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August 2007 Archives
August 31
I never saw
Simon Birch but I found
this interview Roger Ebert did with Ian Michael Smith really amazing. I don't know if it was how comfortable Ian is with sci-fi-ing up his body, how the two of them used technology to overcome their current physical conditions, the discussions of "disability blogospheres" or just how happy Roger seems to be in this conversation but the whole thing made me smile...and
something made me think MeFi would agree.
posted by Brainy at 7:32 PM PST - 15 comments
Fate, Absolute Life and Death, the Aleph, the Zeitgeist, the sinking of the Atlantis, the
World Trade Center, the formation of the universe...what more could you want from art? There's probably already been a been a post on this guy, Paul Laffoley, but I should hope more people could get a glance at some of
this man's work. Crazy or brilliant, you make your decision. A
video from his website.
posted by moonbizcut at 1:57 PM PST - 24 comments
The Price. Confessions of a College Call Girl is a blog by... well a prostitute who is in college. While her posts are mostly entertaining stories about her experiences, her most recent entry addresses e-mailers who have expressed interest in her field.
posted by spec80 at 11:33 AM PST - 96 comments
It's not a bug, it's a feature: Carolin Horn has designed
Anymails, which represents your email messages and folders as micro-organisms. The morphology of the individual organisms and their behaviour within colonies imparts information about the state of your email. You can view QT movies of the application in action (
1,
2), download her
thesis, and download
the Anymails code itself. See some of her other work
here (predominantly in German).
via Madame Martin, the "French Metafilter".
posted by Rumple at 10:44 AM PST - 22 comments
Derinkuyu wasn't discovered until 1965, when a resident cleaning the back wall of his cave house broke through a wall and discovered behind it a room that he'd never seen, which led to still another, and another. Eventually, spelunking archeologists found a maze of connecting chambers that descended at least 18 stories and 280 feet beneath the surface, ample enough to hold 30,000 people. [flickr]. [wiki].posted by dersins at 8:21 AM PST - 48 comments
Viacom used my video without permission on their commercial television show, and now says that I am infringing on THEIR copyright for showing the clip of the work that Viacom made in violation of my own copyright! Writer, film-maker and "somewhat renegade Christian thinker" Christopher Knight
(No, not the Brady Bunch kid. And yes, I'm as disappointed by that as you are.) fights back via his blog, with links to his original material. The show in question is Vh-1's
Web Junk 2.0, and the clip in question was removed from YouTube, but preserved for posterity by
Political Soup (A .wmv file
here).
posted by amyms at 12:45 AM PST - 48 comments
August 30
"If the truth was really known about the origins of Jazz, it would certainly never be mentioned in polite society." The expression arose sometime during the later nineteenth century in the better brothels of New Orleans, which provided music and dancing as well as sex. Jazz has been around for more than a hundred years now. It is not the result of choosing a tune, but an ideal that is created first in the mind, and willed in the music, inspired by
A Passion for Jazz.
posted by netbros at 9:28 PM PST - 27 comments
As the global climate changes, agriculture is sure to be affected.
The Stern Review explains that "developing countries - in particular the poorest - are heavily dependent on agriculture, the most climate-sensitive of all economic sectors."
Working Group II of the
IPCC says that: "Smallholder and subsistence farmers, pastoralists and artisanal fisherfolk will suffer complex, localised impacts of climate change (high confidence)." Meanwhile, some important staple crops
are especially threatened by rising temperatures (though
genetic engineering may help). You can
experience a taste of it yourself, with a climate change awareness fast, taking place on Tuesday, September 4th.
posted by sindark at 8:15 PM PST - 14 comments
Michael Jackson
the Beer Hunter (not the other one)
passed away this morning. Beer fans
remember the man and his impact on the world of beer. Among other things, he is responsible for establishing the definition of worldwide
beer styles. He is also credited with reviving the Belgian beer industry and inspiring the U.S. microbrewing renaissance. I'll raise a glass of ale to him tonight because he was a friend and inspiration.
posted by sixpack at 3:03 PM PST - 80 comments
Folks, don't worry about energy crisis. Because Standard Oil, Shell, Gulf, Mobil, Texaco, Amoco, Esso, Sunoco, Exxon, Nixon, Standard Oil, General Motors, Chrysler, George Wallace, and Ford is not the backbone of America. The backbone of America is a mule and cotton. [
mp3] Bluesman, outsider artist,
vaudevillian:
Abner Jay was a real One Man Band and, as he put it,
"the last great Southern black minstrel show". Some more mp3s: [
Cocaine Blues, excerpt]; [
I'm So Depressed, excerpt]; [
The Reason Young People Use Drugs, full]
posted by billysumday at 12:11 PM PST - 8 comments
A Life With Jazz is a collection of the wonderful photographs of Herman Leonard, focusing on the iconic figures of 20th century jazz music.
posted by jonson at 9:59 AM PST - 9 comments
In 1971, George Harrison
RIP and
Ravi Shankar organized,
promoted, and put on
The Concert for Bangladesh – the first high-profile rock concert to
raise money (administered by UNICEF) for humanitarian causes – at NYC's Madison Square Garden.
Performances: Ravi Shankar
{ Bangla Dhun } George Harrison and band
{ Wah Wah, My Sweet Lord, Awaiting On You All, That's The Way God Planned (composed/performed by Billy Preston), It Don't Come Easy (composed/performed by Ringo Starr), Beware of Darkness (featuring Leon Russell on guest vocals), While My Guitar Gently Weeps (featuring Eric Clapton on lead guitar), Jumping Jack Flash/Young Blood Medley (performed by Leon Russell), Here Comes The Sun (featuring Pete Ham) } Bob Dylan
{ A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall/It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry, Blowin' In The Wind, Just Like A Woman, Love Minus Zero/No Limit, If Not For You (soundcheck duet with George Harrison) } [Encore!, Encore!] posted by Poolio at 2:52 AM PST - 37 comments
Wellcome Images This collection of thousands of high-quality images includes anatomical images, rare books and manuscripts, posters, photos, and more. Also includes galleries on war, witchcraft, wellness, and other subjects.
posted by hortense at 1:19 AM PST - 10 comments
August 29
Dampcats.com is one of the strangest sites I've seen in some time. I have no idea how these people got their cats moist, or why.
posted by landis at 11:29 PM PST - 37 comments
Astrona - Space & Astronomical Art Journal : "specialising in space and astronomical art, science fiction art, visions of future worlds, design and visualization of technologies for living in space, space exploration, spaceships, starships, space colonies, etc."
posted by peacay at 10:29 PM PST - 6 comments
Eco Porn. "Fuckforforest is an erotic non-profit eco organization. By showing the beauty of love and nature we wish to direct attention to and collect money for the earth’s threatened nature, with help from sexually free people." (NSFW)
posted by Kraftmatic Adjustable Cheese at 10:04 PM PST - 25 comments
A Teacher's Guide to the Holocaust - an overview of the people and events of the Holocaust through photographs, documents, art, music, and literature. It is designed to prepare K-12 teachers to approach this sensitive topic. The content is presented from three perspectives: Timeline, People, and The Arts. Produced by the University of South Florida.
posted by netbros at 9:22 PM PST - 7 comments
American Elf is a daily diary comic by James Kochalka. The latest strip is always free but the archives are subscription only. He also a musician, his most famous song being
Hockey Monkey, and he has number of songs up for free on his site.
[via Eddie Campbell who says: "Beginning in 1998 Kochalka took the form of daily strip and imbued it with a life that has been missing from it for a long time. Since then he has made sure his daily round is not finished until a strip is done. Another thing I like about it is the way he carefully avoids any taint of 'continuity'. There is no story here, just the eternal incidentalness of life as it is lived."]posted by Kattullus at 8:39 PM PST - 21 comments
Like the
US, the
UK, and
Canada before it, Australia has recently announced that, as part of its new citizenship guidelines, prospective citizens
must pass a test with
questions relating to Australian history, society, and culture. Not everyone is a
fan of the test, though, or the information on it, and today The Age has released
its own suggestions for a citizenship test. Could you pass it?
posted by mosessis at 7:31 PM PST - 70 comments
"It so often happens that I receive mail - well-intended but totally useless - by amateur physicists who believe to have solved the world. They believe this, only because they understand totally nothing about the real way problems are solved in Modern Physics...It should be possible, these days, to collect all knowledge you need from the internet. Problem then is, there is so much junk on the internet... I know exactly what should be taught to the beginning student...I can tell you of my own experiences. It helped me all the way to earn a Nobel Prize. But I didn't have internet.
I am going to try to be your teacher. It is a formidable task."posted by vacapinta at 4:22 PM PST - 47 comments
Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal by Joel Salatin. This Saturday will mark this article's four year anniversary. Frankly, I was mildly surprised not to have found it mentioned before in MeFi. It's a good read about a sad state of affairs; how our government is turning its own people into outlaws, because freedom has been traded in for an illusion of security.
...but then we already knew that. Don't we?posted by ZachsMind at 1:22 PM PST - 110 comments
The fight to
free Burma has been making noise lately.
Protests are picking up in
Burma, international activists are putting
pressure on the UN to step in, and
Jim Carrey has joined as
yet another celebrity to try to bring public attention to the effort. Burma is an amazing place and the Burmese people are some of the warmest, most hospitable, beautiful, and silliest people I have ever encountered. The people of Burma deserve a better world. Is the tide shifting? Will this be a turning point for Burma? I hope so.
posted by crawfishpopsicle at 10:13 AM PST - 29 comments
August 28
You've got just over two weeks to make it to the
John Henry celebration in Leeds, Alabama, where some folks believe the legendary steel driving contest actually took place. Maybe you already made it to
John Henry Days in Talcott, West Virginia (or read a
fictionalized account), where some more folks claim the same. John Garst, Scott Nelson, and other folklorists weigh in
here, supplemented by a wealth of links and resources on the subject. While you think on it let
Mississippi Fred McDowell,
The Boss,
Ralph Stanley,
John Jackson,
Merle Travis, and
Jason Isbell tell their own versions.
John Garst and his research mentioned
previously.
posted by Roman Graves at 11:34 PM PST - 17 comments
The organisers of New Zealand hacking convention
Kiwicon have created some PR the only way they know how, l33t h4x0ring. Using a
XSS bug in NZ's largest newspaper the
NZ Herald they created a fake URL that injected javascript to
rewrite an article there. The URL got passed around and soon ended up with
genuine media coverage in NZ Herald's biggest competitor
Stuff. An earlier effort on the NZ Computerworld site was quickly fixed and got no media coverage.
posted by sycophant at 9:55 PM PST - 14 comments
In 1955, at least twelve men in Boise, Idaho were arrested for
"infamous crimes against nature.". In the resulting dragnet, the vice president of the Idaho First National Bank was
sentenced to seven years in prison, while national magazines fomented a McCarthyite
Lavender Scare with headlines such as
Male Pervert Ring Seduces 1,000 Boys. This dark chapter in
Idaho gay history was documented in both John Gerassi's 1966 book,
The Boys of Boise and the recent film,
The Fall of '55, by documentarian
Seth Randal, but neither Gerassi nor Randal could identify
The Queen, a closeted but politically connected homosexual who allegedly used his massive clout to stop the witch hunt.
posted by jonp72 at 6:39 PM PST - 45 comments
The Wacky World of beating up guitars to add value."Normally, even one of the resulting scratches or dings on a brand-new instrument would make a guitar enthusiast cringe. But in the hands of Mr. Eldred, they are the first steps in the process of creating a "relic" guitar -- a brand new instrument that has been deliberately aged to simulate decades' worth of rock-and-roll wear and tear."posted by KevinSkomsvold at 2:52 PM PST - 48 comments
At
rivertrout.com, the goal is to bring together people who nurture a passion for an old, and yet exquisite, form of literature: The writing of letters.
posted by netbros at 11:45 AM PST - 12 comments
Nanda Devi - India's
second-highest peak, at 25,645 feet (7816m), sits in a "sanctuary," surrounded by 21,000-foot+ lesser mountains. This has made it even more of a challenge to climb. Among those who took up the challenge were
a 1965 CIA team trying to set up a plutonium-powered device to spy on China's nuclear testing program.
That expedition retreated in the face of bad weather, leaving the device on the mountain. When they returned the next spring, it was gone. The Nanda Devi Sanctuary supplies water to the Ganges River, and there were fears that the four pounds of plutonium in the device could escape into the watershed. Those fears
have been confirmed.
posted by Kirth Gerson at 11:24 AM PST - 42 comments
Hallstatt, Austria, besides being idylic, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and is historically fascinating:
A Bronze Age cultural center, with a 2,500-year-old
salt mine (the world's first); beautiful
ice caves; and a Catholic cemetery so small that the dead were regularly disinterred after a time, their skulls painstakingly identified and decorated and stacked in an
ossuary.
posted by bigskyguy at 10:23 AM PST - 5 comments
You're Gonna Miss Me is playing in a few theaters this summer. The documentary explores the life of
Roky Erickson, former frontman for the seminal psychedelic rock group The 13th Floor Elevators, an influential musician who's life and career has been marred by mental illness. But in recent years his life has been characterized by drastically improved health and an increasingly active recording and performance career. (Via Chicago Public Radio's
Sound Opinions, see footnotes 5 & 6).
posted by nanojath at 10:00 AM PST - 21 comments
March of the librarians: "Twice a year, tens of thousands of librarians make a trek across the United States to a meeting of the ALA. How they know to congregate in the same spot, no one knows. They come to learn, to network, to collect free stuff, and possibly to mate."
