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September 2010 Archives
September 30
For the past month or so I've been daily watching
YouTube episodes about Mike "LionKing"'s 2008 hike across the USA on the
American Discovery Trail. There are 66 episodes (4-8 min ea) which is a lot and probably difficult to absorb in a sitting or day, but if you spread it out, you'll get the impression a long haul experience from Delaware to California, w/out the sore feet. He is the first to hike the entire trail non-stop, including both parts of the mid-country loop.
posted by stbalbach at 9:54 PM PST - 9 comments
Have you been thinking about what to do with all the leaves that have fallen in your yard?
Try leaf art.
posted by Xurando at 4:55 PM PST - 19 comments
Oak Reed was a write-in candidate for homecoming king who won with a majority of the votes. The
school administration took away his crown, saying that since Oak is biologically female, he isn't eligible to win the title. Well, his classmates didn't
like that.posted by domo at 11:09 AM PST - 86 comments
The Suck Fairy. "The Suck Fairy is an artefact of re-reading. If you read a book for the first time and it sucks, it’s nothing to do with her. It just sucks. Some books do. The Suck Fairy comes in when you come back to a book that you liked when you read it before, and on re-reading—well, it sucks. You can say that you have changed, you can hit your forehead dramatically and ask yourself how you could possibly have missed the suckiness the first time—or you can say that the Suck Fairy has been through while the book was sitting on the shelf and inserted the suck."
[Via]posted by homunculus at 9:12 AM PST - 168 comments
Poet
and editor
Michael Gizzi,
known equally well for his own verbally inventive work and for publishing the work of other innovative poets (he used to edit Hard Press and
lingo magazine), has
died. He got his start studying at Brown with National Book Award winning poet and editor
Keith Waldrop, whose Burning Deck Press published Gizzi's most recent collection,
New Depths of Deadpan. The first ("Michael") link has many further links to Google Books versions of Gizzi's collections (as usual semi-blocked, but you can flip through them to get a sense of the career).
posted by aught at 9:05 AM PST - 4 comments
As mentioned
previously, Toronto's mayoral candidates are almost farcical, with the most boring candidate caught in a
sex scandal, another candidate who has the world's worst case of
foot in mouth disease, and another who thought that presenting himself as a
Mafia Don was a good idea. Thankfully, there's still
Steve Murray. Because Toronto deserves
something. If only he hadn't missed the registration deadline.
[more inside]posted by krunk at 8:42 AM PST - 16 comments
Mike Doyle (
blog one,
blog two) is an artist who was previously known (by boardgamers) for
boardgame artwork. He burned out on boardgame art and has taken up a new medium...
with stunning results. This is his very first model and it's an astounding work of craftsmanship, detail, mood, and tone. This is the kind of work that many builders would kill to do after several years of building.
[more inside]posted by Legomancer at 6:13 AM PST - 13 comments
Inside C Street–Six Questions for Jeff Sharlet It’s about the Idea… the monolithic vision of fundamentalism always threatening to subsume the many lowercased ideas that constitute democracy. In Uganda, we see the Idea verging on murder, in the military, we see it gathering force, at C Street we encounter its enduring corruption.
(
Jeff Sharlet previously).
posted by adamvasco at 3:02 AM PST - 13 comments
Res Obscura is a blog by Ben Breen, a graduate student of early modern history, which styles itself "a compendium of obscure things." Indeed, even the asides are full of wonder, such as the one about Boy, the famous Royalist war poodle of the English Civil War, which is but a short addendum to
a post about witches' familiars. Here are some of my favorite posts,
Pirate Surgeon in Panama (and a related
post about 18th Century Jamaica),
vanished civilizations,
asemic pseudo-Arabic and -Hebrew writing in Renaissance art, and a series of posts about the way the Chinese and Japanese understood the world outside Asia in the early modern period (
Europeans as 'Other',
Europeans as 'Other,' Redux and
Early Chinese World Maps).
posted by Kattullus at 12:43 AM PST - 16 comments
September 29
Seaquence "...is an experimental musical petri-dish. Adopting a biological metaphor, Seaquence allows you to create and combine musical lifeforms into unique, dynamic compositions."
posted by gwint at 10:32 PM PST - 2 comments
"The internets a creepy thing, especially if you have
kids. It says something very creepy about the fact that I use the
same machine to masturbate with as I use to teach my kid the
alphabet." Comedian Greg Giraldo
died of a drug overdose.
posted by fungible at 7:23 PM PST - 63 comments
Commonwealth, schmommonwealth. The Alltech FEI World Equestrian Games are on. Horse lovers the world over are enthralled by the high drama and hijinks in Lexington, Kentucky this week. Already there's been a controversial withdrawal following a
travel-related mishap (on the very same flight
hilariously previewed here.) In all the excitement, Eitan Beth-Halachmy, a "cowboy dressage" rider in the opening ceremony, seems to have
burst a spleen. As expected, the Dutch took the gold medal in Dressage despite one of their team being disqualified with
a horse bleeding from the mouth. Some point to training methods like
rollkur, or hyperflexion, saying they are cruel and abusive. The FEI has banned rollkur; former advocates say that what they do is not rollkur, but "LDR" (long, deep and round.)
Look at the lawsuits fly! In happier news, the gloriously named
Nobby took the gold medal in the Endurance event. "He could go another 100 miles today if you wanted him to," rider Maria Mercedes Alvarez Ponton said of the 15-year-old bay Arab gelding. Still to come, the equestrian triathlon:
Eventing! [more inside]posted by rdc at 12:24 PM PST - 16 comments
Jenny Hagel has a three part YouTube series about "a dumpy women's studies professor [who] transforms herself into a ghetto fabulous rap star to convince people to care about feminism. When she's finished rapping...they still don't care." Parts
1,
2 and
3.
posted by Kattullus at 12:33 AM PST - 33 comments
September 28
Pizza!
Slice Harvester is one man's quest to taste and review every pizza slice offered by NYC's pizzerias. His mission statement reads,
"...I'm going by neighborhood, starting in Manhattan, getting a plain slice at every place. I am f***ing sick of the current trend in Pizza Journalism that's all about f***ing artichoke guacamole tahini pizza on rice dough. That s*** isn't pizza. Sorry."posted by Arthur Phillips Jones Jr at 11:26 PM PST - 69 comments
The history of
sovereignty can be understood through two broad movements, manifested in both practical institutions and political thought. The first is the development of a system of sovereign states, culminating at the
Peace of Westphalia(check out the cool maps) in 1648. The second movement is the circumscription of the sovereign state, which began in practice after World War II and has since continued through European integration and the growth and strengthening of laws and practices to protect human rights.
via [more inside]posted by AElfwine Evenstar at 8:19 PM PST - 28 comments
Star Wars - '77 - '80 Collector's Blog. "I have a passion for collecting vintage Star Wars merchandise from the late 70's. Action figures, comics, trading cards etc - anything related to the first Star Wars movie. But why only until 1980? It's not that I don't love The Empire Strikes Back and beyond (I really do), but there is something about that first wave of Star Wars mania that really grips me, back when it was all fresh and exciting..."
posted by Fizz at 6:36 PM PST - 44 comments
Coming soon to a library near you,
outsourcing.
