by tpoh.org at 11:21 AM PST - 189 comments
You are looking at a Titan Fluorite skull. The skull is 16.9 inches long, from front to back. We specially saved a large piece of high quality fluorite for caving this titan skull, and were all amazed by its beauty when all the carving and polishing were done. A site with remarkable focus and clarity of purpose.
posted by Wolfdog at 9:47 AM PST - 42 comments
The Space Shuttle Atlantis, STS-135, is scheduled to lift off this morning from Kennedy Space Center. The time was originally scheduled for 11:26 AM EDT, but that has been
pushed back, despite
"no technical concerns and... weather is a 'go'." Astronauts aboard are Commander
Chris Ferguson, Pilot
Doug Hurley, and Mission Specialists
Sandy Magnus and
Rex Walheim.
Watch live coverage, with some archival footage,
on NASA's Ustream or
on NASA.gov. NASA has provided
countdown highlights of the day to get you up to speed.
Read NASA's feed on Twitter. At the time of this post's writing, the countdown clock is on a scheduled hold with 9 minutes to go.
Previously,
STS-134, on the Blue.
posted by knile at 7:55 AM PST - 200 comments
Sylvia Londono, a real estate agent and mother of two, says her condo, which she bought for $450,000 in 2007, is now worth $150,000. She has never moved in, she says, put off by the stench that rises from the site and a nearby sewage treatment plant on rainy days. “It has been the worst experience ever,” says Londono
Welcome to
Biscayne Landing! You can learn a lot about our sprawling development by reading these informational "
articles" (all internally written). Just please don't read
this one (source of above quote). Mmmk, thanks!
[more inside]posted by obscurator at 7:45 AM PST - 39 comments
Roger Ebert has discovered the Macmillan Reader's Edition of
The Great Gatsby and he hates it:
"This is an obscenity." Macmillan Reader's Editions are
geared to ESL students. Ebert thinks that's a really bad idea: "Why not have ESL learners begin with Young Adult novels? Why not write books with a simplified vocabulary? Why eviscerate Fitzgerald?"
[more inside]posted by CCBC at 1:28 AM PST - 247 comments
July 7
Friday Downloadable Fun:
Pixelships is a freeware combination of Pokemon and Defender. Destroy, collect, and upgrade 160 pixelized spaceships in a series of randomly generated levels. The sequel,
Pixelships Retro, is now out and is available as shareware.
posted by Lovecraft In Brooklyn at 4:33 PM PST - 10 comments
Obesity Epidemic Grows: [CNN.com] "Two-thirds of all adults and about a third of all children and teenagers in the United States are overweight or obese according to a report release Thursday by the Trust for America's Health (TFAH) and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF).
According to
"F as in Fat: How Obesity Threatens America's Future 2011,"[PDF] adult obesity increased in 16 states during the past year and rates soared to 30% or more in these 12 states: Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and West Virginia. Four years ago, only one state - Mississippi - had an adult obesity rate of more than 30%. No state showed a decrease in it obesity rate in Thursday's report."
posted by Fizz at 3:50 PM PST - 231 comments
Threats, blackmail, bribery and illegal bugging all in the name of journalism?
Jack Anderson, the bombastic muckraker who broke some of the biggest political stories of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, would have felt right at home at the
News of the World. A
devout Mormon, Anderson was "
part circus huckster, part guerrilla fighter, part righteous rogue," a crusading journalist who believed that God was behind his work, no matter how he went about it.
[more inside]posted by not_the_water at 1:54 PM PST - 15 comments
What History Teaches Us About the Welfare State. 'In the wake of the economic crash, which has led to soaring budget deficits, Democrats and Republicans are negotiating “to move forward to trillions of spending cuts,” as House Majority Leader Eric Cantor said recently. A report from House Speaker John Boehner’s office called for “eliminating government agencies and programs” and “reducing transfer payments to households.” These changes would result in unprecedented reductions in the size of the welfare state and the American social compact as it developed over the last century.'
[more inside]posted by VikingSword at 1:06 PM PST - 142 comments
So, I have come to take back the knife on behalf of us prudes, who quite often are only reserved, shy, terribly square people whose native restraint and weak knees are, in fact, generally accompanied by a deep love of personal freedom and diversity of opinion. Prudery comes in for a lot of flak because people imagine that the prudes want to impose limitations on the behavior of others, but they particularly, especially do not. The wimpy and yikes-prone, far from wishing to restrict or even to express an opinion regarding anyone else's private practices, are in reality possessed of a fervent, if doomed, desire to know as little about them as possible.