(YouTube)posted by Orb at 8:55 AM PST - 30 comments
In honor of
this morning's impressive lunar eclipse, another moon-photo post: For decades you had to be a scholar or specialist to get access to the original Apollo flight films, most of which have been stored in freezers at Houston's Johnson Space Center. Now Arizona State University and NASA are scanning the negatives with high-resolution equipment and creating
an online digital archive of downloadable images for the general public.
Here are
the first few, from Apollo 15.
(Similar topics previously:
1,
2,
3,
4.)
posted by GrammarMoses at 7:21 AM PST - 9 comments
Leaping Through the clouds 40 years ago yesterday, 18 experienced recreational skydivers took off in a converted World War II B-25 flying at 20,000 feet, intending to land at
Ortner Field in Wakeman, Ohio.
Expecting to free fall and then pop their chutes at 3,000 feet, after passing through the clouds at 4,000 feet, they instead plunged into Lake Erie, five miles from shore. FAA rules then and now
bar skydiving through clouds, for obvious reasons.
The plane's pilot wasn't rated to fly the craft but he also received bad information about his location from an air traffic controller in Oberlin: the controller mistook a Cessna observing the jump from a couple of miles away for the B-25.
Two skydivers, one of whom had used his Styrofoam-lined helmet as a flotation device, were saved from the waters by a passing boater; 16 skydivers drowned.
Oddly, one skydiver had told people the night before that, given a choice, he would take
drowning as the way to go. He did not survive.
The tragedy remains the
worst recreational skydiving accident in history. (Sub. required.)
posted by etaoin at 6:17 AM PST - 20 comments
Many a music fan out there in
MeFitown and beyond was delighted with and intrigued by that now-vanished website,
Dylan Hears a Who! It featured backing tracks that captured, with an astonishing believability, both the sound and the feel of Highway 61-era Bob, not to mention an uncannily good Dylan vocal imitation. And of course, as is now legend, "Dylan" was singing lyrics straight out of the wonderful works of the good
Dr. Seuss. Well, back in April Salon magazine broke the story of the very, very talented individual who put the whole thing together. Those for whom this is old news please forgive me, but it's news to me, and I can't find any notice of it here at MeFi, so,
here it is.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 4:22 AM PST - 13 comments
August 27
Dead Road - Museum of Communism in the Open. "It was one of the most ambitious projects of the Stalin era, known as the
'railway of bones'. At least 10 people a day died during the four years of its construction [actually 1947-1953], but unlike most of Uncle Joe's grand designs it was never completed and now sits unfinished in the tundra, an icy road to nowhere." The
transpolar railway was built by labour camps
^ 501 and 503 and construction was stopped after the amnesty following Stalin's death in 1953; 800km, about half, was built. Some sections are currently in operation, but much is abandoned:
depot and locomotives in Dolgoe,
Dolgoe itself,
labour camps,
more spectacular decay. (Previously:
Norilsk, which was supposed to see an extension of the line.)
posted by parudox at 11:36 PM PST - 13 comments
Ocean Residences by Four Seasons is your own private apartment aboard a giant cruise ship (one of 112 similar apartments aboardship). For those afflicted with both wanderlust and an unimaginable amount of money, the
online brochure makes a somewhat compelling case for having no fixed abode.
posted by jonson at 10:33 PM PST - 40 comments
The Chernobyl exclusion zone has been
mythologized as a sort of wildlife garden of eden with storks, bears, birds, wolfs, pigs etc.. taking over in the absence of man. However it turns out the reports are anecdotal, there have been no formal scientific studies - until now. According to
this study of birds, both the number of species and abundance of individuals declined with increasing radiation levels. For example, the most contaminated sites had about two-thirds fewer birds than those with normal levels of radiation. Chernobyl is far from a wildlife paradise, “This was a big surprise to us,” biologist Dr. Mousseau of the University of South Carolina said. “We had no idea of the impact.”
posted by stbalbach at 9:31 PM PST - 33 comments
"Since bursting onto the scene in 1967, Leonard Cohen has inspired generations with his unique personality and haunting music, becoming one of the most original and enduring artists to emerge from the 1960's. In January, 2005, Lian Lunson traveled to Sydney to film the historic "Came So Far For Beauty" show, a tribute to Cohen at the Sydney Opera House organized by famed music producer Hal Willner. And in a series of candid interviews, Cohen himself reveals his trademark wry humor and soulful intensity, using his own artwork, poetry, and personal collection of photographs to reflect upon his colorful past and his creative process."
Lian Lunson's
I'm Your Man (103 minutes, Google video)
posted by item at 7:47 PM PST - 24 comments
NoSo [embedded audio] is the next stop on the self-referential satire train of Web 2.0.* Going beyond
Useless Account, inspired (kinda) by Flash Mobs, Fight Club ("the first rule..."), and MeFi Meetups, it allows anonymous users the opportunity to organize "NOevents" where members can congregate in selected physical locations
without using their technological connectivity devices and
NOT engage in communication with each other. That's right, no talking allowed at a NOevent. Reading books is OK. You may go home and blog about it, but NO live blogging. Organized by
a San Franciso art group that
may just be using it to get people to show up at their installations (aha!), and who violate the Fight Club rule
in an interview with R.U. Sirius.
(viablame TechCrunch) *Plagiarized with attribution from bhouston.posted by wendell at 5:24 PM PST - 11 comments
Radar picks the worst colleges in America. At least one of the picks is rather dubious, although I suppose being the "worst" Ivy League is a position of some note, and another one of the picks was where my school's valedictorian went. Either way, it's always nice to see the Moonies somersaulting into otherwise non-Moonie related stories.
posted by Sticherbeast at 2:09 PM PST - 75 comments
The
Marquis de Condorcet and Admiral
Jean-Charles de Borda were two men of the French Enlightenment who struggled with how to design voting systems that accurately reflected voters' preferences. Condorcet favored a
method that required the winner in a multiparty election to win a series of head-to-head contests, but he also discovered that his method easily led to a
paradoxes that produced no clear winners. The
Borda method avoids the Condorcet paradox by requiring voters to rank choices numerically in order of preference, but this method is flawed because the withdrawal of a last-place candidate can reverse the
election results. Mathematicians in the 19th century attempted to design better voting systems, including
Lewis Carroll, who favored an early form of
proportional representation. Economist Kenneth Arrow argued that designing a perfect voting system was futile, because his
"impossibility theorem" proved that it's impossible to design a non-dictatorial voting system that fulfills
five basic criteria of fairness. (more inside)
posted by jonp72 at 12:11 PM PST - 43 comments
For
Roland Barthes, the Death of the Author came on
March 23, 1980, in the form of a car speeding down the Rue des Écoles (perhaps that car has become, like wrestling or detergent, another
myth); though the Author is gone, his works--
texts--remain; they are about
history, about
fashion, about
love, about
chopsticks, but fundamentally, they are about
signs--as Barthes, once interviewed, said, "Each of us speaks but a single sentence, which only death can bring to a close"--rapidly approaching the end of his sentence, Barthes thought about
living together, but the period would be found on his tombstone:
écrivain.
[more inside]posted by nasreddin at 10:28 AM PST - 19 comments
"At a convocation of writers in Seville, Spain, six weeks before Bolaño died [in 2003], he was declared to be the most influential Latin-American writer of his generation." (
NYer)
And since then, Roberto Bolaño's reputation has been growing (NYRB:
"The Great Bolano").
A man who dismissed magical realism as "shit" is more the heir of Cortazar and Borges (his two idols) than Garcia Marquez or Vargas Lllosa yet he is also something entirely new. Bolano was also the founder of infrarealism, a movement whose manifesto proclaims "A new lyricism springing up in Latin America, nourishing itself in ways that continue to amaze us.... Tenderness like an exercise in speed. Breath and heat. Experience at full tilt, self-consuming structures, stark raving contradictions."
Why has the
English speaking world not heard of Bolaño? His great novel,
The Savage Detectives, a sprawling work about youth and poetry and chaos (with no less than 52 narrators across several continents) has
only this year been translated.
posted by vacapinta at 10:27 AM PST - 24 comments
A nation of outlaws. A century and a half ago, another fast-growing nation had a reputation for sacrificing standards to its pursuit of profit, and it was the United States.
posted by Kirth Gerson at 7:45 AM PST - 18 comments
Wikipedia explains
biorhythms ".. is in need of attention from an expert on the subject." There are
many programs available, some are
free; some are
online.
Hocus pocus,
unsubstantiated,
or substantive?
A Mefite refers to a course tutor "Recording everything from blood pressure to sleep habits several times a day every day for 29 years." Myself? I work with numbers and know how to manipulate them. But perhaps more will be revealed about biorhythms. But when and by whom?
posted by Schroder at 6:02 AM PST - 34 comments
Burundanga (NSFW, video). Arguably the worlds most sinister drug. Under its influence you remain lucid and articulate yet absolutely compliant to any suggestion. When your 'trip' is over, you have no recollection of what has transpired.
The "Devil's Breath" is an admixture of
Scopolamine, a chemical that was experimented with, for its interrogative properties, by both the C.I.A. and Josef Mengele. For at least the past two decades, Burundanga has been a major component of Colombia's
criminal element. posted by thanatogenous at 12:04 AM PST - 46 comments
August 26
The Philosophy Research Base features thousands of annotated links and text resources for philosophy research on the Internet. Categorized by history, subject and author, this meta-index serves as both a study guide and a platform for a wide variety of community services for students and teachers in philosophy and related subjects.
posted by netbros at 11:24 PM PST - 5 comments
"
The storm carried twice as much dirt as was dug out of the earth to create the Panama Canal. The canal took seven years to dig; the storm lasted a single afternoon. More than 300,000 tons of Great Plains topsoil was airborne on that day."
Black Sunday. April 14, 1935.
Timeline, Oral Histories (
Kansas,
Nebraska), Dust Bowl Movie (
part I,
part II), Black Sunday photos (
1,
2,
3,
4).
[previous dust on mefi: iraq, texas, africa, china]posted by jessamyn at 5:56 PM PST - 17 comments
If you enjoyed
Supermarket 2.0, you'll love
brgr, aka
Burger 2.0! Yes, it's your basic "if your hamburger were like a website/web celebrity/software product/tech company/buzzword" schtick, but
some of them are funny. My faves [inside].
posted by wendell at 5:01 PM PST - 14 comments
Celebrating Tony Wilson (realplayer - realplayer alternative
here). BBC Radio One's weekly 2hr Essential Mix, this week featuring show host Pete Tong and Hacienda legend Mike Pickering. It'll be up for a week from today - tracklisting
here.
posted by forallmankind at 11:56 AM PST - 18 comments
August 25
Meet Rick and Steve : The Happiest Gay Couple In All The World. The animated series follows a gay couple, Rick and Steve, and other couples from their (fictional) town, West Lahunga Beach. Rick (voiced by
Will Matthews from MTV's "Punk'd") is Steve's stay-at-home partner. He is a genius but very insecure. Steve (voiced by
Peter Paige, best known as Emmet Honeycutt from "Queer As Folk") is a real estate broker and devotee of the gym.
Margaret Cho lends her voice to the character Condie Ling. The computer generated animated series began airing on
Logo on July 10, 2007, and is based on the 1999 short films of the same name from creator
Quenton Allan Brocka. Let the comedic stereotyping begin! In animation form, anyway. (Episodes 1-5 available in three parts each from the first link.) Not quite safe for work. Or the easily offended.
posted by gummi at 10:55 PM PST - 27 comments
Euromyths from the English press in alphabetical order collected by the European Union's UK Press Room. Examples include: EU orders farmers to give toys to pigs, pets to be pressure cooked, circus performers must wear hard hats, no more Caerphilly Cheese in Caerphilly, butchers cannot give a dog a bone, EU says Brit yoghurt has to be called Fermented Milk Pudding & Brussels makes bright smiles illegal.
posted by Kattullus at 5:51 PM PST - 64 comments
There are 65,000 contracts @ $750.00 for the SPX 700 calls for open interest. That controls 6.5 million shares at $750 = $4.5 Billion. Not a single trade . But quite a bit of $$ on a contract that is 700 points away from current value. No one would buy that deep in the money calls. No reason to. So if they were sold looks like someone betting on massive dislocation. Lots of very strange option activity that I haven't seen before. I've been doing this about 25 years.
The entity or individual offering these sales can only make money if
the market drops 30%-50% within the next four weeks. If the market
does not drop,
the entity or invidual involved stands to lose over $1
billion just for engaging in these contracts! Clearly, someone knows
something big is going to happen BEFORE the options expire on Sept.