LSSI is now the 5th largest library services provider in the US. The ALA is surprisingly
neutral on this issue. "In general, there is no evidence that outsourcing per se has had a negative impact on library services and management. On the contrary, in the main outsourcing has been an effective managerial tool, and when used carefully and judiciously it has resulted in enhanced library services and improved library management. Instances where problems have arisen subsequent to decisions to outsource aspects of library operations and functions appear to be attributable to inadequate planning, poor contracting processes, or ineffective management of contracts."
posted by Xurando at 5:31 PM PST - 45 comments
erkie A bookmarklet that lets you destroy ads and other parts of the page asteroids-style by moving around with the arrow keys and shooting with the spacebar.
posted by Deathalicious at 4:12 PM PST - 20 comments
POM Wonderful may not be so wonderful, but that might not be so surprising, given the history of
Stewart and
Lynda Resnick. The couple are involved with much more than pomegranate juice: they own
Fiji Water, pesticide manufacturer
Suterra, Paramount Agribusiness (source of
citris,
well-known pistachios and
other nuts), and
former owners of the Franklin Mint. This round with the Resnicks started in
February 2010, with a warning from the FDA, which lead to
a confusing bit of restraining order requested, then soon after requested to be withdrawn (with
fears of pushing the First Amendment too far). That phase is past, but POM Wonderful is now stating they believe "
very strongly in its first amendment rights to communicate the promising results,"
results which look similar to placebos taken by control subjects.
The FTC is not impressed.
posted by filthy light thief at 1:32 PM PST - 29 comments
In a survey of
Americans' religious knowledge conducted by the Pew Research Center, atheists and agnostics, Jews and Mormons scored higher than evangelical Protestants, mainline Protestants and Catholics on questions about the core teachings, history and leading figures of major world religions, leading the surveyors to conclude that "large numbers of Americans are uninformed about the tenets, practices, history and leading figures of major faith traditions – including their own."
posted by Houyhnhnm at 12:39 PM PST - 116 comments
"Along with François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol's name is famously associated with the path-breaking criticism of Cahiers du Cinéma and the rise of the French New Wave. But whilst Truffaut and Godard saw themselves as auteur and innovator, to survey Chabrol's long career is to see a craftsman productively immersed in the conventions and compromises of mainstream filmmaking."
One of the fathers of the
French New Wave, often
compared to Hitchcock,
Claude Chabrol passed away last week at the
age of 80.
[more inside]posted by HumanComplex at 10:55 AM PST - 11 comments
Paul Krugman and Robin Wells have a long two-part essay in the
New York Review of Books on the current economic slump.
The Slump Goes On: Why? And
The Way Out of the Slump.
Since around June 2009 many indicators have been pointing up: GDP has been rising in all major economies, world industrial production has been rising, and US corporate profits have recovered to pre-crisis levels.
Yet unemployment has hardly fallen in either the United States or Europe--which means that the plight of the unemployed, especially in America with its minimal safety net, has grown steadily worse as benefits run out and savings are exhausted. And little relief is in sight: unemployment is still rising in the hardest-hit European economies, US economic growth is clearly slowing, and many economic forecasters expect America's unemployment rate to remain high or even to rise over the course of the next year.
[more inside]posted by russilwvong at 10:29 AM PST - 41 comments
Docs Teach, a new website from the
National Archives, offers teachers access to more than 3,000 digitized documents from NARA's collections, along with classroom activities using them. It's the latest in a series of efforts under the recently appointed Archivist of the United States
David Ferriero to enhance the agency's presence on the web.
(via) [more inside]posted by Horace Rumpole at 10:03 AM PST - 5 comments
The OpenOffice.org Project has unveiled a major restructuring that separates itself from Oracle and that takes responsibility for OpenOffice away from a single company. ... Driving home the changes, OpenOffice.org project is now The Document Foundation while the OpenOffice.org suite has been given the temporary name of LibreOffice.posted by Joe Beese at 8:01 AM PST - 45 comments
Mixtapes have been a way for rappers and producers to promote their music and have it heard for pretty much the entire history of hiphop, and they're still called mixtapes even though most have abandoned tapes for CDs and, in turn, CDs for mp3s. But there's such a glut of stuff on the market - Atlanta's Gorilla Zoe, for instance,
released a mixtape a day throughout February - that it can be difficult to have a clue what's going on. One site I've found useful for just barely keeping up with things is
DatPiff.
[more inside]posted by Dim Siawns at 6:40 AM PST - 11 comments
September 27
Pornland. At the beginnings of the 1950s, porn was something boys indulged in behind the barn and creeps enjoyed in dingy little movie theatres. 60 years later, porn is everywhere. Michael Enright recently interviewed academic
Gail Dines on CBC Radio's Sunday Edition. Listen to the interview
here.
[more inside]posted by KokuRyu at 9:44 PM PST - 75 comments
Fallen [SLVimeo]. A bit of melancholy existentialism? An atheist manifesto? Just an adorable animated short? In any case, it's the saddest, sweetest, most wonderful thing I've seen all week.
posted by eugenen at 4:05 PM PST - 39 comments
The owner of Segway, James Heselden, has died, after accidentally driving his Segway
over a cliff. This, only two months after the Department of Justice, which implements the American Disabilities Act, addressed Segway as a
mobility device for disabled persons.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 9:04 AM PST - 118 comments
Mr. Bungle Monday!!! In their 15-year career, the band only made one music video and it was banned by MTV for being ... well, generally deranged.
Quote Unquote was originally called
Travolta but Warner Bros. pressured them into changing the title.
Luckily, their 3rd and final album left enough of a lasting impression to warrant fanmade videos. Thus, we now have:
a)YT user tkan's Chris Cunningham-inspired
Retrovertigo & the Hitchcock-esque
Pink Cigarette clips;
b)YT user Illusionoel's
Goodbye Sober Day, which reworks footage from Baraka; and
c)
Vertigo, a beautiful medley of the album itself, California, performed by a highschool drumline
[more inside]posted by mannequito at 12:40 AM PST - 28 comments
September 26
The Lynchsons is a remixed episode of the Simpsons with strange graphical glitches, almost no discernable plot, rythmic noise collages, mis-cued and distorted music, and an overall odd sensibility.
[more inside]posted by codacorolla at 7:28 PM PST - 70 comments
A gang of thieves dubbed
"the vacuum burglars" has struck for the fifteenth time in France, drilling a hole in the pneumatic tube that siphons money from the checkout to the strong-room. They then sucked rolls of cash totalling £60,000 from the safe without even having to break its lock. A classic exploitation of a vulnerability in a system. But is it worth it to fix?
via, via [more inside]posted by nevercalm at 6:04 PM PST - 38 comments
On September 18th,
Mitchell Heisman posted his
1904 page long suicide note online, and then shot himself in the head on Harvard square.
The note, according to wikipedia, "discusses sociobiology, transhumanism, history, religion, death, nihilism and other philosophical issues at some length".
posted by DZack at 11:46 AM PST - 145 comments
September 25
"It was like trying to have a relationship with a sea sponge, or a single-cell protozoa. She didn't do anything! Or at least, nothing I could understand." — Phillip Toledan,
The Reluctant Father. A photo-essay on the cultural expectations of parenthood.
posted by chunking express at 4:24 PM PST - 102 comments
They call it the "Ring of Steel" The NYPD is tightening surveillance in New York's subways by installing a new surveillence system modeled after London's so called
"Ring Of Steel" . The $200 million system, paid for with federal funds and mismanaged by the MTA and Lockheed Martin, is part of what will one day be a 3,000-camera network of "public and private-sector cameras." London, feeling it's title as the most surveilled city in the world threatened, is now considering using
unmanned drones for covert aerial surveillance, security, or emergency operations.
posted by SpaceJazz at 2:51 PM PST - 47 comments
10 years and 10,000+ posts old yesterday. The web creation of MetaFilter's own, quonsar and madamjujujive,
Everlasting Blort,
- a compendium of the web's weird underbelly, updated daily with links to the strange, absurd, bizarre, humorous.
posted by nickyskye at 11:33 AM PST - 54 comments
Eating 'local' is touted as healthier and friendlier to the environment than shopping from large commercial food sources that spend petroleum products shipping food hundreds and thousands of miles from their place of origin. Farmer's markets are on the rise. Yay!