In Defense of Prudes, an essay by Maria Bustillos, from the Awl.
posted by sweetkid at 10:45 AM PST - 150 comments
After spending years and millions of pounds settling civil lawsuits, seeing their royal editor and an investigator jailed, and insisting that only a few rotten apples knew about the phone hacking, the 168 year old
News of the World is to publish its last issue and close
this Sunday.
[more inside]posted by MattWPBS at 9:39 AM PST - 1124 comments
Yesterday, July 6th, was the first day of
San Fermín or Sanfermines in Pamplona, in celebration of
Saint Fermín. As is tradition,
it starts with a rocket, and turns into
a giant, joyous, drunken party in the streets. The
events to follow have changed over the centuries, with the addition of Riau Riau in 1914 (
actual singing,
words and lyrics,
Spanish Wiki page with lyrics) in 1914, and most recently,
leaving of candles and red bandanas at
the Church of San Lorenzo, following the singing of
Pobre de Mi. Oh, and there's
the running of the bulls (
route,
photos from yesterday's run,
previously).
[more inside]posted by filthy light thief at 8:48 AM PST - 9 comments
The best social network you've (probably) never heard of is one-five-hundredth the size of Facebook. It has no video chat feature, it doesn't let you check in to your favorite restaurant, and there are no games. The company that runs it has just four employees, one of whom is responsible for programming the entire operation. It has never taken any venture capital money and has no plans to go public. Despite these apparent shortcomings, the site's members absolutely adore it. They consider it a key part of their social lives, and they use it to forge deeper connections with strangers—and share more about themselves—than you're likely to see elsewhere online.
Why
Ravelry is such a great community and social network.
Prevposted by Foci for Analysis at 5:14 AM PST - 109 comments
When Smith writes long soliloquies, he doesn't do so from an attempt to ironically portray how Holden conceives relationships with juvenile sentimentality, but because he lacks the ability to give you insight into each character without having them wrenchingly declare themselves and their universe to you. A better writer gives you the details and lets you discover a human being from them, but here, each word is very important, and each one has meaning, because this is communication through vivisection. You open up the animal, and every working part matters.
-- Kevin Smith's Chasing Amy, Criterion Collection,
reviewedposted by crayz at 1:35 AM PST - 88 comments
July 6
Music fans have known for a long time that Ian MacKaye's post-hardcore group
Fugazi and the members of Shaolin-based hip-hop collective
The Wu-tang Clan were really just two sides of the same awesome-sauce coin. So enter the mash-ups of -- wait for it --
WUGAZI! [more inside]posted by bardic at 10:49 PM PST - 27 comments
Although
ATM's has been recently identified as playing a part in high unemployment, Switzerland's
Anti PowerPoint Party believes the country loses approximately 2.1 billion Swiss Francs (2.5 billion $USD) through the use of PowerPoint. If they can obtain the signatures of 100,000 voters as needed under Swiss law the group can call for a national referendum to ban the use of PowerPoint and other presentation software throughout Switzerland. Edward Tufte (and
others) also had a
problem with PPoint...
posted by wallstreet1929 at 8:43 PM PST - 56 comments
Shawn Thorsson makes costumes for his friends Shawn Thorsson, self-professed busiest man alive,
uses a laptop, a printer, a carving machine, and a mad scientist's lab of home-made tools to make costumes based on
Star Wars,
Halo, LEGO, and other appropriately nerdy, sci-fi related media artifacts. He shares them with his friends, and they have the
best Halloween ever!
posted by willhopkins at 7:31 PM PST - 28 comments
Shortly before noon yesterday morning an art thief walked into the
Weinstein Gallery near San Francisco's Union Square, grabbed Pablo Picasso's 1965 pencil drawing,
"Tête de Femme (Head of a Woman)" and strolled casual out of the museum to a waiting cab. Witnesses described the man as a "well dressed" "white man about 6 feet tall, age 30 to 35, wearing a dark jacket, a white shirt, dark pants, large dark glasses and loafers with no socks." Surveillance cameras at nearby restaurant Lefty O'Doul's appear to have
captured the suspect as he walked briskly down the street, Picasso under arm.