21.viaposted by Huplescat at 4:49 PM PST - 119 comments
The Official Berkeley Breathed Website [warning: ComicSans] announced that the weekly
"Opus" comics for August 26th AND September 2nd*
"have been withheld from publication by a large number of client newspapers across the country, including Opus' host paper The Washington Post." The reason? Making jokes aout Islam. And just the week before, Opus was thoroughly ridiculing
the late Jerry Falwell. BB recommends catching his missing strips in
the Salon.com comics section. But it being the Internet, somebody has already found and posted
tomorrow's "Opus". Let's hear it for Fatima Struggle!!!
Berkeley Breathed is no stranger to controversy. Even his latest children's book, "Mars Needs Moms", was declared "Politically Incorrect". He is no stranger to me, either, although my last email exchange with him was over 3 years ago and I had nothing to do with this recent interview at MSNBC.com.
*Comic strip trivia: Most newspapers have their Sunday comics printed weeks in advance; that's why Kudzu ran Sunday strips two weeks after the dailies ended when Doug Marlette died.posted by wendell at 4:43 PM PST - 48 comments
MUVA El PAIS has been conceived as a dynamic, interactive museum bringing together the most renowned works of contemporary Uruguayan art, an important contributor to Latin American art. MUVA is devoted to quality, content, education, information and recreation through the knowledge of visual arts. In Spanish and English, Flash and/or HTML.
posted by netbros at 3:42 PM PST - 2 comments
SciVee is a site where scientists can upload video presentations alongside their published research. I especially like
this one, but there's a lot to explore.
posted by nowonmai at 2:07 PM PST - 6 comments
Jammin' with Buddy Guy You are a good guitar player, you are a really good guitar player, but you are eight years old, but whoa, here you are on the stage with one of the greatest bluesmen ever, Buddy Guy, and he is digging your sh**.
posted by caddis at 12:50 AM PST - 68 comments
We have lost on the way the lesson of living together,
We are now even scared of each other.
They are others whose faces are on your hands,
Your hurts are a deep sea -- our wounds are deep.
The stories that are being spread in our names are lies,
This is not us.
Words of a Pakistani pop song Yeh Hum Naheen [This is not us] hitting the charts, attempting to
spread the message that all muslims are not terrorists,
story via Salon.
"
Produced and written by a British Muslim, Waseem Mahmood, at the request of his two sons, "
Yeh Hum Naheen" offers a welcome counterpoint to the images of troops storming the Red Mosque, or fundamentalist mullahs preaching jihad. But the key to the song's success lies neither in its production values or deft depictions of average Pakistanis going about their daily lives, but in its heartfelt expression of pain. "
posted by infini at 12:01 AM PST - 26 comments
August 24
So you want to do porn but you want to be sure you get paid for your efforts?
Kink.com posts detailed listings of what acts pay what amount. (
if you don't understand that this is NSFW, this may be your only career option)
posted by Kickstart70 at 10:45 PM PST - 68 comments
Ventiçello is a miniature ceramic village sculpted and photographed by Steven Travis, who also invented a language and script called
Tapissary, inspired by American Sign Language, which appears on the images.
posted by Kattullus at 12:38 PM PST - 5 comments
Friday Flash Fun,
Pillage the Village. Kill as many villagers as possible by throwing them in the air, easy at first, but gets pretty hard after a bit.
posted by andywolf at 9:01 AM PST - 30 comments
The Papalagi. "Then many of these thought-mats are tied into bunches and pressed together ('books' the Papalagi calls them) and sent to every part of that great country. Very soon, everyone who takes these thoughts into themselves is infected. They devour these thought-mats as if they were sweet bananas ... [Y]oung and old gnaw at them like rats gnawing at sugar cane. That is the reason why so few of them are still able to think reasonable, natural thoughts, like those that every honest Samoan has.'posted by No-sword at 3:33 AM PST - 14 comments
Ever read a blog post, and think, "I wish I wrote that"? For all the Mefites with the many AskMe questions about "can I/should I/how should I learn to/ be a computer programmer", here's a pretty good explication of how
good programing is done:
Holding a Program in One's Head.
posted by orthogonality at 2:55 AM PST - 43 comments
Where the Engineers Are - "To guide education policy and maintain its innovation leadership, the United States must acquire an accurate understanding of the quantity and quality of engineering graduates in India and China."
posted by Gyan at 2:01 AM PST - 39 comments
August 23
I loved this beautifully filmed short documentary on
The Letterpress. For those of us who have ever risked our very own fingers for the cause of printing, or had the California Job Case burned into memory, this will be a trip down memory lane. For the rest of you, it may give you an idea for your next hobby.
posted by The Deej at 8:28 PM PST - 30 comments
From a Time magazine article: A new, innocuously titled book,
Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light (Doubleday), consisting primarily of correspondence between Teresa and her confessors and superiors over a period of 66 years, provides the spiritual counterpoint to a life known mostly through its works. The letters, many of them preserved against her wishes (she had requested that they be destroyed but was overruled by her church), reveal that for the last nearly half-century of her life she felt no presence of God whatsoever — or, as the book's compiler and editor, the Rev. Brian Kolodiejchuk, writes, "neither in her heart or in the eucharist."
Previously on Mother Teresa's doubt,
more generally.
posted by ibmcginty at 7:54 PM PST - 110 comments
The Shanhai Cooperative Organization. [wiki] When Moscow and Beijing engineered the creation of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) six years ago, I am not sure if they foresaw its emergence as an important actor in the international order. Iran, India, Pakistan and Mongolia, currently observers, are lobbying hard to get accepted into this club. The US request for membership was rejected two years ago.posted by delmoi at 5:07 PM PST - 14 comments
San Jose, CA - then & now - a decent collection of old photos, matched up with recent photos taken from the same vantage point. An interesting look at how things have changed around here. (Found in a reddit comment earlier today)
posted by drstein at 4:12 PM PST - 17 comments
On the internet, nobody knows the G-strings aren't yours. Or how murderously they infatuate. Or whom they're
infatuating.
posted by Firas at 10:21 AM PST - 85 comments
August 22
The '
Neutral Hills' is the name given to a range of hills in east central Alberta (Canada) that were shared hunting grounds for the Blackfoot and Cree Indian tribes. Because of its importance to the tribes, the area was designated as 'neutral' for hunting only, not fighting. The area ranges from the village of Veteran as far east as Major, Saskatchewan, and from just south of the town of Provost to the community of Esther. Every image posted on this site was captured within the Neutral Hills region.
posted by bwg at 11:17 PM PST - 16 comments
Spending years clarifying my observations of the community and putting them down on paper slowly revealed a society beset by a fatal condition; an affliction that has been destroying us at an ever increasing rate for two centuries and must eventually return us to barbarism. A final result that should be no surprise, as it has overtaken every other civilization; a fate that appears as inevitable and as irreversible as old age with its increasing feebleness and dementia. I was no longer interested in why our bureaucracy was full of incompetents? but why our society was full of incompetents? My original aim to improve my community with technology was replaced with answering the question, why does a community age like any other creature?
Philip Atkinson knows: civilization is in decline. And he's determined to
tell you about it. Find out the truth about
Nelson Mandela,
AIDS,
obesity,
parenting,
standard weights and measures, and, of course,
the Ten Commandments. We're
screwed, guys. Sit down,
read a book, and
watch it burn.
posted by nasreddin at 8:17 PM PST - 44 comments
Tried to do some research about this technology called Trisenx, it's even been mentioned
in the blue back in the day. But honestly I gave up, because
the video and all you may extrapolate from it says everything. And yes, that's George Clinton.
posted by jeremias at 7:57 PM PST - 8 comments
Keepon , the bot that bounces to the rhythm!
"[It] is a small creature-like robot with a soft rubber skin, two cameras in its eyes, and a microphone in its nose. Keepon is designed to interact with children by communicating attention and emotion. It has four degrees of freedom: attention is directed by turning +/-180° and nodding +/-40°, while emotion is expressed by rocking side-to-side +/-25° and bobbing up to 15mm:"posted by Phire at 7:54 PM PST - 24 comments
It's the Vietnam War. Nixon has declared a state of emergency and allows for secret tribunals against anti-war protesters, draft dodgers, and others guilty of "hindering the war effort." They have two choices: spend 15 to 20 years in a federal penitentiary or spend 3 days in
Punishment Park, where they will have 3 days to trek 50 miles in the California desert without food and water while on pursuit by armed National Guard and police units.
Watch Peter Watkin's (
previously) "documentary" of Punishment Park
here (Google Video, with strong language ).
posted by champthom at 7:07 PM PST - 28 comments
Dental Vacation Plans & Travel Packages For Single Men: At first thought, it may seem a bit strange to combine the objectives of romance and dental surgery or treatments - into a singles vacation package! But, if you are a single man who would like to seriously explore opportunities of finding a special woman and also have some dental health issues that you would seriously like to resolve, then why not?posted by billysumday at 6:17 PM PST - 15 comments
Ted Leo and
the Pharmacists[NPR segment]. Ted is a soon to be 37 years young punk singer/songwriter who draws his influences from artists like Billy Bragg, Curtis Mayfield and Clash singer Joe Strummer, Ted Leo mixes punk rock with soul, folk and pop melodies. Here is
Ted with and without the Pharmacists doing a few tunes:
Me and Mia,
Kelly Clarkson's
Since you Been Gone,
Bomb. Repeat. Bomb,
Where have all the Rudeboys Gone?,
Little Dawn, the Pogues's
Dirty Old Town, Bruce Springsteen's
Dancing in the Dark and
Sons of Cain. As he's touring nearly 365 days per year, you can rest assured that he's coming
to a venue near you.
posted by psmealey at 3:34 PM PST - 46 comments
Is there anything good about men? In
this address to the American Psychological Association, psychologist Roy Baumeister suggests that women have historically had a much greater chance of reproducing than men, and that this has had a profound influence on the way their respective roles in society have evolved:
For women throughout history (and prehistory), the odds of reproducing have been pretty good. Later in this talk we will ponder things like, why was it so rare for a hundred women to get together and build a ship and sail off to explore unknown regions, whereas men have fairly regularly done such things? But taking chances like that would be stupid, from the perspective of a biological organism seeking to reproduce. They might drown or be killed by savages or catch a disease. For women, the optimal thing to do is go along with the crowd, be nice, play it safe. The odds are good that men will come along and offer sex and you’ll be able to have babies. All that matters is choosing the best offer. We’re descended from women who played it safe....For men, the outlook was radically different. If you go along with the crowd and play it safe, the odds are you won’t have children. Most men who ever lived did not have descendants who are alive today. Their lines were dead ends. Hence it was necessary to take chances, try new things, be creative, explore other possibilities.
posted by Turtles all the way down at 4:34 AM PST - 130 comments
August 21
Most of the students entering college this fall, members of the class of 2011, were born in 1989. They never “rolled down” a car window. They have grown up with bottled water. “Off the hook” has never had anything to do with a telephone. Tiananmen Square is a 2008 Olympics venue, not the scene of a massacre. Wal-Mart has always been a larger retailer than Sears and has always employed more workers than GM. They never saw Johnny Carson live on television. Wisconsin's Beloit College
has published its annual
Mindset List. [previously
2003 and
2006].
Now, get offa' my goddamned lawn!
posted by ericb at 5:29 PM PST - 109 comments
Obesity has been called an epidemic in the United States.
Looking at an
interactive statistic [CNN, flash] of the state-by-state numbers is sobering
mf.
64% of adults are overweight and approx 25% are obese
[
Wikipedia 1,
2].
The usual suspects have so far been a culture of low-exercise
mf
high-consumption (due to
urban sprawl, driving, TV, ... ),
microbes mf,
genetic predisposition,
and bad diet
(the ubiquity of
junk food with its high levels of fat, sugar and salt.
Recently the high fructose levels in the common American diet has also been noted.
Fructose comprises 50% of table sugar and up to 90% of high-fructose corn
syrup (HFCS), both ingredients found in copious
amounts in most American 'convenience' foods.
[Wikipedia: Fructose#References, Wikipedia:HFCS]).
Now it seems that a
decisive
assessory
is a common virus, the
Human Adenovirus-36, which may really make obesity
an actual epidemic. [
Int. Journal of Obesity,
CNN]
posted by umop-apisdn at 2:21 PM PST - 48 comments
Traditionally, media doesn't print names/photos of people only accused, but not yet convicted, but not always. Lots of towns have a police blotter section where arrests are listed.
Here in Seattle, the FBI recently
asked
the public for help in identifying two men seen acting suspicious on the ferry system. The
Seattle PI has decided not to publish the photos.
Other local media have. The
commentary on if the PI made the right choice follows predictable paths...
posted by nomisxid at 2:16 PM PST - 33 comments
Brazilian Blogger Bashing! The respected Brazilian newspaper
Estadao decided to promote its new online presence by jokingly
producing a series of ads with obvious misfits and asking such questions as "Is this the guy giving you dating advice?" and
a video (youtube) comparing bloggers to monkeys. Bloggers
are outraged "Why would you read a newspaper that compares bloggers to monkeys?".