But some of those farmers have a secret:
They don't grow their own. [more inside]posted by SLC Mom at 9:06 AM PST - 148 comments
It's hard to explain why this video of an anonymous family at Christmas set to
Baxendale's song
Flash Gordon works so well for me, other than to say that it just makes me happy. Maybe it will make you happy too? (also featuring Cheech and Chong, Tony Bennet, and dancing Darth Vaders)
posted by puny human at 9:00 AM PST - 4 comments
September 24
If there is ever one song that you should not listen under the influence of hallucinogens or other mind-altering substances, it would be "
Pizza Song," quite possibly one of the creepiest-sounding tracks in existence.
posted by WCityMike at 9:05 PM PST - 55 comments
Nonetheless, like the man in the parable, we ultimately come back to our faith in the law. In the coming weeks, a court-appointed group will finish inventorying the remaining boxes, as well as the contents of the Spinoza Street apartment. It’s only a matter of time before the list is made public and most of the materials find their way to one archive or another. The last doorkeeper out of the way, we’ll be as close to Kafka as we’re ever going to get.posted by Houyhnhnm at 3:15 PM PST - 4 comments
In the wake of increasingly prominent appearances by South Asians in American television (Mindy Kaling, Aziz Ansari, Danny Pudi), NBC has launched
Outsourced (
preview) (
full pilot on Hulu), a comedy about an American who moves to Mumbai to manage a call center. Featuring a mostly South Asian cast, the show is a potential high-water mark for Indians in popular American media. But is the show's portrayal of Indians progressive, or does it get bogged down in stereotypes and clichéd jokes about spicy food and funny names? Himanshu Suri of art rap trio Das Racist
weighs in.
[more inside]posted by naju at 12:11 PM PST - 89 comments
Rare fossilised flower found, related to sunflowers. "A 45 million-year-old fossil flower found in northern Argentina has uncovered the evolutionary roots of Earth’s most populous plant family. Image can be viewed
here.
Called Asteraceae, the family includes dozens of domesticated species — from sunflowers, daisies and chrysanthemums to lettuce, artichoke and tarragon — and some 23,000 undomesticated plants. But despite its ubiquity, Asteraceae’s fossil legacy is sparse, containing little more than pollen grains. A few larger, detailed fossils exist, but they’re relatively young."
posted by Fizz at 11:46 AM PST - 7 comments
Ever since the
Women's Health Initiative published data showing
increased risk and little benefit with post-menopausal hormone replacement therapy it has become more controversial and the
FDA now recommends using the lowest dose possible for the shortest time, if using it at all. Why was HRT so popular in the first place? It now appears one reason was that what appeared to be legitimate articles in peer reviewed journals were actually ghostwritten by drug companies.
[more inside]posted by TedW at 9:59 AM PST - 22 comments
Women's Pro Tennis Turns 40. Women's professional tennis was launched by
World Tennis magazine publisher
Gladys Heldman 40 years ago on September 23, 1970, with a tournament that had nine entrants and $7,500 in prizes. The
original nine were Billy Jean King and Rosemary Casals along with the lesser known Peaches Bartkowicz, Judy Dalton, Julie Heldman, Kerry Melville, Kristy Pigeon, Nancy Richey and Valerie Ziegenfuss. A year later, King became the first female athlete to earn six figures in her sport. In the '80s, Martina Navratilova became the first to earn $1 million. Today the
WTA Tour is an $85 million-a-year sport. "We wanted to make sure that any young girl, if she was good enough and if she wanted to, would have the opportunity to make a living playing tennis," King said.
posted by rcade at 8:01 AM PST - 14 comments
If you were to ask me "What is the most
artistic drum solo you've ever heard?", I'd say "You mean the one with the most exquisite sense of dynamics? One that doesn't bludgeon you over the head, but instead pulls you in with its subtlety and restraint? Where masterful technique is purely at the service of
musicality? That best conveys a musical vision and a deep understanding of the interrelationships of percussive timbre and tone that make up that remarkable instrument we call the drum set?" You'd say "Yeah." I'd say
this.
[more inside]posted by flapjax at midnite at 7:29 AM PST - 49 comments
Is this just another version of the minstrel show? The
Pendleton Round-up is celebrating its
100th anniversary. Part of its attraction is the performance of a
"American Indian" dance pageant, whose participants are compensated traditionally. "A century later, the mill still provides blankets, and families are still paid to appear, $5 per person each day at the arena. Beef and vegetables are provided, as are tokens for other food. The winner of the “Best Dressed Indian Award” at the parade gets 50 silver dollars. The winner of the “Oldest Indian Couple Award” gets 100 silver dollars in a pouch."
posted by Xurando at 7:04 AM PST - 17 comments
Adolf Finds Out Bin 38 AngelGate. Originally used as a term to describe wealthy individuals who funded theater productions in great Britain,
angel investors have become the go-to people when your start-up needs seed money, but not enough warrant a full fledged venture capitalist firm. Acquiring an angel investor can involve everything from full on formal proposals to an individual visiting your dorm room and writing a check...
[more inside]posted by AElfwine Evenstar at 5:50 AM PST - 26 comments
The latest attempt to mitigate the impact of the
Citizens United decision has failed, with an attempt to pass transparency rules for corporations funding political advertising failing to reach
cloture. Obama comments on this vote in his
most recent weekly address.
Citizens United v Federal Election Commission (2010) held that corporate funding of independent political broadcasts in candidate elections cannot be limited under the First Amendment.
[more inside]posted by lucien_reeve at 3:40 AM PST - 44 comments
September 23
The Merry-Go-Round Broke Down (a SLYT 40 years in the making) showing one frame from every Warner Brothers theatrical cartoon made from 1930-1969 (thankfully at a rate of about 3 per second). See the evolution of animation! Porky Pig's successful diet in '37! Michigan J. Frog's memorable single appearance! And illegal alien Speedy Gonzalez replacing American toons in the '60s! (via
M.E.)
posted by oneswellfoop at 5:36 PM PST - 80 comments
NASA has some
new maps showing air pollution around the world. It shows PM
2.5, that is, Particulate Matter less than 2.5 micrometers in size, small enough to get past normal bodily defenses and cause health problems.
[more inside]posted by stbalbach at 4:22 PM PST - 32 comments
This is all rooted in a vision I had, of William S. Burroughs as a CIA agent, and Philip K. Dick as his young henchman, going head-to-head with notorious gangster and pervert Adolf Hitler somewhere in Hamburg to find out where Hitler is shipping all the computers he can get his hands on. - In another world Charles Stross wrote
this sprawling work of
Alternate History instead of the
Merchant Princes books. Fictional books are of course themselves a common them in Alternative History stories, from The Grasshopper Lies Heavy in
The Man in the High Castle to Adolf Hitlers pulp novel
Lord of the Swastika in
The Iron Dream. Stanisław Lem was particularly enamoured with the idea of the fictional book, and wrote two volumes of reviews and introductions for them, lovingly described
here by Bruce Sterling.
posted by Artw at 11:18 AM PST - 87 comments
8BITS is a short, very violent film about nostalgia for 8-bit video games. Well, maybe 'about' is a strong word.
posted by Fraxas at 9:28 AM PST - 28 comments
In
"My
Lie" author Meridith Maran reveals her own painful history with
recovered memory: she accused her own father of molesting her, and
years later learned that her recollections had been false.
Interviewed today on
NPR,Maran
equates her journey through the recovered memory movement to the
persistent political lie that President Obama is a Muslim.