“
Most galleries that show this caliber of artwork don’t put it on street level,” said gallery owner Rowland Weinstein. “It’s very upsetting, because my goal is to keep this kind of work accessible to the public.” Weinstein says the piece was insured and is valued at $200,000.
posted by 2bucksplus at 3:39 PM PST - 101 comments
Will young men ever grow up? 'They're often called lost boys, the many young men' in Canada, 'who keep postponing adulthood.' 'Social scientists are trying to figure out why their numbers keep growing.' 'In the past, marriage and family were markers of adulthood, writes Michael Kimmel in his book Guyland, but in a world where young women put off children for careers, where job security is a thing of the past and their parents' values hold little allure, young men can postpone adulthood almost indefinitely.'
[more inside]posted by VikingSword at 11:17 AM PST - 289 comments
"America?" he says. "I'll tell you about America. America is not all honey and roses the way they tell you. Truth is, 90 percent of the people there, you will find, they'll do the most stupid things, impulsive things. I know for a fact. At the same time, Americans are bighearted people, and the remaining 10 percent of them are smart. Bloody smart. That's why they rule the world."
[more inside]posted by Naberius at 9:31 AM PST - 90 comments
"The contemporary setting and concerns of "
The Steam Arm" are a very great distance from the Gothic setting and tropes of much 1830s horror fiction, and its science fictional content makes it possibly unique."
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 6:46 AM PST - 16 comments
July 5
India's vultures are vanishing. Populations of three species on the sub-continent have plummeted since the 1980s from 50 million to less than 60,000. Their disappearance could lead to widespread increase in human diseases.
posted by binturong at 8:43 PM PST - 24 comments
Variously dubbed "King Leer", "Hollywood primitive", "trash master" and "dirty old man", this self-proclaimed "King of the Nudies" and "glandscape artist" not only defined the sexploitation genre, he practically invented it. [all links NSFW] posted by Trurl at 8:20 PM PST - 21 comments
"
After Navy SEALs killed Osama bin Laden, the White House released a photo of President Barack Obama and his Cabinet inside the Situation Room, watching the daring raid unfold. Hidden from view, standing just outside the frame of that now-famous photograph was a career CIA analyst" -
The man who hunted Osama bin Ladenposted by vidur at 5:23 PM PST - 58 comments
"
Out of 53 species [of bacteria found in my belly button], 35 were present in only 10 or fewer other volunteers. And 17 species in my navel didn’t show up in anyone else. In the column for notes in Dunn’s spreadsheet, he’s annotated these species with scientific descriptions like “weird one” and “totally crazy.”
Several species I’ve got, such as Marimonas, have only been found in the ocean before. I am particular baffled that I carry a species called Georgenia. Before me, scientists had only found it living in the soil.
In Japan."
(via
Sullivan)
posted by LarryC at 11:35 AM PST - 74 comments
In a redoubled effort to capture consumers’ attention in this sputtering economic recovery, some paint companies are hoping to distinguish their brands with names that tell a story, summon a memory or evoke an emotion — even a dark one — as long as they result in a sale. What the names do not do is reveal the
color. [SLNYT]
posted by bayani at 11:30 AM PST - 53 comments
"The Japanese call critters like Godzilla "daikaiju", which means something like 'sacred giant monster'. I like this name, because it reflects the awe felt by mere humans in the presence of these creatures. These aren't just large animals, to be trapped for zoos or shot and mounted as trophies (sites like this notwithstanding). These are beings that, by their very presence, shake humanity's conceptions of self-importance and place in the universe." Chris Jarocha-Ernst makes
miniature pixel monsters in the style of
MicroHeroes.