In today's newspaper, Estadao offers no apology but instead dryly recounts the facts. Meanwhile, the resulting controversy, with thousands of blogs weighing in, has driven a lot of traffic to their new site.
posted by vacapinta at 10:35 AM PST - 25 comments
It has been three decades since the
Summer of Sam. Since his conviction for the murders he committed as the Son of Sam, David Berkowitz has been imprisoned at the Sullivan Correctional Facility in Fallsburg, NY. But he hasn't been idle. Through his
website, he has been
preaching the Word of God as well as conveying a
public apology. But recently, alarmed by
the murders in Newark, he wrote a letter[
1,
2] to
amNewYork. "Perhaps," he writes, "it is time for us to go back to our roots and reexamine what America is all about. Greed or generosity? Unity or selfishness? Liberty or bondage? Love or hate? Life or death?"
posted by nasreddin at 9:12 AM PST - 16 comments
The 2005 outbreak of
Corrupted Blood in
World of Warcraft may provide
epidemiologists with a new platform for studying the spread of disease.
By using these games as an untapped experimental framework, we may be able to gain deeper insight into the incredible complexity of infectious disease epidemiology in social groups.
It comes as no surprise that the
"stupid factor" plays a role in susceptibility to viral marketing, but it may also be a
factor in the spread of real life germs.
posted by solipsophistocracy at 8:11 AM PST - 37 comments
August 20
Porn Star Registry List. As part of the
Adam Walsh Child Safety and Protection Act (Sec. 503, p. 51), the "Department of Justice wants to come up with an official list of every porn star in America - and slap stiff penalties on producers who don't cooperate." Is this an effective way to make sure porn movie producers don't hire underage actors, or is this, as Paul Cambria alleges, a violation of first amendment rights?
posted by John of Michigan at 8:23 PM PST - 153 comments
Christs, Communists, & Rock 'n' Roll is an excellent introduction to a tradition of anti-rock writings and recordings by the Religious Right. In the 1960s, there was
David Noebel who wrote
Communism, Hypnotism, & the Beatles and
The Marxist Minstrels. In the early 1970s,
Reverend Riblett constructs a seven-foot cross out of rock music records and sets it aflame with gasoline. Michael Mills finds
hidden Satanic messages in Bow Wow Wow and the Grateful Dead, while Bob Larson valiantly
debates Mandy, a 13-year-old fan of the Cure. The motherlode is probably the
cassettes of John Todd, who traveled the fundamentalist circuit in the 1970s claiming to be a former witch and a member of the Illuminati, but that's just the tip of the iceberg. (more inside)
posted by jonp72 at 8:13 PM PST - 31 comments
You’d need years to
really study these
murals of Califonia’s history -
the artist certainly had a lot a free time to create them. You'd probably also need a special invitation to engage in a multi-year study in the
gallery - and you probably don't want one.
posted by rtha at 12:11 PM PST - 8 comments
It is Saturday
morning at 8:00. It's
1969. Your parents are asleep. What'll it be?
CBS of course, with
The Jetsons, then
The Bugs Bunny and Roadrunner
Hour,
Dastardly and Muttley
and their Flying Machines,
The Perils of Penelope Pitstop,
Scooby Doo,
The Archies,
The Monkees,
The Wacky Races,
The New Adventures of Superman
and
Jonny Quest. On Channel 4
NBC fights back with
Heckle and Jeckle, then
The Grump,
The Pink Panther,
HR Pufnstuf,
The Kellogs Banana Splits Adventure
Hour,
Jambo,
The Flintstones and
Underdog. Channel 7 is
ABC which trails with
Casper, then
Cattanooga Cats,
Hot wheels,
The Hardy Boys,
George of the Jungle and
Fantastic Voyage.
Good times.posted by grahamwell at 12:06 PM PST - 93 comments
Andy Kaufman { Mighty Mouse, Elvis impersonator, Bachelor #3, Latka Gravas/Vic Ferrari, the host of his own TV special, trouble-maker [?], Dostoevsky's Idiot, "born again" Christian, percussionist, inter-gender wrestling/bitch-slap champion, lounge singer Tony Clifton [?], bit player, Elayne Boosler's ex-boyfriend, and the Man On the Moon } RIP [YA RLY]posted by Poolio at 7:49 AM PST - 33 comments
August 19
Recovering nicely, the
American Bald Eagle was
delisted (pdf) as an endangered species this summer by the Department of the Interior. Only a handful of species have fought their way back from the endangered species list. Credit the
ban on DDT for the bald eagle's remarkable resurgence.
posted by netbros at 9:16 PM PST - 40 comments
'Welcome to the wonderful world of
Miroslav Sasek. This site is devoted to the life and works of the Czech artist, illustrator and author of the This is series of children's books.' From the equally wonderful
I Like.
posted by Alec at 5:32 PM PST - 8 comments
Computers get cheap. While Microsoft has seen fit to require a whole new generation of computers to run its
latest operating system, a number of manufacturers have started the creation of cheap notebook computers. The list includes the infamous
Palm Foleo, mentioned here previously, and the
OLPC, mentioned pretty much everywhere previously. But also coming soon is the
Asus EEE, a $200-300 notebook running Linux. And Intel's
alternative to the OLPC, the
Classmate PC. Even as the low cost alternatives to standard computer start to come on sale, the prices for traditional laptops dip
ever lower. Can the
digital divide, at least hardware wise, be consigned to the dustbin of history?
posted by zabuni at 1:28 PM PST - 86 comments
Aerogel Update Originally
posted back in '02 by
adrianhon this crazy new material looks to be on the verge of mass production.
Currently used in homes for insulation & for winter clothes that are too warm to wear, this is a truly amazing technology.
Want to know how to
make it?
Want to
buy some?
Here is a
pic to help you believe it's real. More
here.
Aspen Aerogel is currently in
production.
posted by thekorruptor at 9:38 AM PST - 31 comments
A tiny wireless spy earpiece is being marketed to students who want the cheat on exams, much to the chagrin of teacher/examiner organisations. The Examear website proclaims they are: "Helping students succeed. Worldwide!" The makers say the devices are also suitable for people such as TV reporter, TV game show contestants -- anyone who needs help remembering things. Remember, before the internet, when students didnt copy all their essays and actually did some work?
posted by domdom at 4:38 AM PST - 73 comments
Physicists have 'solved' mystery of levitation Professor Ulf Leonhardt and Dr Thomas Philbin, from the University of St Andrews in Scotland, have worked out a way of reversing ... the
Casimir force, so that it repels instead of attracts. Their discovery could ultimately lead to frictionless micro-machines with moving parts that levitate. But they say that, in principle at least, the same effect could be used to levitate bigger objects too, even a person.
posted by MythMaker at 2:06 AM PST - 30 comments
August 18
The Aphrodite Project :
both an homage to Aphrodite and her prostitute-priestesses as well as a practical tool for the contemporary sex worker. Or, GPS platform shoes for street hos. Check the demo. posted by Burhanistan at 9:41 PM PST - 23 comments
How do you fit Fred "Rerun" Berry, Shaun Cassidy, Howard Cosell, Kate Jackson, Hal Linden, Penny Marhsall, Kristy McNichol, Donny & Marie, Parker Stevenson, Dick Van Patten, Adam Rich, Abe Vigoda, and Cindy Williams all into a single 48 minute TV show? It would take a magician like
David Copperfield, in his first television special in 1977.posted by The Deej at 9:23 PM PST - 42 comments
"How I Became A Programmer" veers between linear biography and brain dump. The piece meanders through its theme, stopping along the way to flirt with word origins, family politics, the senior prom, Japan, airlines and military recruitment. Reading it, I felt trapped inside inside an extremely quirky -- yet recognizable (in a too-close-for-comfort way) -- mind. About half the time I yearned to tell him that he needs an editor; the other half, I was grateful that he didn't have one. Mostly, I'm amazed he HAD a date to the senior prom!
posted by grumblebee at 7:45 PM PST - 52 comments
In the world of conversation killers, talking about Excel to the average person ranks up there with the best. At the same time, there is always a chance that you wish you could have that conversation at work when it gets down to the wire. Even as a pro, you might need that brush up on
Array Functions,
calculation tricks,
VBA examples or some examples from one of the
well known authors on Excel. There is also no shortage of people who dedicate their working lives to this arcane program and are more than willing to assist others for free by posting solved issues on their websites. People like
David McRitchie,
OzGrid,
Rob Bovey,
Ron de Bruin,
John Walkenbach,
Dick Kusleika,
Joseph Rubin and
Chip Pearson.
Or if you just want to be a Debbie Downer at the next party, just take page from any of the following, memorize it. and recite it when faced with that nudge you don't want to talk to:
Excel Support,
Jon Peltier,
Colo's Junk Room,
Scriptorium,
Andrew's Excel Tips,
Andy Pope,
Anthony's VBA Page,
Rodney Powell,
Array Formulas,
Erlandsen Data Consulting,
Excel-it,
ExcelUser,
JKP's Excel Page,
John Lacher,
McGimpsey,
Bill Jelen,
Stephen Bullen,
Tushar Mehta,
VBusers.com,
The Excel Nexus,
The Excel Logic Page, and
Anthoney Does Excel. It’s a fast and easy way to ward off lounge lizards.
posted by lampshade at 2:13 PM PST - 42 comments
Let's send a knowledge Ark to the Moon, says a French University. The founders of the group Alliance to Rescue Civilization (ARC) agree:
"extending the Internet from the Earth to the moon could help avert a technological dark age following "nuclear war, acts of terrorism, plague, or asteroid collisions." Better than sending
1679 binary digits, into space? The French are no strangers to
CETI , inventor
Charles Cros petitioned the French Government for years for funding to construct a giant mirror to burn giant lines of communication into the deserts of other planets. [
previously]
posted by takeyourmedicine at 4:30 AM PST - 45 comments
August 17
Reversible flow! In the 1960s, the National Committee for Fluid Mechanics Films produced a series of films for education in fluid mechanics. This clip is part of "
Low Reynolds Number Flow"; you can find the entire collection streamed
here. Interesting demonstrations abound.
(1st link is QT; rest are RealPlayer.)posted by Upton O'Good at 4:32 PM PST - 19 comments
Church chandeliers made from bullet casings and cannon parts Until today I'd never heard of
trench art. From the second link:
Pieces described as ‘trench art’ have the following distinctly different origins:
1. War souvenirs collected by soldiers or non-combatants during the war and during the demobilization period and modified in some way to serve as a remembrance of the war.
2. Souvenirs crafted by soldiers during the war.
3. Souvenirs made for sale to soldiers by other soldiers or civilians during the war.
4. Souvenirs made by prisoners of war in exchange for food, cigarettes or money.
5. Mementoes of the war made by convalescent soldiers.
6. Post-war souvenirs made for tourists visiting the battlefields.
7. Post-war souvenirs made by commercial firms in ‘trench-art style’.
posted by SassHat at 12:51 PM PST - 11 comments
An excellent video collection of live performances of jazz and Brazilian music from Youtube user
Pedro Mendes. Including such artists as Max Roach, Abbey Lincoln, Derek Bailey, Bill Evans, Charles Mingus, Sun Ra, Miles Davis and many, many more. Plus a host of Brazilian musicians I had never heard of before, but are quite excellent, such as Édison Machado, Dom Um Romão, Hermeto Pascoal, Elis Regina and Maria Bethania.
posted by Kattullus at 12:17 PM PST - 7 comments
Toronto: 1977 vs 2007. Shige Sakamoto spent a week in Toronto back in 1977, and took several photographs. Damon Schreiber is retracing Sakamoto's steps, taking photos of the same locations today. He's presenting the photos on his photoblog.
posted by chunking express at 8:04 AM PST - 44 comments
A society without power relations can only be an abstraction. Which, be it said in passing, makes all the more politically necessary the analysis of power relations in a given society, their historical formation, the source of their strength or fragility, the conditions which are necessary to transform some or to abolish others. For to say that there cannot be a society without power relations is not to say either that those which are established are necessary or, in any case, that power constitutes a fatality at the heart of societies, such that it cannot be undermined. Instead, I would say that the analysis, elaboration, and bringing into question of power relations and the "agonism" between power relations and the intransitivity of freedom is a permanent political task inherent in all social existence.
"Saint" Michel Foucault (1926-1984) transformed Western thought. Institutions --
prisons,
asylums,
clinics -- define the rhythm of our daily existence; Foucault found that they also determine the way we think. The search for the political and philosophical implications of this insight led him to
biology and economics,
linguistics and
the study of sexuality. In Foucault's eyes, intellectual activity, however radical,
could never be divorced from the techniques of
power. This is why some have accused him of
political quietism. Other critics say he was simply
a bad scholar. Who was the real Foucault?
"Anarchist, leftist, ostentatious or disguised Marxist, nihilist, explicit or secret anti-Marxist, technocrat in the service of Gaullism, new liberal," gay saint, charlatan, or something else entirely? Perhaps we have
posed the question incorrectly...posted by nasreddin at 8:01 AM PST - 92 comments
Giuliani promises a bigger
longer war than we got right now with W. This from a guy that used his command center in NYC as a
love nest. Of course, the Onion sums it up
best.
posted by zzazazz at 7:03 AM PST - 81 comments
August 16
This map displays county-to-county migration data for 2000-2005 from the U.S. Internal Revenue Service. In, out, staying put, median household income.