[more inside]posted by pianomover at 9:21 AM PST - 67 comments
'Sesame Street' Pulls Katy Perry video from show. Sesame Workshop, which produces the long-running PBS children’s show “Sesame Street,” said on Thursday morning that it would not show a music video planned for the coming 41st season of the series that features the pop singer Katy Perry, citing in its decision the outcry of viewers who had seen the suggestive video online. The video features Ms. Perry singing a parody of her song “Hot ‘N Cold” accompanied by the “Sesame Street” character Elmo.
Via NYTimes.composted by Fizz at 6:22 AM PST - 235 comments
It's
Chili time in
NM!
This NYTimes story on hot peppers is full of good stuff(if Capsicum and
heat are your thing). Some experts argue that we like chilies because they are good for us. They can help lower
blood pressure, may have some ,
antimicrobial effects, and they increase salivation, which is good if you eat a boring diet based on one bland staple crop like corn or rice. The pain of chilies can even kill other pain, a concept supported by
recent research.
There is evidence that by 6,000 years ago domesticated Capsicums (hot peppers) were being used from the Bahamas to the Andes.
[more inside]posted by Blake at 4:39 AM PST - 38 comments
Continuous Chest Compression CPR is
a hands-only CPR method that doubles a person’s chance of surviving cardiac arrest. It’s easy and does not require mouth-to-mouth contact, making it more likely bystanders will try to help, and it was developed at the University of Arizona College of Medicine. YT link for
the video. The Mayo Clinic
Presentation.
posted by nickyskye at 4:22 AM PST - 57 comments
September 22
The Sacrifice! Valve Software releases a 4-part comic that chronicles what happens to Francis, Louis, Zoey, and Bill at the end of the original Left 4 Dead.
[more inside]posted by kbanas at 8:40 PM PST - 15 comments
Towering over New Hampshire at a height of 6,288 feet,
Mount Washington is the highest peak in the Northeastern United States. It has been ascended by countless hikers from all walks of life, including (for the first time ever)
a paralyzed dog.
[more inside]posted by dhammond at 2:51 PM PST - 41 comments
The
Humournet Collage Archive is an artifact of of the Old Web consisting of hundreds of .txt
collages (422 to be exact) of jokes and anecdotes, originally issued as part of the HumourNet mailing list. Sometimes the moderator's
opener is as funny as the content.
posted by griphus at 2:50 PM PST - 4 comments
For millions of addicts around the world, Alcoholics Anonymous's basic text - informally known as the Big Book - is the Bible. And as they're about to find out, the Bible was edited. After being hidden away for nearly 70 years and then auctioned twice, the original manuscript by AA co-founder Bill Wilson is about to become public for the first time next week, complete with edits by Wilson-picked commenters that reveal a profound debate in 1939 about how overtly to talk about God.posted by Joe Beese at 1:53 PM PST - 76 comments
Dictaphone Parcel. Lauri Warsta put a tape recorder inside a box, set it recording, sealed up the box, sent it from London to Finland through the post, then animated the captured audio.
Previouslyposted by sleepcrime at 1:42 PM PST - 13 comments
The making of Goodfellas. Twenty years after the movie came out, Scorsese and the cast and crew talk about making the movie -- what was scripted, what wasn't, who was originally considered for the cast -- and how many real wiseguys made it on screen.
posted by devinemissk at 7:47 AM PST - 117 comments
When releasing the Mozilla source code, Netscape's lawyers insisted that the code first be sanitized. In particular, "any text containing vulgar or offensive words or expressions; any text that might be slanderous or libelous to individuals and/or institutions," had to be removed.
Here is a sample of what it looked like before that occurred.
posted by Obscure Reference at 4:57 AM PST - 46 comments
September 21
"With the midterm elections in the U.S. Senate just six weeks away, everyone is wondering how the balance of power between Republicans and Democrats will shake out after November 2." Wonder no more with Google's
2010 U.S. Election Ratings Map. Information can be filtered by state, type of race (senate, governor, house), and by source. A Google Maps
blog entry has more detailed info for those who want to dig deeper into the application. [via
TechCrunch]
posted by bayani at 10:27 PM PST - 20 comments
"He sits at a table and spins his yarn, his only requisites being a small stick, the so-called 'wakening-rod' xingmu (in Yangzhou storytelling called 'talking stopper' zhiyu), a handkerchief and a fan."
A comprehensive guide to the art and tradition of
Chinese Storytelling — with photographs, text, audio and video clips illustrating elements of performance.
posted by unliteral at 6:20 PM PST - 3 comments
What does four weeks, 124 takes, 12 trainers, two furniture movers, 12 dogs, one goat, 38 buckets and a bunch of furniture equal? OK Go's new video
White Knuckles, all shot in one single take. A behind the scenes look at the video
here.
posted by MaryDellamorte at 11:45 AM PST - 94 comments
Can you write a hack in 140 characters?
Someone figured out how, and now Twitter is infested with them. They say they'll have a fix today. In the mean time, the twitter page belonging to the wife of the British PM
has been hacked, making it redirect to a Japanese porn site.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 10:15 AM PST - 53 comments
"Make-up is great. It is a powerful tool, a way to express yourself, your mood and interior life. But, when you can’t go without something, it loses its spark." We are two days into Rabbit Write's
NO MAKE-UP WEEK.
posted by hermitosis at 8:23 AM PST - 227 comments
New York:
High Quality - $448.92/oz
Medium Quality - $341.42/oz
Low Quality - $183.36/oz
posted by swift at 8:02 AM PST - 173 comments
He showed that the Royal Mail will deliver things as small as a bee or as large as an elephant; he once posted himself home; and he invented the self-recirculating postcard - it had two sides, each with a different address.
W Reginald Bray was a genius at
mail art and the self-proclaimed autograph king.
[more inside]posted by Joe in Australia at 7:51 AM PST - 13 comments
September 20
She read from notes, stumbling occasionally, and did not so much lean on her metaphors as wrestle them to the floor and grind them underfoot; but they loved it anyway - all 15 minutes of it. She attacked everyone from the president on down, demanded stricter standards for America's service personnel, espoused an aggressive red-meat constitutionalism, and proposed a new policy which she summed up as "if you don't like it - go home."
The 2,000-strong crowd cheered wildly as she literally howled her frustration before leading them, fists pumping, in an anti-incumbent chant of "Go home!" A strange mix of patriotism and petulance, it was a rough kind of stump speech that hadn't been tested in a focus group or tried out on a campaign aide, and which was delivered with complete disregard for how it might play in the media.
Witness the startling political
debut of Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta, American citizen.
posted by anigbrowl at 11:19 PM PST - 115 comments
The entire assemblage comprises 14,882 human skeletal fragments, as well as the mutilated remains of dogs and other animals killed at the massacre site -- Sacred Ridge, southwest of Durango, Colo.
[....]
when the violence took place, men, women and children were tortured, disemboweled, killed and often hacked to bits. In some cases, heads, hands and feet appear to have been removed as trophies for the killers. The attackers then removed belongings out of the structures and set the roofs on fire.
[....]
At least two other separate studies have come to similar conclusions, suggesting the genocide victims at Sacred Ridge belonged to an ethnic group that was different from that of other nearby populations.
posted by orthogonality at 7:37 PM PST - 45 comments
For those Internet gamers who have grown tired of the same old Flash games, Casual Girl Gamer has assembled a well-vetted list of the
30 best HTML5 games. And for those with a more artistic bent, HTML5 also has much to offer, such as this
kaleidoscope project (which allows visitors to use their own Flickr photos) or this
doll creator (which also allows users to create custom faces from their own photos). These pages -- or at least some of the links contained within them -- are all associated with Microsoft's
Beauty of the Web event, which highlights websites taking advantage of HTML5 and other cutting edge Web technologies.