[more inside]posted by codacorolla at 11:13 AM PST - 14 comments
Lee Marvin:
A Personal Portrait by John Boorman "While trolling youtube for all things Lee Marvin and Parker I discovered this really nifty mini-documentary that filmmaker John Boorman (Point Blank, Hell in the Pacific, Deliverance, Excalibur) did for the BBC called Lee Marvin: A Personal Portrait. It's really fantastic with appearances from folks like William Hurt, Jim Jarmusch, Pamela Marvin, and others. Readings from Marvin's personal journal about his WWII experiences as well as his great fishing expeditions in Australia. And yes, you'll be able to see the wallet Marvin was carrying when a bullet went whizzing through and granted him his Purple Heart."
posted by puny human at 10:50 AM PST - 23 comments
Although the past 12 years have seen the warmest 10 years on record, temperatures have remained fairly steady, even while CO2 emissions grew by nearly a third. Temperatures should have been increasing during this period, rather 1998 was tied with 2010 for hottest on record. Now a
study suggests why (pdf): sulfur emissions from Asian coal plants (China mostly) are so high they mimic the effects of a volcano which can cause short term cooling by reflecting light back into space. Insidiously, the long-term warming caused by CO2 (coal) has been masked by short-term cooling of sulfur (coal).
posted by stbalbach at 10:00 AM PST - 85 comments
A Song of Ice and Fire [SLYT] Game of Thrones Violin Cover. An acoustic and electric violin cover of the main theme song from Game of Thrones. Arranged and performed by Jason Yang. Original song and soundtrack by Ramin Djawadi.
posted by Fizz at 9:33 AM PST - 55 comments
"Excuse me, but it appears you have been presented with an addition to your in-box. Would you like tea and crumpets with that, my lord?"
Do you still receive email
(previously)? If so, perhaps you are tired of your system's built-in email notification sound. Never fear,
a brave .wav enthusiast has compiled endless references to the receiving and reading of email. These sound bytes span America's rich TV past (well, mostly Simpsons references), but don't miss the veritable Inbox of Babel toward the bottom.
posted by obscurator at 7:47 AM PST - 50 comments
Hop in the
Video Time Machine and scroll to any year: from
1860 (the first recorded sound) to the
present day to experience video and audio from that time period: most of it iconic, some forgotten, and others entirely random. Results can be filtered for music, sports, movies, current events and more.
[more inside]posted by Bora Horza Gobuchul at 12:25 AM PST - 8 comments
July 4
Tinkatolli is an extremely cute online game for kids. With a difference; it lets them level up for doing things like making junk spaceships and getting exercise. Kids play as Tinkatollis, tiny creatures who live on an island where junk washes up everyday, which they can turn into cool stuff. It's still in beta testing, but you can explore the
TinkaMaker and make your own Tinkatolli. (via
Drawn)
posted by emjaybee at 9:24 PM PST - 14 comments
Thirteen-year-old
Milly Dowler was kidnapped and murdered on her way home from school in 2002. During the six-month hunt before her body was found, her parents gave exclusive interviews to the
News of the World, saying they believed she would be found alive.
That hope was based partly on the fact that her voicemails were still being listened to and deleted. Today, it was revealed that the deleting was
being done by the News of the World.
[more inside]posted by bonaldi at 3:22 PM PST - 324 comments
"You know, I don't really know how else to explain how this makes me incredibly uncomfortable, but I'll just sort of lay it out that I was a single woman, you know, in a foreign country, at 4 AM, in a hotel elevator, with you, just you, and - don't invite me back to your hotel room right after I finish talking about how it creeps me out and makes me uncomfortable when men sexualize me in that manner..." Rebecca Watson, founder of
Skepchick, spoke in Dublin at the World Atheist Convention a month ago
(video). Afterwards,
in a video post (relevant part starts at about 2:30), she discussed an incident that occurred there.
She received some dismissive responses. PZ Myers is
supportive.
Richard Dawkins is
dismissive. Dawkins is
called out. PZ Myers
weighs in again. Dawkins
still doesn't get it.
[more inside]posted by flex at 9:40 AM PST - 1266 comments
The Declaration of Independence is perhaps the most masterfully written state paper of Western civilization. As Moses Coit Tyler noted almost a century ago, no assessment of it can be complete without taking into account its extraordinary merits as a work of political prose style. Although many scholars have recognized those merits, there are surprisingly few sustained studies of the stylistic artistry of the Declaration. This essay seeks to illuminate that artistry by probing the discourse microscopically -- at the level of the sentence, phrase, word, and syllable. The University of Wisconsin's Dr. Stephen E. Lucas meticulously analyzes the elegant language of the 235-year-old charter in a distillation of
this comprehensive study.