[via]posted by tellurian at 10:58 PM PST - 19 comments
Max Roach has
passed at age 83. The famed drum innovator, composer and educator who came to prominence during the bebop era died last evening at age 83 at home in Manhattan. Known as the pioneer of a technically complex style that allowed for far greater improvisational texture, Max was one of the first drummers to step out from the role as mere timekeeper. His imprint on both the history of jazz and the history of music is indelible.
posted by nonreflectiveobject at 12:10 PM PST - 53 comments
Countrywide Empties Out on Widowmaker gives a vivid idea of the turmoil in the mortgage market, and the difficult American real estate environment. "You sold your unlimited subway card after the 5th race, plunged full-bore on a filthy hot dog, a beer and a 9-1 shot that finished next-to-last. You are Countrywide."
posted by Adamchik at 11:46 AM PST - 42 comments
Salad? mmhmm. If you're not one for the ever-generic chicken caesar, well, there are alternatives. (in keeping with recent baconposts, of course.)
posted by vellocet at 10:57 AM PST - 16 comments
4th Edition is Coming... Eight years after the release of Dungeons and Dragons 3rd Edition (and only four years after the release of 3.5), Wizards of the Coast announced today that 4th Edition will be on the shelves in May of 2008. Back in 2000, the release of 3rd Edition launched a boom (and
bust) of secondary adventures published under the
Open Gaming License. Back then, a gamer couldn't swing their boffer sword without hitting a start-up
game company with d20 content. Contrast that to this month when the very
last issues of venerable
Dragon and
Dungeon magazines hit the shelves.
posted by robocop is bleeding at 9:34 AM PST - 106 comments
I now know what to do in case I ever got stuck on an airplane that's not going anywhere- organize and stage a revolt, like the passengers of Continental flight 1669.
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 9:19 AM PST - 82 comments
A 7.9-magnitude earthquake hit Peru in the Ica region, south of the capital of Lima. Ica, Chincha and Pisco have been hardest hit, although the pavement rippled in downtown Lima as well. BBC (first link) and
CNN have been reporting about 336-7 dead, but my uncle (in Lima) says that many towns south of San Bartolo have simply disappeared into rubble.
posted by LMGM at 8:08 AM PST - 27 comments
August 15
Why New Yorkers Last Longer. Interestingly, urban theorists believe it is not just the tightly packed nature of the city but also its social and economic density that has life-giving properties. When you’re jammed, sardinelike, up against your neighbors, it’s not hard to find a community of people who support you—friends or ethnic peers—and this strongly correlates with better health and a longer life. [New York Magazine article]
posted by nickyskye at 11:32 PM PST - 75 comments
Today is the 30th anniversary of the death of Elvis Presley so it seems somewhat appropriate that we remember not only
The man King but his music as well, including
Jailhouse Rock,
Love Me Tender,
In The Ghetto,
Unchained Melody,
Always on My Mind,
Burning Love,
Suspicious Minds,
Return to Sender,
Blue Christmas,
Heartbreak Hotel,
It's Now Or Never,
Hound Dog,
My Way,
Don't Be Cruel,
Way Down,
Are You Lonesome Tonight,
Amazing Grace,
You've Lost That Loving Feeling,
Promised Land,
Viva Las Vegas and
many more.
Here's the lyrics if you want to sing along to any of those. Not a fan of his music? Fair enough. Why not go make yourself
a grilled peanut butter and banana sandwich? Just don't eat 12 to 15 of them in one sitting!
posted by Effigy2000 at 6:39 PM PST - 78 comments
My Right Wing Dad is a new-ish and rather informal blog that aims to provide "a chance for folks to examine the unrestrained rhetoric that is quietly passed from in-box to in-box in America," by hosting a collection of the emails that form an often untraceable and unacknowledged part of public discourse in the U.S., especially on the Right. Tagged by category (for example:
God,
college,
flag,
liberal, and
World War II), the amateur archive presents a range of colorful opinion, not all of it strikingly accurate, and some of it offensive. In efforts to understand
liberal and conservative habits of communication, it may be worth considering the role of forwarded email in the electoral process, and the
reasons that the forwarding of email is popular among some people, and whether this behavior tends to correlate with particular political opinions. The emails hosted on MyRightWingDad may in any case be enlightening, unless you're already on the forward list of someone in the know.
posted by washburn at 5:16 PM PST - 105 comments
What's the relationship between
the rise of film noir and the national mood of post-war
(WWII, that is) America?
"Was noir simply a way of reanimating the tired conventions of the pre-war crime film? Or did we need melodramatic illusions potent enough to overcome whatever disillusions strayed briefly into our minds as we surrendered to the mighty engines of prosperity? Or was it one of those cycles - like biopics, westerns, sci-fi, etc. - that Hollywood mysteriously embraces and then just as mysteriously abandons?" Via.posted by amyms at 4:34 PM PST - 8 comments
"A group of teenagers, en route to attend a rock concert, lose their way when their car runs out of fuel in the dead of night. They find themselves in an unfamiliar rural backwater where they are confronted by flesh-eating zombies and a psychotic cannibalistic killer dressed in a sheet. It could be the plot to a thousand Hollywood horror films but while these teenagers may dress, talk and smoke dope like young Americans they are in fact young Pakistanis, and the film -
Zibahkhana or Hell's Ground -
is the first modern horror film to be filmed in Pakistan."
posted by brundlefly at 1:51 PM PST - 12 comments
Bar Code Revolution! With more than just lines and rectangles, Japanese company
Design Barcode works around the
basic elements of a barcode and infuses real, functional barcodes with creative designs and silhouettes. See barcodes as
tomatoes,
stomachs,
rain,
pianos,
guns,
train tracks,
waterfalls,
cliffsides, and yes, even
combovers.
posted by Lush at 4:31 AM PST - 46 comments
The
largest democracy in the world celebrates its
60th anniversary, in a year which saw
horrendous floods, the election of its
first woman president (previously mentioned
here), the signing of the
123 Nuclear Agreement, and the recent victory over England after a span of
21 years.
posted by hadjiboy at 12:03 AM PST - 23 comments
August 14
Little Boxes is a song written by Malvina Reynolds in 1962 that lampoons the development of suburbia and what many consider its bourgeois conformist values.
[1]
During the first season of the Showtime series
Weeds,
Malvina's original recording was used during the opening credits. In the second season, the song was performed by a different artist each episode —
Elvis Costello,
Death Cab for Cutie,
Engelbert Humperdinck,
Kate and Anna McGarrigle,
Maestro Charles Barnett,
Aiden Hawkin,
Ozomatli ,
The Submarines,
Tim DeLaughter,
Regina Spektor, and
Jenny Lewis.
[Malvina's recording was used again for the season finale.] Randy Newman just kicked off the third season, which the network promoted with a
Little Boxes music video contest.
Kevin Nealon and
Romany Malco were notable among the
participating cast members.
posted by Poolio at 11:18 PM PST - 132 comments
The most cruel viral ad campaign yet. Give your friend the experience of being stalked by a serial killer. Make sure to preview the very slick customized video generated first, before you decide whether you really want to do this to someone you like.
[Yes, yes, viral advertising for some FX show, also Flash]posted by blahblahblah at 10:28 PM PST - 38 comments
Is there no humor in public relations? The public relations blog PRBlogNews included a post last week on PR and LSD (
a long strange happy tradition). It appears to have been a joke, mixing a selection of early youth-on-acid videos with a vintage discourse about LSD by Dr. Richard Alpert (later
Ram Dass) re-imagined as a history of successful "tripvertising." It must have stirred some sort of trouble; there's been a follow-up, "LSD and PR don’t mix" post (
Don’t eat the brown acid) which warns
against mixing PR and LSD (and hot dogs).
posted by mmahaffie at 8:16 PM PST - 11 comments
The Continental was a short-lived TV show that
debuted in 1951 on KNBH Los Angeles and aired nationally on ABC and CBS during the 1952-1953 TV season. Sponsored by
Cameo Stockings, the show featured Italian actor
Renzo Cesana (who got discovered when Robert Rossellini produced a play Cesana wrote when he was 16!) purring seductively into the camera, while offering "sham-pan-ya" to an offscreen lady friend. Best known for inspiring a series of
Saturday Night Live sketches starring
Christopher Walken, the show inspired parodies in its own era, such as this
Popeye cartoon (where Bluto tries to seduce Olive Oyl by posing as "The International"), a
Jerry Lewis skit on the
Colgate Comedy Hour that imagines the Continental as played by Marlon Brando, and a Pepe Le Pew cartoon where our amorous skunk attempts to seduce the feline object of his affection in
The Cat's Bah. Unfortunately, Internet footage of the real show appears to be nonexistent, although you can buy some
love songs recorded by the Continental off EBay.
posted by jonp72 at 6:33 PM PST - 25 comments
Barbie Recalled. Mattel recalled one of their Barbie products today, a sweet little toy to teach kids responsibility called
Barbie and Tanner. But watching that commercial closely one must wonder, if those magnets are coming out of Tanner so easily, surely they won't stay in your kid. Perhaps the design flaw had nothing to do with magnets but rather such an ill-conceived product. So, after Tanner poops out the magnet, you do
what with it?
posted by Toekneesan at 5:10 PM PST - 75 comments
Oh, Inverted World. As we’ve all learned in school, 70% of the Earth’s surface is covered by water, only 30% is solid ground. What if everything was reversed? What if every land mass was a body of water, and vice versa?posted by Ufez Jones at 3:47 PM PST - 25 comments
Frankie Valli is very old but he is not dead, (MySpace, music plays on load) so you can keep those periods packed away. That first link showcases Pilooski's shockingly subtle and effective remix of Beggin', which should have been the radio hit of summer 2007, except for the small problem of not getting airplay in the States. You can compare different video treatments of the full song
here (cyriak's trippy animation),
here (pretty dancing people), and
here (Northern Soul slideshow). The original 1967 version of the song should still be available
here.
posted by maudlin at 10:06 AM PST - 22 comments
Foreclosure Radar. This is the fastest growth market in real estate, and we can help you capitalize on it. We go far beyond simple foreclosure listings: we track every single foreclosure auction in the state, every day.posted by chunking express at 7:37 AM PST - 32 comments
Re-thinking the "cradle of civilization". New discoveries at dig sites in Middle Asia are
challenging the archaeological worlds idea that civilization began in Mesopotamia. Sites in modern-day Iran and Russia suggest that a vast network of societies together constituted the first cities, along with the potential discovery of a new writing system.
posted by stbalbach at 7:32 AM PST - 20 comments
August 13
OBITUARIES
Dunn, Nicholas Ryan. August 5, 2007.
"Yesterday my son took his own life. He did not intend to. He did something thousands of people have and are doing, using drugs. Drugs they know nothing about. Drugs recommended and provided by friends or strangers that are not chemists that know what's in them or doctors that knew how much his body could take. My son Nick has devastated us … We also all hurt for a
three year old little girl named Kylie Marie who will grow up without her father … Those drugs do not discriminate by race, income, the status of you or of your family. These are those who care about you and those who you care about. Consider them, please! The pleasure is not worth the risks! Goodbye Nick, we love you, and will miss you."
posted by pardonyou? at 2:09 PM PST - 119 comments
"While we were there, sitting by the fire one night, I saw an extraordinary-looking dog that appeared to have
two noses. I was sober at the time, and then I remembered the story that the legendary explorer
Colonel Percy Fawcett came back with in 1913 of seeing such strange dogs in the Amazon jungle", explains fellow British Colonel John Blashford-Snell. The double-schnoz phenomenon has been documented in other
species, and has even been
studied,
dramatized, and
synthesized in humans. But a clue has recently been discovered in Bolivia that hints at not just a random mutation, but what might have once been a multi-snouted dog breed.
posted by Toekneesan at 10:27 AM PST - 30 comments
High resolution images of Earth. The German satellite TerraSAR-X was shot into space on June 15, and already four days after sent some beautiful pictures back to Earth. Pictures are described in German, but you'll figure it out.
posted by Glow Bucket at 8:08 AM PST - 17 comments
A State Street Family Album - State Street in Madison, Wisconsin is a half mile link between the Capitol dome and the campus of the University of Wisconsin. Tree lined, traffic restricted, shops of all manner, State Street represents an almost picture postcard ideal. It is also home to the Family. In the 30's they might have
ridden the rails, now they are hanging out in the Peace Park. Glenn Austin has documented their community.
posted by caddis at 7:27 AM PST - 72 comments
Real Life "Colossal Cave Adventure”! Discussion of original source code, different versions of the game, hand draw maps, and lots of photos inside the cave the game is based on. Grab your shiny brass lamp and tasty food and meet me at the Bedquilt entrance.
posted by cosmicbandito at 7:14 AM PST - 17 comments
DayFilter: Everyone from
T-Bone Walker,
The Mamas &
the Papas,
The Carpenters,
Jimmy Buffett,
Fleetwood Mac,
The Neighborhoods,
The Boomtown Rats,
New Order,
Duran Duran,
The Bangles,
Snow,
Pulp,
Rialto,
Alan Jackson,
Tegan and
Sara, to
Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, has a song about Monday... but
only Ohio's best newscast -
19 Action News –
has Carl Monday,
bitch! [closed]posted by Poolio at 6:31 AM PST - 25 comments
August 12
Interviews with 100-year-olds:
(
Short): Quick NPR interview with a guy who works on Wall Street.