[more inside]posted by GnomeChompsky at 6:44 PM PST - 41 comments
Click "Write". Get a prompt. And a timer that will all too quickly hit 0:00. That's when you don't get to edit anymore. It's
Six Minute Story, and it's among the most fun/frenetic (or perhaps fun/harrowing) 360 seconds you'll have today. [via
mefi projects]
posted by davidjmcgee at 2:31 PM PST - 25 comments
Every day, our world gets a little bit smaller and a lot more complex. So much so that even minor decisions can have major consequences. Not just for trees or frogs or polar bears, but for human lives, and livelihoods. At its core, sustainability is about people.
The Living Principles for Design aim to guide purposeful action. It is a place to co-create, share and showcase best practices, tools, stories and ideas for enabling sustainable action across all design disciplines.
[more inside]posted by netbros at 1:20 PM PST - 9 comments
Over the course of three years, designer
Christien Meindertsma tracked the products that had been made from the remains of a single pig. In doing so,
she discovered that the skin, bones, meat, organs, blood, fat, brains, hoofs, hair and tail of a single pig might be used in more than 180 very diverse products, from shampoo, medicine, tattoo ink, munitions, cardiac valves, matches, desserts and bubblegum, beer and lemonade, car paint and brake discs to pills and bread.
TED Talk. TED
Bio. Vimeo video:
Reading through the pages of Pig 05049.
Exhibition (in Dutch). Design Observer:
Pig 05049. Amazon:
Pig 05049 [more inside]posted by zarq at 12:56 PM PST - 24 comments
What you get when you attach a 102-year old Wollensak 35mm F5.0 Cine-Velostigmat lens to a 5DmkII. And you're photographer Timur Civan.
posted by dobbs at 10:59 AM PST - 41 comments
PuzzGrid is a lightweight, fast game of forming associations, which is, ahem, "based on" the BBC's
Only Connect. Hundreds of grids to play and you can submit your own, too! (The BBC site has
a few dozen more, in a fancier, louder flash app.)
posted by Wolfdog at 5:52 AM PST - 40 comments
The
National Portrait Gallery's Taylor Wessing Photographic Prize shortlist for 2010 has been announced. Among the entries, and causing a small ripple of controversy, is
Panayiotis Lamprou's Portrait of My British Wife, which is reopening up where mainstream sensibilities of the border between art of and voyeurism lie. The photo features Lamprou's wife Christina looking directly at the camera.
Wearing no knickers.
[Links are SFW. NSFW links appropriately flagged on the pages themselves] [more inside]posted by MuffinMan at 5:41 AM PST - 72 comments
September 19
Ecto-1 A community dedicated to the discovery, creation and preservation of one of the most beloved movie cars of all time, Ghostbuster's (1984) Ecto-1. This site will be a useful tool for Ecto-1 Builders and collectors by providing rare photographic reference and knowledge from Ecto-1 Owners and builders.
posted by Fizz at 4:10 PM PST - 20 comments
History and mystery wonderfully blended. Although doubtless well-known to UK Mefites, I was only recently directed to this marvelous and engaging TV series featuring Michael Kitchen as Detective Chief Superintendent Christopher Foyle. It's a refreshing change from American fare, entirely adult, with crisp dialogue and meticulous attention to detail and historic accuracy. Speaking as a Yank weary of plasticity, it's also wonderful to see actors with real faces. The series can be seen on Youtube in pieces that can be viewed fairly seamlessly: Series One:
The German Woman,
The White Feather,
Lesson in Murder,
Eagle Day. Series Two:
Fifty Ships,
Among the Few,
War Games,
The Funk Hole. Series Three:
The French Drop,
Enemy Fire,
They Fought in the Fields,
War of Nerves. Series Four:
Invasion,
Bad Blood. Series Five:
Bleak Midwinter,
Casualties of War. Series Six:
Plan of Attack,
Broken Souls,
All Clear.
[more inside]posted by kinnakeet at 12:13 PM PST - 25 comments
"All you do is put it in the center here like this and then set a fire to it. And not always but most -
uh oh." (Minecraft SLYT via
Reddit)
posted by stringbean at 6:35 AM PST - 382 comments
Avast there! Ahoy, mateys! Tis the blessed day at last.
Here be yer bible.
Here be yer Web site. And
here be yer Pirate Name Generator. Now get out there and
celebrate, for tis Talk Like a Pirate Day! Arr!
posted by Lynsey at 12:40 AM PST - 73 comments
September 18
Continuing
his track record [MeFi previously links] of using online distribution for his albums, Trent Reznor
offers a five-song sampler of the soundtrack he created with Atticus Ross for The Social Network for free download online. (Well, really for the small "price" of your email address.)
[more inside]posted by hippybear at 10:43 AM PST - 23 comments
Perhaps it's best my grandmother didn't live to see this day: the Liberace Museum, located in the besequined showman's old stomping grounds of Las Vegas, is
closing, and that would have saddened her. Maybe it's time for all of us to brush up on our early
Liberace history. And let's hear the sparkling man, resplendent in gold, take
Mack the Knife through some changes. Farewell, Liberace.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 8:39 AM PST - 66 comments
Caring about something is about taking the pain and the joy. The pain is hard. Taking the pain, facing it, dealing with it are the ways I think we can show we really care. That we know we care. --
Bob, the story of a dog.
posted by Gator at 6:56 AM PST - 16 comments
Belleza sobrenatural (supernatural beauty) is a project from Elle Spain magazine featuring twelve (Spanish) beautiful women completely without makeup and without Photoshop enhancement; four of them appear on the covers. It's being picked up by
other websites, but so far only in Spanish; I couldn't find any coverage in English. Meanwhile, the
US version of Elle has the usual makeup/photoshop enhanced cover models.
[more inside]posted by math at 4:42 AM PST - 33 comments
The old lady always called me her boy... and she kept me in her room from the time that I was born until her death, then willed me to her son Samuel. When she was dying she called me to her bedside... Taking my hand in hers she told me to be a good boy and stay with Samuel. To Samuel she said, "Keep my boy as long as you live to remember me by." Larry Lapsley began life as someone else's property, but he managed to break free from his mistress' dying wish by way of a remarkable journey that would lead him to becoming the first black homesteader in Saline County, Kansas:
When I came to Salina I was twenty-five years old and was without schooling. I had never gone to school a day in my life and I haven't any education yet but there is one thing I have, a good home and plenty of friends. [more inside]posted by amyms at 12:02 AM PST - 22 comments
September 17
In 1977 the Dutch public broadcasting association VARA made a documentary called Wonderland, about then up-&-coming recording artists Warren Zevon, Linda Ronstadt, Bonnie Raitt & Jackson Browne. Here is that film.
Warren Zevon at Griffith Observatory,
Linda Ronstadt in studio “Tracks Of My Tears” alternative studio version,
Linda Ronstadt outside her Malibu house,
Warren Zevon at a burrito stand,
Warren Zevon in concert “Carmelita”,
Bonnie Raitt at Frederick’s,
Bonnie Raitt in concert “Nothing Seems To Matter”,
Linda Ronstadt in the bedroom of her Malibu house,
Linda Ronstadt in studio “Lose Again” alternative studio version,
Warren Zevon at Griffith Observatory,
Warren Zevon in rehearsal “Frank And Jesse James”,
Bonnie Raitt,
Bonnie Raitt in concert “Give It Up Or Let Me Go”,
Jackson Browne,
Jackson Browne in concert “Before The Deluge”.
posted by scalefree at 7:00 PM PST - 29 comments
An Associated Press photo of last Wednesday's Middle East peace talks in Washington D. C. was
enhanced for publication in
Al-Ahram, Egypt's state-run and largest newspaper. Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak was electronically moved to a more central position.
posted by Obscure Reference at 2:12 PM PST - 34 comments
High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP) is currently the most common form of digital transmission protection for high definition digital multimedia, requiring an unbroken chain of licensed products for content to play back for
TV systems and
computers.