More on the Declaration: full transcript and
ultra-high-resolution scan,
a transcript and scan of Jefferson's annotated rough draft,
the little-known royal rebuttal,
a thorough history of the parchment itself,
a peek at the archival process, a reading of the document
by the people of NPR and
by a group of prominent actors,
H. L. Mencken's "American" translation,
Slate's Twitter summaries, and
a look at the fates of the 56 signers.
posted by Rhaomi at 9:22 AM PST - 72 comments
July 3
Here are two videos of the astoundingly creative and masterful skateboarder Kilian Martin:
1 and
2posted by mhjb at 8:31 PM PST - 33 comments
Marlon Brando. Yeah, sure, he could act. Very talented guy. But, hey, he also invented a radically innovative tuning system for conga drums. Played the congas, too. Yup.
That's right.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 8:20 PM PST - 23 comments
Ever wonder how many variants of jumpsuits there can be? Do mock turtlenecks belong in space? Why is brown the color of respecting alien cultures?
Fashion It So takes on the couture of the 24th century one Next Generation episode at a time.
posted by The Whelk at 3:22 PM PST - 32 comments
From 57 cowbrains in 15 minutes to Ess-a-bagel and hanging out with NYC chefs and models...the 'where is he now' of
Takeru Kobayashi.
posted by bquarters at 1:59 PM PST - 34 comments
They’d met in the psychology department at U.C.L.A., where Gonzaga was conducting a study on married couples. Setrakian, who had a master’s in clinical psychology, was the project coördinator. To test their procedures, they needed a man and a woman to impersonate a married couple for multiple sessions. Gonzaga and Setrakian became the impersonators, and fell in love.
An article about
online dating from the New Yorker.
posted by wittgenstein at 12:45 PM PST - 18 comments
Who holds the longest home sell-out streak in professional sports? The Red Sox have the longest streak in major league baseball, just under 700 games (and counting.) The Washington Redskins have sold out 348 straight home games, a streak dating back to 1968. But the longest streak belongs to the Portland Trail Blazers, who sold out 814 straight home dates between 1977 and 1995.
Yesterday, they were joined by
the Dayton Dragons of the Class A Midwest League, whose victory over the Bowling Green Hot Rods marked their 814th straight sellout. The Dragons, despite playing in an
economically troubled mid-sized city,
have sold out every home game the team has ever played, drawing over 8,000 fans a game, better than most AAA clubs. Dragons manager
Delino DeShields was
last seen on MetaFilter as a hitting coach in the independent Pioneer League. General manager Gary Mayse
explains how the Dragons have found success in hard economic times.
posted by escabeche at 9:53 AM PST - 35 comments
July 2
Metacognitive training is a useful
complementary treatment approach to schizophrenia. MCT aims at sharpening the awareness of patients for a variety of cognitive biases (e.g. jumping to conclusions, attributional biases, over-confidence in errors), which are implicated in the formation and maintenance of schizophrenia positive symptoms (especially delusions), and to ultimately replace these biases with functional cognitive strategies.
Researchers at the
Universitätsklinikum Hamburg-Eppendorf have developed
an MCT program, comprised of eight modules targeting common cognitive errors and problem solving biases in schizophrenia.
[more inside]posted by aeschenkarnos at 10:33 PM PST - 16 comments
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Margaret Herrick Library today launched its latest online research tool, the Production Art Database. The database contains records for more than 5,300 items from the library’s collection, including motion picture costume and production design drawings, animation art, storyboards and paintings. Nearly half of the records include images, making this an invaluable online resource for researchers interested in motion picture design.posted by Trurl at 7:56 PM PST - 7 comments
Hobo Lobo of Hamelin is a thing by a dude, who’s all like, “I’m Gonna Make a Thing.” And then he did. Or is doing. Or, you know, whatever. This dude can be found on the internet. He websites to put food on his family. A wonderfully crafted and designed illustrated book for the digital age.
posted by netbros at 4:02 PM PST - 26 comments
"The first and greatest American Surrealist,
Joseph Cornell is best known for his
boxes. The best of his mysterious assemblages of dime-store tchochkes and paper ephemera in little hand-made cabinets perfectly realize the elusive sublime at the heart of Surrealism, while avoiding the juvenile theatrics of his European colleagues.
However, Cornell was also one of the most original and accomplished filmmakers to emerge from the Surrealist movement, and one of the most peculiar. Just as the ascetic and introverted Cornell himself held Surrealism at arms length, borrowing only those elements that suited his interests and temperament, his films superficially resemble those made by other Surrealists, they are in truth sui generis. Only a handful of his contemporaries understood the genius of films like his
Rose Hobart — an unfortunate situation exacerbated by Cornell's own obstinate resistance to public screenings. No one made films even remotely similar to Cornell's for almost thirty years, and even now the perfect opacity of his montage remains unrivalled."