(
Medium): A series of small segments with the oldest graduate of Gilbert High School.
(
Long): Part of
WFMU's 365 day project. Restored tape from 1978, on which it appears a young student is interviewing an old lady from Kansas.
posted by Alex404 at 10:57 PM PST - 8 comments
3D design artist and
Filmmaker,
father-to-be and fan of long titles extraordinaire,
Transfatty, aka
Patrick O'Brien (dir.
The Man With The Smallest Penis In Existence And The Electron Microscope Technician Who Loved Him,
previously) will debut his new DVD,
Everything Will Be Okay, or How I Learned to Trancend Form, Live in the Now and Make Love in my Electric Wheelchair, tomorrow in NYC. The DVD is clips from his forthcoming film,
October 5, 1974, his ongoing personal documentary about his journey to the end with
ALS.
posted by Ambrosia Voyeur at 8:24 PM PST - 7 comments
Elizabeth Murray, a New York
painter who reshaped Modernist abstraction into a high-spirited, cartoon-based, language of form whose subjects included domestic life, relationships and the nature of painting itself, died yesterday at her home in upstate New York.
(Images)posted by R. Mutt at 8:19 PM PST - 7 comments
Happy
Vinyl Record Day, everyone. On this date in 1877, Edison invented the phonograph. To commemorate the date, a blogswarm of 22 of the best vinyl sharity blogs out there have come together to celebrate the legacy of the dominant recorded music format of the 20th century, led by jb of
The Hits Just Keep On Comin' and featuring
Flea Market Funk, Echoes in the Wind,
Funky 16 Corners,
Davewillieradio,
Good Rockin' Tonight,
Py Korry,
It's Great Shakes, (
bonus!),
Ickmusic,
Jefitoblog,
FuFu (
bonus!),
Lost in the 80's,
Three-Sixty-Five 45s,
Underground Vault of Records,
AM then FM,
The "B" Side,
In Dangerous Rythm (
bonus 1,
bonus 2),
You Must Be From Away, Got The Fever,
Retro Remixes,
Bloggerythms and finally
The Stepfather of Soul.
posted by jonson at 7:39 PM PST - 34 comments
Louis Wain became one of the most famous British illustrators of the late Victorian and Edwardian era after trying to cheer up his wife Emily by drawing portraits of their pet cat,
Peter. In addition to publishing a popular
children's book about kittens, he was a
founder of the U.K's
National Cat Club who was instrumental in promoting the
Cat Fancy movement, which encouraged Britons of all classes to view cats as lovable pets instead of household pests. Unfortunately, after Wain's wife Emily died of breast cancer, Wain gradually went mad due to
psychosis and
late onset schizophrenia, ending up in London's notorious
Bethlehem Hospital (the etymological origin for the word
bedlam). While at Bedlam, Wain continued to draw, but his cat portraits transformed into pure
geometric abstraction and
psychedelic fractals, but some see harbingers of madness in cryptically titled works, such as
Early Indian Irish and
The Fire of the Mind Agitates the Atmosphere. For more insight on Wain, check out this
1896 interview and this
short film dramatizing the progression of Wain's schizophrenia through his art.
posted by jonp72 at 12:37 PM PST - 25 comments
The "Great Climate Change Debate" finally on the cover of Newsweek - what's new, you ask? This is
the story of the denial that global warming exists and how exactly the science behind the undeniable facts of increasing hurricanes, tsunamis, droughts, heatwaves and monsoons was muddied for profit.
Bonus links from the same issue:
Timeline of global warming and its denial and a slideshow of images from around the world on the effects but its one of those fancy interactive thingamajigs that doesn't allow it to be linked by an URL so be sure to take a look at it. Extra bonus!
Quiz your knowledge on global warming
posted by infini at 9:36 AM PST - 125 comments
Frank Zappa' was so many different things
{ Mother of Invention, orchestra conductor, garage freak, SNL musical guest, anti-censorship advocate, home movie maker, Congressional witness, Monkee, documentary film subject, whipping boy, drug trafficker, late-night TV talk show interviewee, death wisher, composer, Dance Fever judge, master of his domain, dental floss tycoon, cosmic force, breast man, Crossfire combatant and The Walrus, among others } that the one day
he was recently given by Baltimore's Mayor hardly seems enoughs.
posted by Poolio at 4:52 AM PST - 79 comments
August 11
Hooked On Heat is the two year old foodblog of
Meena, daughter of a Malaysian mom & Indian father, with tons of recipes & food stories for those who love spice in their food; her recent series of posts,
Indian Cooking 101 is a must read for those who love to eat Indian food and want to try it out at home.
posted by jonson at 7:20 PM PST - 25 comments
Your teenage son loves terrible horror movies, like
C.H.U.D.
How do you mend his ways? Well, you start with
Paranoiac, and move on to
Ravenous 1,
2,
3,
4,
5,
6,
7,
8,
9,
10,
11,
12.
While he's still quaking, show him Takashi Miike's brutal
Ôdishon ( even YouTube won't air those scenes.) Lighten the coming dark with
Shaun of the Dead.posted by Mblue at 2:42 PM PST - 46 comments
Nazi Pop Twins is an
eerie documentary that debuted this year on BBC's
Channel Four about the neo-Nazi teen folk musicians,
Prussian Blue. The girls are managed by a neo-Nazi stage mom from hell, and the girls already seem to be more interested in shopping at the mall than singing white power lyrics. One of the creepiest scenes includes the twin girls on a phone call with their prison "pen pal,"
David Lane, the Neo-Nazi convicted of the murder of radio talk show host,
Alan Berg. Lane refers to the twin girls as his "fantasy sweethearts," raising issues about whether an obsession with genetic "purity" leads to
pedophilia on the Racist Right. Watch the documentary on YouTube (Parts
1,
2,
3,
4, and
5) (Warning: may be exposed to YouTube comments from racist asshats.)
posted by jonp72 at 10:43 AM PST - 165 comments
He wasn't the greatest technician on earth (he only studied a short time with a teacher, as states his
biography), he wasn't really famous outside Brazil, in spite of the
many recordings available under his name, of his various talents (
drawing, designing a
new string instrument), but his playing is really endearing, and whatever the material,
originals,
bach or
chico buarque, he made his point across easily.
posted by nicolin at 7:28 AM PST - 9 comments
Deleuze's ABCs A year before his sensational suicide by defenestration, the philosopher
Gilles Deleuze, known for his refusal to appear on television, offered to set the record straight with close student and friend, Claire Parnet, on the condition that it not be released until after his death. The interview, spanning eight hours, was conceived as an abécédaire, like a child's ABC book, with headings of "A comme animal," "B comme boisson," C comme culture". L'Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze:
[Part 1][Part 2][Part 3].
Overview.
posted by Frankieist at 3:37 AM PST - 12 comments
In 1937-38, computer pioneer George Philbrick worked for the Foxboro Co. as an analyst. He had the radical idea of building an electronic analog computer to simulate the behaviour of hydraulic industrial equipment, so Foxboro customers could experiment with control systems without needing a pipe wrench. One of the world's first analog computers was ignominiously ferried around the U.S. in the back seat of Philbrick's car. Ironically, Philbrick didn't give his "Automatic Process Analyzer" a properly techy, pretentious nickname. He dubbed his one-eyed monster
Polyphemus.
(PDF)
(prev)posted by metasonix at 12:19 AM PST - 9 comments
August 10
"More than just a printmaking technique, photogravure etching is also a way of exploring the world that brings to light an incomparable variety of tone and texture: shimmering luminous highlights, deep multi-hued blacks, shadows within shadows, and the most subtle gradations of tone." The photogravure etchings of
printmaker Peter Miller peacefully await your attention. Peter started out depicting scenes of 'quaint Japan' near his home in Kamakura Japan, but these days - exactly ten years after opening his website - he is working at a much wider scale, creating images from around the world. It's a bit pointless to try and pick more than a
couple of
examples to show you, so just start with his
Viewing page, and browse around at random.
It's stunning work, and when you read his
description of the process, hard to believe that anybody could still be doing this today.
(Note: it's a bilingual website, and if you don't have asian fonts installed, you'll see some gobbledygook here and there on the pages, but the English explanations, and the images, will be understandable.)posted by woodblock100 at 9:54 PM PST - 15 comments
A New Kind of Bank Run. ...a new financial architecture has emerged that relied more on securities and less on banks as intermediaries. With the worth of [these new] securities now being questioned — and no equivalent of deposit insurance — some who financed the securities want their money out, a fact that has created the 21st-century equivalent of a run on a bank.
. It's no wonder these securities are being questioned, when some are based on
Ninja mortgages and
foreclosures are up 58% from last year.posted by storybored at 3:02 PM PST - 51 comments
In August 1781, the case of
Brom and Bett vs. Ashley went to the jury. The year before, Mum Bett, a slave in the Ashley house since 1742, was struck by her mistress. Mum Bett left the house and refused to return. Bett had overheard conversations about the new Massachusetts constitution that included the clause, "All men are created equal" and argued that the clause applied to her. When the jury agreed, slavery was effectively abolished in the state of Massachusetts. Mum Bett took the name of Elizabeth Freeman and went to work in the employ of her lawyer. (More inside)
posted by forrest at 12:44 PM PST - 34 comments
Joan Root, who spent most of her life in Kenya, was a noted naturalist and filmmaker (along with
her (former) husband. She was
murdered by gunmen at point-blank range in January, 2006 in her home on
Lake Naivasha. Lake Naivasha is the only fresh water source in the
Great Rift Valley, and has become increasingly endangered by pollution and overuse for irrigation, and Root spent considerable time fighting to protect it. Today, a Kenyan magistrate
acquitted the four suspects in her murder, calling the testimony of 13 witnesses "defective".
posted by mkultra at 9:41 AM PST - 11 comments
Constitutional Showdowns. Eric Posner and
Adrian Vermeule analyze constitutional showdowns, ask what rate and level of showdowns would be socially optimal, and ask whether socially optimal showdowns will be supplied by government institutions acting to promote their policy preferences and institutional interests.
posted by dios at 9:40 AM PST - 9 comments
American Express's highly publicized
Members Project has come to an end. A novel idea: Cardmembers nominated and voted for charities--and the nominee with the most votes won $2 mil. The winner?
Children's Safe Drinking Water, a
nonprofit that works with nonprofits to battle the public health crisis of contaminated drinking water in third-world countries by distributing water purification kits. Why on earth would anyone call foul on this? Bear with me here. [more inside]
posted by cowboy_sally at 9:20 AM PST - 30 comments
August 9
Ewwwwww. Do-it-yourself home lipoma (fatty tumor) excision. But, to be honest, I can't tell if the surgery or the accompanying music is more sick-making.
posted by John of Michigan at 11:18 PM PST - 64 comments
In early 1968,
Jean-Luc Godard filmed The Rolling Stones
in the studio writing/recording "Sympathy for the Devil".
Mick Jagger recalled in a 1995 interview with Jann Wenner: "... [it was] very fortuitous, because Godard wanted to do a film of us in the studio. I mean, it would never happen now, to get someone as interesting as Godard. And stuffy. We just happened to be recording that song. We could have been recording "My Obsession." But it was "Sympathy for the Devil," and it became the track that we used."
Later that year, Godard released
a film (in Europe) titled "One Plus One" which featured the "Sympathy for the Devil" studio footage. To increase the commercial value of the film, the U.S.
release was re-titled after the Stones song and the end of the film's soundtrack was altered to include
a full take of the song in its final form, much to the dismay of Godard.
posted by Poolio at 11:18 PM PST - 35 comments
Official transgender blessings -- Kulanu -- the newly-revised manual for LGBT issues and ceremonies put out by the
Union for Reform Judaism (1.5 million US Jews are Reform) now includes 2 blessings (written by a Rabbi now male) for those transitioning and who have completed the change, alongside the already existing same sex marriage liturgy and other documents and procedures. A first? (blessings text inside)
posted by amberglow at 10:00 PM PST - 50 comments
I have to assume the only reason you're reading this right now and not busy home curing & eating bacon is because nobody has shown you how.
Let's fix that.
posted by jonson at 5:44 PM PST - 106 comments
Excellent BBC
Brain Story series available online. One of the best TV series on psychology and neuroscience ever produced, the BBC's Brain Story, is available on public bittorrent servers for download. It is a six part series covering virtually every area of contemporary neuropsychology, including the major researchers, discoveries, techniques and even many of the patients who have been the subjects of classic case studies that have helped us understand the curious effects of brain injury.
posted by nickyskye at 11:01 AM PST - 17 comments
Johnson & Johnson is suing the American Red Cross for trademark infringement. It contends that the Red Cross is supposed to use the symbol only in connection with non-profit relief services. "For a multibillion-dollar drug company to claim that the Red Cross violated a criminal statute … simply so that J&J can make more money, is obscene," said Mark Everson, the Red Cross president. Everson is paid
$500,000 per year, more than triple his previous salary as
IRS Commissioner. The suit asks the Red Cross to turn over the products in question to New Brunswick, N.J.-based Johnson & Johnson for destruction and also seeks unspecified punitive damages.
posted by Kirth Gerson at 10:50 AM PST - 94 comments
Lit2Go - tons of stories, tales and poems suitable for younger readers: HTML, PDF, and MP3s. From Baa, Baa, Black Sheep to Jane Eyre, Frankenstein, and Flatland.
posted by Wolfdog at 9:28 AM PST - 6 comments
Don't know which candidate to support in the 2008 election? Let a
web script match a candidate to your views!
posted by nthdegx at 6:21 AM PST - 181 comments
August 8
Who is
Billy Jack?