A possible "master key" was posted online earlier this week, and created quite a stir around the potential of this leak or reverse engineering. Intel, who
developed the initial specification,
has confirmed the validity of the "master key", but instead of coming up with a new protection scheme, will use "legal remedies, particularly under the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act)." In essence,
the threat of legal action, rather than cryptography, is [Intel and the media companies] real tool against unapproved uses of digital content. [more inside]posted by filthy light thief at 12:41 PM PST - 84 comments
The 32.000 year old artifact was discovered in the form of hundreds of small fragments in a cave in Stadel im Hohlenstein in Germany on the 25th of August 1939.
The fact that the fragments belonged to a figurine was discovered in 1969 by Prof. Dr. Joachim Hahn. He mentioned a similarity of several small peices and puzzled a first version of the figurine with nearly 200 fragments.
Meet the Lion Man.
[more inside]posted by Substrata at 12:17 PM PST - 42 comments
September 16
We are princesses in a land of machos. "They drink beer, they are part of local governement and they are symbol of good luck for their family: they are Muxes, homosexuals of the “pueblo oaxacaqueno de Juchitan”, more than 3000 homosexuals who enjoy respect and admiration in all the country... they walk proudly in the streets, dressed as women with huipiles and enaguas, typical dress of the Tehuantepec Isthmus." Photo essay by Nicola Okin Frioli.
More at Flickr.
[more inside]posted by madamjujujive at 7:04 PM PST - 28 comments
In a
wonderful 15-minute video from 1969, a young Jim Henson shows you how to make puppets out of ordinary things. Yes, it's SLYT, but it's a really
good SLYT, so I beg forgiveness.
posted by cerebus19 at 1:37 PM PST - 43 comments
Three years after the National Academies (US) report
Rising Above the Gathering Storm outlined eroding science and technology "advantages," the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (
PCAST) released today an outline for the development of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education: Prepare and Inspire (
executive report).
[more inside]posted by cgk at 12:28 PM PST - 15 comments
Don’t just touch Paul Bellini – tattoo him on your arm! That kooky writer from
The Kids in the Hall, Paul Bellini (NSFW
blog), developed cult infamy as a result of recurring appearances on that show wearing next to nothing but a bath towel. Who indeed can forget the subsequent
Touch Paul Bellini contest, in which one Rebecca Klatka of St. Petersburg won the right to do just that? (
Video proof. Inevitable
Facebook group.) A decade and a half later, Eric Cedrone of Buffalo takes the prize for Most Dedicated Fan of Man in Towel with his arm tattoo of Bellini in said towel, voided area used to advantage.
posted by joeclark at 9:30 AM PST - 28 comments
If you see someone walking towards you late at night, on a dark street, wearing a big NY on their cap, watch out. The New York times examines a link between
Yankees clothing and criminal behavior. Mets fans say
we told you so. Is there a link between
Jay-Z, the Yankees and criminality? "Criminologists, sports marketing analysts, consumer psychologists and Yankees fans have developed their own theories, with some attributing the trend to the popularity of the caps among gangsta rappers and others wondering whether criminals are identifying with the team's aura of money, power and success."
posted by Xurando at 7:01 AM PST - 98 comments
September 15
"Hua Yang De Nian Hua, or
"To those who we remember fondly", is a 2000 short film by Hong Kong director Wong Kar Wai that was shown at the 2001 Berlin International Film Festival. It consists of a 2m 28s montage of scenes from vintage Chinese films, most of which were considered lost until some nitrate prints were discovered in a California warehouse during the 1990s, set to a song from the soundtrack of Wong's
In The Mood For Love, a golden oldie by
Zhou Xuan."
posted by puny human at 7:43 PM PST - 13 comments
Once upon a time, cows were milked in Brooklyn's
Prospect Park. The city dairy provided a safe, affordable source of nutrition for children in 19th-century New York, and was an important bulwark against one of the city's most insidious killers: swill milk. The dairy and its cows have disappeared, but the story of the
swill milk scandals lives on.
[more inside]posted by MonkeyToes at 6:10 PM PST - 28 comments
Statsis: A short film by Christian Swegal In the future, an Ex-Soldier is placed in virtual exercises to cure his Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. In the simulations, he sees glimpses of a mysterious girl, presumably someone from his past. When a Stranger appears in his facility offering answers, the Soldier finds himself once again asked to kill, this time for her...
[more inside]posted by clockworkjoe at 4:36 PM PST - 16 comments
Omar Rodriguez-Lopez drops his fifth solo album of 2010, in
Tychozorente, which is available to stream as well as purchase (for a minumum of $6.99) from the link.
[more inside]posted by opsin at 1:39 PM PST - 35 comments
In a five part series he wrote a few years ago, blogger J. Brad Hicks breaks down how, in the mid-1960s, the Republican party made a conscious decision to rebrand themselves as the party of Christians, and in doing so, how they had to shift the ideology of the churches to what he calls a "
false gospel".
[more inside]posted by quin at 1:36 PM PST - 208 comments
Tea Party candidate and
Sarah Palin endorsee Christine O'Donnell - a former
chastity lobbyist - has
defeated the longest-serving Congressman in Delaware's history by six percentage points to claim the Republican nomination for Vice President Biden's former Senate seat - despite Karl Rove's televised statements to Sean Hannity that she says
"nutty things":
It does conservatives little good to support candidates who, at the end of the day, while they may be conservative in their public statements, do not evince the characteristics of rectitude and truthfulness and sincerity and character that the voters are looking for. [more inside]posted by Joe Beese at 8:31 AM PST - 448 comments
A Google engineer was recently fired for spying on several teens through their GTalk, Gmail, and Google Voice accounts.
He accessed contact lists and chat transcripts, and in one case quoted from an IM that he'd looked up behind the person's back... In another incident, Barksdale unblocked himself from a Gtalk buddy list even though the teen in question had taken steps to cut communications with the Google engineer. Google
statement confirming the shenanigans.
posted by swift at 8:13 AM PST - 96 comments
September 14
Touched By Your Presence, Dear: Ex-Blondie songwriter and bassist Gary Lachman (aka "Gary Valentine") blogs (and is interviewed) about his books on Jung, Steiner, Ouspensky, and Sixties mysticism, and his time spent toiling in the fields of Crowleyana and The Gurdjieff Work.
posted by darth_tedious at 10:51 PM PST - 20 comments
Advanced Style: 'Proof from the wise and silver-haired set that personal style advances with age.' Advanced Style is run by Ari Seth Cohen who in his own words: "Roams the streets looking for New York's most stylish and creative older folks. Respect your elders and let these ladies and gents teach you a thing or two about living life to the fullest."
Debra Rapoport and Maayan Zilberman also collaborate on the site. Also worth checking out,
Advanced Style Videos, a more in depth look into the lives of the wonderful people featured on the site. Made by Ari Seth Cohen and Lina Plioplyte these videos allow our wonderful friends to share their own voice and opinions about personal style:
Tziporah Salamon,
Thrifting with Debra,
Going to the Movies with Debra,
Debra's Hat,
Design with Debra,
Debra on the Importance of Colour,
Hattitude!,
Mary,
Doris' Treasures.
posted by Fizz at 9:18 PM PST - 34 comments
The next level in outsourcing: "He has his assistant seducing women for him. His assistant, who is female and lives in India, logs onto his account on a popular dating site, browses profiles and (pretending to be him) makes connections with women on the site. She has e-mail conversations and arranges first dates. Then her employer reads the e-mail conversation and goes to the date."
posted by d. z. wang at 7:14 PM PST - 92 comments
One of the hottest authors of the 1910s had been dead for over 200 years before she ever published a word.