Jack's Dream ::
Cotillion / The Midnight Party ::
By Night with Torch and Spear ::
Centuries of June ::
moreposted by puny human at 3:38 PM PST - 16 comments
Copa América is streamed live on YouTube. Copa América is the oldest international football competition, having been held first in 1916. This is a contest between the 10 South American nations and two invitational teams, this time Costa Rica and Mexico, who both sent young squads (Japan was slated to take part but
withdrew due to the earthquake). The tournament started yesterday with Bolivia unexpectedly managing to
hold Argentina to a draw. Colombia are currently beating a 10-man Costa Rica 1-0. Brazil start their campaign tomorrow, against Venezuela. One of the world's premier football writers, Jonathan Wilson, wrote previews of the three groups,
A,
B and
C. The Independent has more light-hearted
team previews.
posted by Kattullus at 12:54 PM PST - 13 comments
BLVR: This is all a pretty analytical approach to improvisation, where I think a lot of people consider Phish’s music to be just “made up on the spot.”
TA: We’re the most analytical band, in some ways. We’d talk and talk for hours about this stuff. I see improvisation as a craft and as an art. The craft part is important. There’s a lot of preparation and discipline that goes into it just so that, when you’re in the moment, you’re not supposed to be thinking at all.
The Believer - Interview with Trey Anastasioposted by lemuring at 8:04 AM PST - 41 comments
Cricketer
Adrian Shankar recently hit the headlines in Britain after blagging his way into an
embarrassed Worcestershire side but he's hardly the first to overcome a complete lack of talent to launch a brief, inglorious sporting career.
Rosie Ruiz famously took a bit of a shortcut to 'win' the 1980 Boston marathon and Senegalese footballer
Ali Dia made a brief and solitary appearance for Southampton, as substitute for the sublime Matt Le Tissier no less, after fooling the notoriously hard bitten Graeme Souness. Excellent as their efforts may have been, none possessed the all round sporting skills of the immortal
Karl Power.
posted by joannemullen at 12:18 AM PST - 16 comments
July 1
Transformers 3 scene from The Island.
SlashFilm
passes along the news that Michael Bay recycled shots from his 2005 film
The Island in his new film
Transformers: Dark of the Moon, saving costs by adding different CGI to the same car chase scenes. "I’m not sure how often this kind of thing happens, but my guess is that it happens probably more than you would think."
posted by mediareport at 9:10 PM PST - 78 comments
Straight to Hell is a 1987 action-comedy film directed by Alex Cox, featuring Sy Richardson, The Clash frontman Joe Strummer (after whose song the film is named), Courtney Love, Dick Rude, Dennis Hopper, Grace Jones, Elvis Costello, Xander Berkeley, Kathy Burke, Jim Jarmusch, Edward Tudor-Pole, Miguel Sandoval, as well as members of The Pogues, Amazulu and The Circle Jerks. ... While the film received almost no positive reviews, it has (like several other of Cox's films) achieved a minor cult status, largely due to its cast of musicians, many of whom have cult followings of their own. A soundtrack has been released. (previously, awesomely)posted by Trurl at 7:28 PM PST - 44 comments
Forget Velonews. For years now, the best place to follow the big cycling stage races has been
steephill.tv, a "bike travelogue" with stage previews, results, news articles, photos, and video curated every day of the race. This site is an obvious labor of love... with no ads! If you want to watch or listen to the Tour de France for free, steephill will helpfully tell you
where to go on the web. But if you're away from your computer or don't have Versus (in the US), there's
an NBC iPhone app with live video, for $14.99 (launches iTunes)
[more inside]posted by jstef at 10:46 AM PST - 24 comments
In an apparent reversal (err, 'clarification') of the Oct. 2009 '
Ogden Memo' (
previously), the DEA has has
issued a new memo stating that "Persons who are in the business of cultivating, selling or distributing marijuana, and those who knowingly facilitate such activities, are in violation of the Controlled Substances Act, regardless of state law."
[more inside]posted by FatherDagon at 7:36 AM PST - 151 comments