Tom Laughlin?
The Born Losers, was the first in the series of counter culture action flicks. Here's a
clip from the film named Billy Jack, that captures the character's response to racism. Eventually this series of films turn to poop, that is politics, with the film Billy
Jack goes to Washington.
As hokey as this character may seem, there is really something good about Billy Jack.
posted by snsranch at 3:45 PM PST - 39 comments
CreateSpace is the new name of Amazon's on-demand self-publishing service for the super long tail of books, audio CD's and film DVD/Blue-ray. Products automatically get an ISBN number and are listed on Amazon.com, including "Search Inside" for books. The National Archives and CreateSpace will be
publishing movies from its collection of over 200,000 public domain films, raising some provocative copyright issues.
posted by stbalbach at 1:57 PM PST - 34 comments
Warning: Explicit sexual content. "These firefighters dedicated their lives to save the lives of others. They did not sign on to become unwilling props to a controversial political and social agenda," says Richard Thompson, President and Chief Counsel of the Thomas More Law Center, representing a group of brave men in uniform who were subjected to "vile sexual taunts" at a San Diego
gay pride parade. Via
Gawker.
posted by digaman at 1:41 PM PST - 339 comments
Brookings Institution analysts Michael O'Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack last week called for another "
six months or so" in Iraq.
The month before, "
This is a decisive phase," a member of Petraeus' staff told [Joe Klein] and began to laugh. "...It's always a decisive phase. But this time, I guess you'd have to say, it actually is."
"Pinky swear?" Klein held out a soft, pink, gullible digit expectantly. "Pinky swear!" the aide responded, shrugging.
You people will believe anything. posted by stupidsexyFlanders at 1:41 PM PST - 41 comments
Ingmar Bergman once said that
Roy Andersson "makes the best
commercials in the world." The 64 year old Swedish director has also made a couple of striking feature films, including the 2000 Cannes Jury Prize winner
Songs from the Second Floor (
excerpt /
reviews) and this year's still unreleased
You, the Living (
excerpt /
review).
posted by billysumday at 8:55 AM PST - 5 comments
Underfire; images from the Vietnam war. Some photographers never made it out:
Dana Stone,
Henri Huet,
Sean Flynn.
Tim Page is still alive and his photos tell the story of
'Fire in the Jungle".
Several of these almost forgotten legends hung out at
Franki's House at one time or another.
Page, Stone and Flyn were all friends of Michael Herr who wrote about them and the war in
Dispatches which was widely acclaimed and acknowledged by Hunter S. Thompson as
puts the rest of us in the shade.
posted by adamvasco at 2:37 AM PST - 14 comments
August 7
Barry Bonds has broken the all-time record with the benefit of a
controversial technological revolution in the game, derided by traditionalists:
The Maple Baseball Bat.
Using technology and woodworking techniques pioneered by
Sam Bat, Bonds helped develop and popularize the bats that are just as responsible for the advent of the
Juiced Ball Era as, well, the other thing.
posted by Slap*Happy at 10:02 PM PST - 192 comments
The NickToons Animation Festival (Flash, noise) is back for its fourth year. A new short is shown each night at 10PM
(schedule PDF). Most of this year's contestants:
Icarus,
Sonadora,
Bare (no video),
Striped,
Hominid,
Kiwi! (previously),
Carried Away,
Jose y Maria,
Angst,
A Peach for the Teach (storyreel only),
Freewheel,
Mortimer Pigmun and His Time Travelling Chums,
Barfy the Pig in a Day in the Park,
Process Enacted,
Puppet,
After Oz,
The Little Dictator, and
Insomnia.
posted by rollbiz at 5:49 PM PST - 3 comments
Theory of history by
Dr. Gregory Clark in his new book
A Farewell to Alms 1. The English Industrial Revolution was caused by changes in the make-up and behavior of the population, which was caused by
natural selection, influenced by cycles of Malthusian booms and busts between 1200 and 1800. The implications for modernizing other nations through institutions such as the World Bank are like " pre-scientific physicians who prescribed bloodletting for ailments they did not understand".
posted by stbalbach at 6:40 AM PST - 67 comments
Even if you're one of those "I don't like jazz" folks, the iconoclastic multi-instrumentalist
Rahsaan Roland Kirk (1936-1977) is probably someone you can dig. For one thing, he wasn't afraid of using a fat
backbeat, more akin to soul/R&B than most of the jazz of his time. And how can you say no to a guy who passed out little flutes to his audience members, inviting them to join in, saying
"What about a blues in W, in the key of W". Or who played 3 or 4 horns at once, followed by a nose-flute solo? God bless you,
Rahsaan Roland Kirk. [more inside]
posted by flapjax at midnite at 4:30 AM PST - 50 comments
August 6
The Rutles: All You Need Is Cash may be the most elaborate parody of the Beatles ever constructed, including satirical tributes to the appearances on
the Ed Sullivan Show,
Yellow Submarine, and the
rooftop concert at Apple Records. Check out some other fine parodies who picked up where the Rutles left off:
The Mosquitoes on Gilligan's Island,
Chris and the Alphabeats on Sesame Street,
Letter B and
Hey Food by the Beetles, the
Be Sharps on the Simpsons,
A Hard Day's Night of the Living Dead by
the Zombeatles, Peter Cook & Dudley Moore's
L.S. Bumble Bee, the Powerpuff Girls Meet the Beat Alls (parts
1 and
2 with commentary by Mojo Jojo), Beatles spoofs in a
Polish sitcom and a
Bollywood musical, Beatallica sings
A Garage Dayz Nite, the Chasers'
I Am Thesaurus, and the Beatles
go bar mitzvah.
posted by jonp72 at 3:45 PM PST - 45 comments
Satanist Rave Shut Down outside Tehran. Iran's drive to enforce Islamic morals netted revellers from Britain and Sweden after police swooped on a "satanic" concert organised over the internet.
Police arrested 230 people and seized drugs, alcohol and 800 illicit CDs after raiding the event in Karaj, 12 miles west of Tehran. Those arrested included young women in skimpy and "inappropriate" clothing, officers said.
posted by domdom at 8:55 AM PST - 58 comments
onoes! teenz on teh pr0n webs! It's been a year since I posted about
Stickam, and in that time, one would be naïve to think that a community of unmoderated videos broadcast live from the private and semi-anonymous bedrooms of the world would not result in
epic lulz (nsfw). To no one's surprise, disgruntled Stickam ex-VP Alex Becker says
Stickam shares office space, staff, and equipment with live pornographic video providers -- this via
NYT tech writer Brad Stone. Cue the
"think of the CHILDRUNZ!" moral
panic. But popular websites being related to or backed up by prurient interest are nothing new: Wikipeda predecessor
Bomis was once accused of having
"softore porn" in its "Babes" section, and of course everyone knows
porn drives technology. What do you think the internet is
for? But if you use Stickam and this bothers you, the burgeoning field of live embeddable Flash-based webcam video streaming is rife with alternatives:
uStream.tv,
Justin.tv,
BlogTV,
Mogulus, and
Operator11, just to name some -- but there'll be naked girls on those too. I guarantee it.
posted by brownpau at 7:18 AM PST - 41 comments
UCLA releases the results of an
independent investigation into an incident where a UCLAPD officer repeatedly tasered a passively resisting student (
previously on MetaFilter). The investigation found that the officer violated UCLA's use of force policies. Furthermore, it found that these policies are "unduly permissive" and that "the UCLAPD policy stands alone in its legitimization of the Taser as a pain compliance device against passive resisters." An internal investigation by UCLAPD previously determined that there was no violation.
posted by grouse at 3:53 AM PST - 31 comments
August 5
Thomas Graz has a collection of glasses with pictures on them. Mainly from the countries of the former Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and the German Empire, but including some other countries too. A novel way to navigate history, architecture, people and landscape. Oh! and he
needs help with some of them too.
posted by tellurian at 8:06 PM PST - 6 comments
NASA's
Phoenix probe launched
Saturday from Cape Canaveral, destination Mars. Its mission is to investigate polar ice. This probe is unique for a couple of reasons: first, it will face a traditional parachute-and-retro-rockets landing, unlike
previous endeavors. Second, it will be landing far north of any previous mission. Previous Mars missions have had mixed success, with only about
half successfully making it to their destination. It is scheduled to land in May, 2008.
posted by backseatpilot at 7:45 PM PST - 16 comments
Recollecting a culture : photography and the evolution of a socialist aesthetic in East Germany. "in contrast to Western histories built upon a foundation of works by modernist and early-modernist masters, the history of East German photography was built from a body of images by amateurs and artists, largely unknown outside Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, whose photographs depicted the world from the class perspective of the worker."
From a 1999 exhibition held at Boston University. 100 images, 10 essays. Sadly, a bad interface and small reproductions.
Out of control : photography from East Germany. A 1993 project documenting
"the uses of photography in Eastern Germany after the collapse of the German Democratic Republic (GDR)" also, with small pictures.
posted by arse_hat at 7:41 PM PST - 17 comments
[newsfilter]
Fake Steve Jobs, infamous anonymous blogger writing in the unrestrained voice of Apple CEO Steve Jobs, has had his real identity
uncovered by the New York Times. Fake Steve is best known for his creative mockery of other high tech figureheads, including
Steve Wozniak,
Bill Gates, and
Richard Branson. The race to
discover his identity had run for nearly as long as he had been writing, and suspects included
Leahnder Kahney and
Andy Ihnatko, both well-known Mac columnists.
Daniel Lyons, senior editor with Forbes Magazine has been writing in the satirical voice for just over a year, and
has announced that Fake Steve will keep writing, sponsored by his current editors at Forbes.
posted by heeeraldo at 4:21 PM PST - 33 comments
Nostalgia and skepticism collide in
this short video of Uri Geller's legendary failure on The Tonight Show starring Johnny Carson, introduced by frequent MeFi subject James Randi. More context and nostalgia in
this longer version, which features Geller with a young Barbara Walters, and on The Mike Douglas Show, along with Randi's expose of "healing evangelist" Peter Popoff.
If you want to waste even more time, just start clicking on
these YouTube search results.posted by The Deej at 1:03 PM PST - 93 comments
California Restricts Voting Machines: after a
source code review of
voting machines
turned up "significant, deeply-rooted security weaknesses"
in voting machines by Diebold, Hart, and Sequoia, the California Secretary of
State decertified all three vendors' systems. These weaknesses have been
well
covered here at MeFi, but some are
bad enough to shock even the
well-jaded, including the revelation that Diebold "uses at least two
hard-coded passwords -- one is 'diebold' and another is the eight-byte
sequence
1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8." Time to think about
open voting?
posted by jacobian at 11:08 AM PST - 48 comments
When
Kevin Gilbert died
unexpectedly at the age of 29, he was eulogized in the mainstream media as Cheryl Crow's piano player, but there was more to it than that. Not only was Gilbert one of the songwriting members of the
Tuesday Night Music Club, he actually introduced Crow to the group, after hiring her to play on the tour in support of
Toy Matinee's album, which had also been produced by the TNMC mastermind,
Bill Bottrell. He was generally considered one of the most gifted musicians of his generation by those who
knew him, and while his legacy isn't volumnious, it contains a few unkown gems, like his stark and lovely solo album
Thud! and two posthumous works;
The Shaming of the True and the almost utterly unknown masterpiece, the dark, industrial
Kaviar.
posted by Devils Rancher at 11:01 AM PST - 20 comments
In Silicon Valley, Millionaires Who Don't Feel Rich [NYTimes Link]
Mr. Kremen estimated his net worth at $10 million. That puts him firmly in the top half of 1 percent among Americans, according to wealth data from the Federal Reserve, but barely in the top echelons in affluent towns like Palo Alto, Menlo Park and Atherton. So he logs 60- to 80-hour workweeks because, he said, he does not think he has nearly enough money to ease up.posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 9:22 AM PST - 142 comments
August 4
I watch virtually
no television but
this NPR review for the debut episode of
Masters of Science Fiction (ABC) had me intrigued. (
A similar review in the NY Times). ABC is being accused of burying this show with the timing of its introduction (and time slot). As for me, I'm still thinking about the debut episode, three hours later.
posted by spock at 10:22 PM PST - 40 comments
Are you Lonely? Curious? Depraved? Do you have questions that are just too risqué for AskMe?
Live Hot Puppet Chat has got your answer.
Yeah baby! Now you can experience sizzling raw, uh, pleasures.