Patience Worth, as channeled through the ouija board of St. Louis housewife Pearl Curran, published
several novels and
scores of poems before the death of her link to the material world in 1937.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 4:38 PM PST - 16 comments
In the final pages of his book, drawing up the merits of programme writing, McGurl ultimately falls back on the one thing the programme really does teach: technique. Countering Eliot’s dictum that ‘art never improves,’ he proposes that literature might, rather, resemble technology or sport, in which ‘systematic investments of capital over time have produced a continual elevation of performance.’ Hasn’t ‘the tremendous expansion of the literary talent pool’ and its systematic training in the ‘self-conscious attention to craft’ resulted in ‘a system-wide rise in the excellence of American literature in the postwar period’? It has. If you take ‘good writing’ as a matter of lucidity, striking word combinations, evocative descriptions, inventive metaphors, smooth transitions and avoidance of word repetition, the level of American writing has skyrocketed in the postwar years. In technical terms, pretty much any MFA graduate leaves Stendhal in the dust. On the other hand, The Red and the Black is a book I actually want to read.
Get a Real Degree by Elif Batuman is a critique of creative writing workshops and a review of Mark McGurl's
The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing.
Louis Menand wrote a review of the same in The New Yorker which was both more appreciative of the book and creative writing programs. It was discussed previously on MetaFilter.posted by Kattullus at 4:35 PM PST - 28 comments
Objects Through Time tells the story of immigration and the changing ethnic diversity of New South Wales, Australia through "
movable heritage" - that is, artifacts and objects with historical resonance. While almost ignoring 50,000 years of aboriginal occupation, the site does a nice job of both familiar topics through a fresh lens (e.g., Captain Cook's "
secret instructions"), but also takes pains to look at those lesser known topics which may be more accessible through material culture than through texts.
[more inside]posted by Rumple at 2:42 PM PST - 7 comments
The Gregory Brothers auto-tune Charlie Rangel, Anthony Weiner, Ron Paul, Tinky Winky, and the President to Weezer's
Memories (
SLYT)
posted by nj_subgenius at 9:51 AM PST - 37 comments
The
Corn Refiners Association, which represents firms that make corn syrup, has been trying to improve the image of the much maligned sweetener with
ad campaigns, and
web sites, (
Previously) promoting it as a natural ingredient made from corn. Now, the group has petitioned the United States Food and Drug Administration to start calling the ingredient "corn sugar," arguing that a name change is the only way to clear up consumer "
confusion" about the product. (
VIA)
posted by Blake at 9:38 AM PST - 172 comments
As reported on NPR's All Tech Considered ("Tech" and "Religion"?) on 9/13. "In a world where Google has put every bit of information at our fingertips, some people are now demanding less information when they surf the Internet" by using
religion-based search engines. And folks are worried that Goohoo results might be biased? (SNPRL - Single Nat'l Public Radio Link)
[more inside]posted by Man with Lantern at 9:25 AM PST - 58 comments
SHIT COMICS: A deep resource of comics/cartoon arcana, lore, links, history, news and more. Why not check out some
Beibers,
early 20th century cartoon tips,
ULTIMO,
A Voyage To The Moon,
Never aired Dan Clowes Commercials,
James Kochalka Number One ,
A Pekar Family Circus, and
venturing vegetables. (Strange and occasionally NSFW)
posted by The Whelk at 8:48 AM PST - 10 comments
September 13
Not the commercials you'd expect for the 2010 Utah State Fair. Check out those
hamhocks and don't for get to grab a
corndog while you're there. The TV commercials have since been
yanked by the fair's board. The director of the ads,
Jared Hess of Napolean Dynamite fame, claims
racism.
posted by maryr at 10:44 PM PST - 47 comments
Canter’s Deli font comes full circle. Graphic designer makes actual typeface family out of casual script seen on sign for classic L.A. deli, Canter’s. (
Wins award!) Youngest, hippest member of the family that owns the diner later independently Googles
"Canter's Deli" + font, locates type designer, then hires him to custom-design a Canter’s “gourmet food truck.” “[W]hat was interesting to me was that this whole scenario could not have happened without the magic of the Internet and search engines.”
posted by joeclark at 9:21 PM PST - 37 comments
The
Haystack application aims to use
steganography to hide
samizdat-type data within a larger stream of innocuous network traffic. Thus, civilians in Iran, for example, could more easily evade Iranian censors and provide the world with an
unfiltered report on events within the country. Haystack earned its creator
Austin Heap a great deal of positive coverage from the media during the 2009 Iranian election protests. The BBC described Heap as
"on the front lines" of the protesters' "Twitter revolution", while The Guardian called him an
Innovator of the Year. Despite the laudatory coverage, however, the media were never given a copy of the software to examine. Indeed, not much is known about the software or its inner workings. Specialists in network encryption security were not allowed to perform an independent evaluation of Haystack, despite its distribution to and use by a small number of Iranians, possibly at some risk. As interest in the project
widens and criticisms of the media coverage and software continue to
mount, Heap has currently asked users to
cease using Haystack until a security review can be performed.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 4:46 PM PST - 31 comments
How to Train Your Robot (to Lie). "A military base has just fallen to enemy fighters. A robot containing top-secret information has to escape detection by the invading army. The robot is facing three corridors: right, center, and left. It could randomly pick a corridor and hope the enemy soldiers pick a different one. Or it could leave a false trail—assuming robots can be trained to lie. A new study using this scenario suggests that they can be. 'Those lying toasters.'
click for picture (Georgia Tech's Decepticon) knows how to mislead pursuers to shake them off." Also, worth checking out is a video that can be viewed from the main link which demonstrates the robots in a game of hide-and-seek.
posted by Fizz at 11:46 AM PST - 23 comments
This is
an open letter written by Noman Benotman, a former commander in the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) and a former associate of Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri. In al Qaeda strategy meetings in Kandahar in 2000, Benotman warned the al-Qaeda leadership of ‘total failure' to realise their aims and called on bin Laden and al-Zawahiri to abandon violence. Soon after the 9/11 attacks, he distanced himself from al-Qaeda and later resigned from his own jihadist organisation. He has more recently been instrumental in negotiations with Libya's government to free former LIFG leaders, and in persuading these leaders to formally renounce terrorism. He also recently joined the London-based Quilliam Foundation as a Senior Analyst.posted by bardophile at 8:04 AM PST - 22 comments
(From the NYT)
Forget What You Know About Good Study Habits which has links to some interesting studies on, well, studying. Think you know the best ways to study? Think you have some kind of specific learning style?
Maybe Not. Think it's best to focus on a single thing when studying?
Probably Not. Think "teaching to the test" is a bad way to learn?
Maybe Not So. It seems the best way to study can be summarized as: Alternate you study environment; Mix your content; Space out your study session; And self-test.
posted by Blake at 6:30 AM PST - 48 comments
September 12
“A lot of people who are worried about privacy and those kinds of issues will take any minor misstep that we make and turn it into as big a deal as possible,” he said. “We realize that people will probably criticize us for this for a long time, but we just believe that this is the right thing to do.”