[NSFW]posted by carsonb at 7:09 PM PST - 13 comments
Spanish Civil War posters, utilizing many early modernist styles --like Art Deco, surrealism, realism, and photomontage-- to communicate with the people of Spain, many of whom were illiterate.
posted by Gamblor at 7:02 PM PST - 20 comments
In the
Sharkrunners game , players control their ships, but
the sharks are controlled by real-world white sharks with GPS units attached to their fins (...) every shark that players encounter corresponds to a real shark in the real world.
via information aestheticsposted by signal at 6:59 PM PST - 9 comments
100 Sites TED thinks you need to know about TED (Technology Entertainment Design) is an annual conference held in Monterey, California and recently, semi-annually in other cities around the world. TED describes itself as a "group of remarkable people that gather to exchange ideas of incalculable value". These are the sites that it thinks you should know about.
posted by psmealey at 6:54 AM PST - 25 comments
It has always been difficult to look up any information on the pioneers of computing. Even today, in the Internet age, one has trouble finding much about early computers--even on the ultimate computer network.
Consider the late George A. Philbrick. He was one of the titanic figures in electronic computing in the 1950s--mainly because of the company he founded, which was a major manufacturer (and pioneer) of the
operational amplifier, at a time when an "op-amp" was made of vacuum tubes. Op-amps were used to build
analog computers, which were widely used to simulate physical processes in the days when digital computers were either non-existent, or too slow and costly, for many kinds of simulation and process-control work. Op-amps, in chip form, are still widely used in electronics. Yet, despite his unquestioned status as a major pioneer of electronics, there was almost nothing on the Internet about Philbrick or his company.
Until 2005--when Joe Sousa decided to put up a website dedicated to Philbrick's legacy. Behold
The Philbrick Archive.posted by metasonix at 1:57 AM PST - 10 comments
August 3
The
first armed robots have hit the streets of Iraq and are now hunting evil-doers with high-powered M249 machine guns. The robots are called SWORDS, which stands for "Special Weapons Observation Reconnaissance Detection System". Army focus groups apparently preferred this acronym over the more obvious PUBE (Predatory Unmanned Battle Engine). The robots are currently being piloted through the streets of Bagdad using remote control. According to
an interview on CNET with Chief Army Scientist Thomas Killion however, the army soon plans to make the killing machines fully automatic.
posted by infini at 10:55 PM PST - 88 comments
The New Yorker dives deep into the world of Spiced Ham: "'You buy your spamming program and your spamming network. You obtain a list of mailing addresses. Anyone can do this in an hour. Then you put them all together and set up a Web site or go to a service provider. You can buy a server for a few hundred dollars and spam from that. Usually, the provider will shut you down quickly and you will be blacklisted. But then you move on to the next.' Among the systems that have been infected by networks of remote computers in the past two years were computers at the weapons division of the United States Naval Air Warfare Center and many machines operated by the Department of Defense."
posted by JPowers at 7:18 PM PST - 14 comments
Deliberately turning her camera from the wreckage, That Red Girl gives us a look at
what's going on in her now quarantined life mere blocks from the
recent Minneapolitan
bridge collapse.
"Several neighbors and I stood in our driveway late into the night debriefing the day. We now live in lockdown. Police must escort us around. We must meet any guests at the corner, they cannot approach the building alone. Residents are told to ask people they do not recognize to show their keys and prove themselves. We joke about seeing everyone’s “FOBs” to those we know well. The dogs are all leashed, tying themselves together as they try to play like normal. It’s frustrating to everyone that we can’t run around as normal. The word “quarantine” is tossed around. People are nervous. One of the residents hasn’t been seen since Wednesday morning. She may be on vacation… no one knows. We see one of the neighbors being interviewed on the corner and a few young girls trying to flirt with the police to gain entrance to our complex. The dogs continued to wrestle and we continued to talk."
posted by taursir at 5:03 PM PST - 39 comments
Pyo pyo fruits is an amusing little game for flash friday. For those of you who grew up without siblings, it will simulate the experience.
posted by bashos_frog at 12:42 PM PST - 17 comments
This video is a welcome conclusion to the
previous post regarding the arrest of Germ's drummer Don Bolles for possession of "GHB" in the form of Dr. Bronner's soap. In the video David Bronner, President of Dr. Bronner's demonstrates how
drug field test kits return false positive results for any true natural soap.
posted by well_balanced at 11:52 AM PST - 33 comments
Animated shorts and trailers potpourri: Alexei Petrov's shiny 3D
Cags, Aleksandr Petrov's jaw-dropping paint-on-glass
Моя Любовь (
more), Maximov's
Wind Along The Coast, Bakhurin's
The White, The Black, Géza Toth's
Maestro, Blur's
A Gentleman's Duel, Alireza Darvish's
What If Spring Does Not Come?, Giersz's classic
Koń, Dumala's
Sciany, a little
Sports et Divertissements (to music of Erik Satie), and a nod to Daniil Kharms (
previously) in
Herzen and Tolstoy.
posted by Wolfdog at 11:30 AM PST - 13 comments
Good Copy Bad Copy is "a documentary about the current state of copyright and culture," featuring Danger Mouse, Lawrence Lessig, Dan Glickman of the MPAA and others. The film's creators are releasing it free of charge, via Bittorrent.
posted by jbickers at 10:09 AM PST - 30 comments
Well,
it's official. After numerous rumors, leaks, and even someone with a sharp eye for
trademark searches, it was revealed this morning with the first entrants to
BlizzCon in Anaheim, California that the next World of Warcraft expansion will be called Wrath of the Lich King, complete with new areas to explore, new hairstyles and character customizations, level 80, and the first new class to be introduced to the game since it opened.
posted by thanotopsis at 9:48 AM PST - 76 comments
Top 10 Clipboard Tricks: One of the greatest features the point and click interface brought to personal computers is the clipboard - that invisible, temporary shelf you use more times per day than Google. If you think the clipboard is only about Ctrl+C, you're missing out. Several utilities can turbocharge your clipboard and track, transfer and reformat the clipboard to your heart's content...
posted by domdom at 9:43 AM PST - 18 comments
The Japanese Trailer to Kokoro Scan. Japanese game trailers always seem pretty interesting and fun. And, well, most often more-or-less nonsensical. This is for the new game
Kokoro Scan, which, um, looks like it might be a dating sim of some sort? Maybe? The animation and segues are pretty interesting, and, though it's 6 minutes -- awfully long for a trailer, particularly one sans any gameplay (I think) -- it's interesting/off-the-wall enough to be engaging. What do cartoon nipples, pixellated white things and bananas have in common?
(via)posted by Rev. Syung Myung Me at 5:47 AM PST - 13 comments
August 2
Notessimo is a quick and easy flash music creator. Lots of different instruments to choose from. You can even share your
ear-piercing horrors soulful tunes!
posted by Kattullus at 5:34 PM PST - 12 comments
Prohibited Beatz (YouTube) is a documentary about acclaimed drummer
Jojo Mayer and his "live electronic" group,
NERVE. It features commentary on the concept of reverse engineering in music, the "
Cabaret Laws" of New York City, and lots of excellent sounds as well. [
A little more inside]
posted by rollbiz at 4:58 PM PST - 15 comments
Michael Caine is to release chill-out album. Apparantly, it's a compilation of chilled out music that he has been collating for over 40 years. This seems to convenient to be real. But it is discussed on his (rather crappy) website and appears to be real. What next? Danny de Vito's Death Metal Mix?
posted by domdom at 9:07 AM PST - 100 comments
The DeZurik Sisters committed only six songs to record during their recording career, but were the first women stars of the
Grand Ole Opry and the
National Barn Dance. Now WFMU has
32 tracks of theirs from their early appearance as The Cackle Sisters on the Purina Checkerboard Squares Radio Show. Download away and hear the yodeling that swept the nation in the early 40s.
posted by 1f2frfbf at 7:20 AM PST - 7 comments
Meet the vegansexuals. Another woman, also a vegan, declared: "I believe we are what we consume, so I really struggle with bodily fluids, especially sexually."
So far, they have
few
supporters. Even
PETA disagrees: "Sex is a very effective form of outreach and activism," said Dan Shannon, a
PETA spokesman, and 10-year veteran vegan, who thought meat eaters could be converted by their partners.
posted by iviken at 5:05 AM PST - 311 comments
In Britain, just as the football season ended 5 months ago, a football fan and journalist launched an endeavour to buy a club.
MyFootballClub asks for £35 from their members and in return, trustees are given the right to vote on transfer deals, squad choices and managerial appointments. But first they are to decide which football team to buy. From across the world people are invited to play
the tycoons at their own game. With the target 50,000 members signed up already, and with the new season set to start in a few weeks
it looks like this radical trust has a fighting chance.
posted by takeyourmedicine at 4:55 AM PST - 22 comments
Genetically Modified Bacteria to make
"Renewable Petroleum" (A biotech startup describes how it will coax petroleum-like fuels from engineered microbes within three to five years).posted by ItsaMario at 3:36 AM PST - 66 comments
The book is an account of the battle of Adrianopolis (Turkey) in 1912 in which the author volunteered as a Futurist-soldier.
Futurism (1909-1944) was perhaps the first movement in the history of art to be engineered and managed like a business.
posted by Meatbomb at 3:16 AM PST - 14 comments
It seems that
this gentleman bought a set of musical robots from the defunct
Showbiz Pizza restaurant chain. This gent has been reprogramming the robots to sing recent hit songs, rather than the '60s Motown hits they sang originally. He then takes video of these performances, and posts it on YouTube. I guarantee this version of Evanescence's "Lithium" will haunt your dreams (or, perhaps, make you hurl).
posted by metasonix at 2:14 AM PST - 59 comments
The Placebo Effect In Action.
"When patients believe a drug will help them, they sometimes heal themselves" (a report on a new study from Columbia University and the University of Michigan). And, an
additional take on the Placebo Effect from the Skeptic's Dictionary.
posted by amyms at 1:46 AM PST - 19 comments
August 1
VisibleVote08.com On Thursday, August 9th, at 9PM EST, the
LOGO television network along with the
Human Rights Campaign are going to host a televised forum with some of the leading Democratic presidential candidates for the discussion of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Trangendered issues. According to the network, if you are unable to see the program on cable, it will be available to you live via the special website. And as of August 2nd, surfers are invited to submit questions to be asked of the candidates live.
posted by FunkyHelix at 8:13 PM PST - 27 comments
Estimated cocaine consumption based on waste-water analysis (expressed as cocaine lines* per day per 1000 Inhabitants, age 15-64)
*1 line was here assumed to be equivalent to 100 milligram of cocaine. --page 272
This, and much more, in the
UN 2007 World Drug Report (pdf).
HTML homepage.
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane at 3:58 PM PST - 49 comments
On
At The Movies this past weekend Richard Roeper announced: 1) The past
20 years of At The Movies (formerly Siskel & Ebert & the Movies) is going to be archived for free download online. That's several thousand reviews -- from
Adventures in Babysitting to
Zodiac. Unfortunately, the first ten years of of the show was poorly preserved. Ebert writes, "Starting Thursday, Aug. 2, visitors will be able to search for and watch all of those past debates, including the film clips that went along with them, plus the “ten best” and other special shows we did. The new archive will be at
www.atthemoviestv.com, and will be the web’s largest collection of streaming reviews." 2) Roger Ebert will be a guest for an online chat Thursday at 8:00 Eastern (7:00 Central). You can submit questions in advance
here. The chat will be at
this link. (Until the actual archive shows up online,
you can enjoy these links.)
posted by McLir at 11:59 AM PST - 75 comments
If you like looking at maps of imaginary places, you should take a peek at the
Fantasy Atlas, a German-language collection of maps of literary fantasy and sci-fi worlds. For a more obsessive (but just as interesting) take on maps of imaginary places, you can check out
the work of Adrian Leskiw, who's been creating road maps of non-existent places since the age of 3.
(Previously on Metafilter.)posted by dersins at 9:31 AM PST - 31 comments
Bitters. This sharp-flavored, slightly medicinal liqueur, originally used as an
aperitif, remains one of the defining ingredients in many classic cocktails, including the
Manhattan, the
Pink Gin, the
Champagne Cocktail, and the
Sazerac. Some popular herbal liqueurs, such as
Campari and
Jägermeister, are essentially just big bottles of bitters. But bitters had fallen on hard times, with most bars stocking only one brand,
Angostura, or, if they were particularly sophisticated (or Southern), a second option,
Peychaud's.
Orange bitters, once an essential ingredient in the
Martini, were forgotten and impossible to purchase. Times have changed, with companies such as
Fee Brothers,
Regan's, the
Bitter Truth, and even
Angostura, releasing their own versions of the orange stuff. In fact, bitters in enjoying something of a renaissance, with bars experimenting with
making their own. Hobbyists, in the meanwhile, are
reviving lost recipes.
posted by Astro Zombie at 8:45 AM PST - 74 comments
How to discuss books that one hasn’t read...
"in order to . . . talk without shame about books we haven’t read, we should rid ourselves of the oppressive image of a flawless cultural grounding, transmitted and imposed [on us] by the family and by educational institutions, an image which we try all our lives in vain to match up to. For truth in the eyes of others matters less than being true to ourselves, and this truth is only accessible to those who liberate themselves from the constraining need to appear cultured, which both tyrannizes us and prevents us from being ourselves."posted by miss lynnster at 8:43 AM PST - 88 comments
Time once again to pay a little visit to Japan's ever-engaging electro-mechanical music overachievers,
Maywa Denki. Here's some of their
latest and
greatest efforts.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 5:31 AM PST - 26 comments