With David Fincher's scathing film
The Social Network set to hit theaters on October 1st, reticent Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg
is interviewed by Jose Antonio Vargas of The New Yorker.
posted by cmgonzalez at 11:08 PM PST - 67 comments
Behind the opening scenes of Blade Runner. “Doug and his Entertainment Effects Group team created thousands of acid-etched brass miniatures lit from below with hundreds of bundles of fiber-optic lights, shot in forced-perspective through layers of smoke to create layers of light refraction, creating depth.” The first of a three-part series on the making of
Blade Runner’s unforgettable opening sequence.
posted by spitefulcrow at 7:16 PM PST - 79 comments
"Is this thought experiment monstrous? Would it be monstrous to refer to the 40,000-plus domestic highway deaths we accept each year because the mobility and autonomy of the car are evidently worth that high price?" In 2007 David Foster Wallace invited readers to a series of thought experiments in a short piece.
[more inside]posted by fantodstic at 2:20 PM PST - 92 comments
Before they foreclose on your house why don't you get back at the bastards by
stripping the place. There are
consequences. "Lawyers who represent people facing foreclosure advise them that whatever's nailed down generally stays with the house."
posted by Xurando at 10:54 AM PST - 138 comments
Russia Uses Microsoft to Suppress Dissent - Adding to its
long-running series on corruption and abuse in post-Communist Russia, the New York Times has reported on Russian authorities using the pretext of software piracy to seize computers from journalists and political dissidents critical of current policies. In a surprising twist, lawyers representing Microsoft have been found working with Russian police, despite reporters and NGOs providing evidence of legitimate software purchases. An
official response to the NYT piece suggests impostors claim to represent Microsoft in Russia, and notes the company's offer of free software licenses to these and similar groups.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 5:23 AM PST - 25 comments
September 11
It is simultaneously unlike, and above, every other record. ... Because perhaps it tells us what a trivial pursuit music really is, and at the same time how indispensable to a meaningful existence it in fact is. ... No one, least of all Carla Bley, has subsequently come even within an orbit’s distance of its achievements. ... It is, in the most literal of senses, untouchable. -
Marcello Carlinposted by Joe Beese at 3:48 PM PST - 42 comments
How the Bad Boy of Brit-Art Grew Rich at the Expense of His Investors From the Economist:
IN 2008 just over $270m-worth of art by Damien Hirst was sold at auction, a world record for a living artist. By 2009 Mr Hirst’s annual auction sales had shrunk by 93%—to $19m—and the 2010 total is likely to be even lower. (The average auction price for a Hirst work in 2008 was $831,000. So far in 2010 it is down to $136,000, a sum that does not even take into account the many lots that failed to find buyers.)posted by R. Mutt at 1:09 PM PST - 58 comments
Kyle Wiens of iFixit talks to ArsTechnica about iFixit's history ("my iBook G3...It seemed crazy that I couldn't find any information online on how to get the thing back together"), his goals ("we realized that the world needed free, open source service manuals, and the manufacturers weren't stepping up"), planned obsolescence, the dirty tricks manufacturers pull to make it harder to repair your own stuff ("Torx has a patent...They're using lawyers to prevent people from making their computers last longer than 3-400 battery cycles"), who are the design kings of repair and servicing, who the villains are, and why recycling electronics isn't all you'd probably like it to be.
posted by rodgerd at 10:52 AM PST - 43 comments
This may just be the most peaceful, beautiful 5-1/2 minutes of your entire day: An audio slideshow look at some of the winning images, guided by one of the judges, of the Royal Observatory in Greenwich's 2010 Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition. Interested in "giving it a go"? Here are some
guides to photographing different aspects of the night sky.
posted by spock at 7:27 AM PST - 24 comments
"
I HEREBY REQUEST that my body or any part thereof may be used for therapeutic purposes including corneal grafting and organ transplantation or for the purposes of medical education [...] with the exception of my skull, which shall be offered by the institution receiving my body to the Royal Shakespeare Company for use in theatrical performance."
[more inside]posted by oulipian at 5:00 AM PST - 17 comments
September 10
Bloglines.com is closing down. According to Ask.com, the owners of Bloglines, the world is very different now from the world in which Bloglines was launched.
"The Internet has undergone a major evolution. The real-time information RSS was so astute at delivering (primarily, blog feeds) is now gained through conversations, and consuming this information has become a social experience."
posted by AmbroseChapel at 3:40 PM PST - 75 comments
I’m not advocating the abolition of grammar, but rather its justification. I’m not quite sure what that will entail in the end, but I’m starting out by pointing out grammar rules that just don’t make sense, don’t work, or don’t have any justification. All I want is for our rules of grammar to be well-motivated.posted by Joe Beese at 2:23 PM PST - 90 comments
Roger Ebert is returning to television: "'This is the rebirth of a dream,' said Ebert, who partnered in recent years with Richard Roeper before cancer robbed him of the ability to speak. He said he will act as co-producer and employ a computer voice to appear on every episode with segments titled Roger's Office devoted to classic, overlooked and new films." (
Ebert, previously on MeFi.)
posted by jbickers at 12:42 PM PST - 22 comments
"In most cases, when a book that deals with potentially classified military information is due to be published, one of the United States's many government divisions inspect it, redact sensitive parts, and either let publication continue or stop it entirely. But a clash in opinion between the U.S. Army and the Defense Intelligence Agency
may lead to the DIA buying up all 10,000 copies of [a] new memoir's first printing -- and promptly pulping the books." "The publication of
Operation Dark Heart, by
Anthony A. Shaffer, a former Defense Intelligence Agency officer and a lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve, has divided military security reviewers and highlighted the uncertainty about what information poses a genuine threat to security."
* [more inside]posted by ericb at 12:37 PM PST - 43 comments
On June 15th, 1920 in Duluth, Minnesota, three young, black circus workers, Elias Clayton, Elmer Jackson and Issac McGhie, were lynched. The Minnesota Historical Society has a great site devoted to the terrible event,
Duluth Lynchings Online Resource. I'd especially like to point out the
Oral Histories section, which has short interviews with African-Americans who lived through the event. In 2001 Minnesota Public Radio
covered the story, inspired by a campaign to build a memorial to the three men, which was dedicated in October of 2003. The Clayton Jackson McGhie Memorial has a
fine website which is well worth visiting.
posted by Kattullus at 10:27 AM PST - 10 comments
'No Belgian church escaped sex abuse', finds investigation. It reveals that abuse was so extensive that it was going on in almost every diocese and at every Church-run boarding school: "We can say that no congregation escapes sexual abuse of minors by one or several of its members," the commission concluded." 'Hundreds of sex abuse victims have come forward in Belgium with harrowing accounts of molestation by Catholic clergy that reportedly led to at least 13 suicides and affected
children as young as two, an independent Belgian commission said Friday.' 'Friday's report lists 507 witnesses who came forward with stories of molestation at the hands of clergy over the past decades. It says those abused included children who were two, four, five and six years old.'
[more inside]posted by VikingSword at 9:33 AM PST - 133 comments
Spiegel has an interesting article on the ol' Nature Vs. Nuture battle. They focus on 2 recent studies. One, looks at socioeconmic status and IQ, and concludes: "A person's intelligence can only truly blossom if the environment gives the brain what it desires." That is, IQ of the poorest in the study appeared to be almost exclusively determined by their socioeconomic status. In the meantime psychologists, neuroscientists, and geneticists have developed a very different perspective. They now believe that the skill we term "intelligence" is not in the least fixed, but is actually remarkably variable. "The low IQs expected for children born to lower-class parents can be greatly increased if their environment is sufficiently rich cognitively,"
posted by Blake at 9:31 AM PST - 25 comments
Q&A with
Duncan Jones, the director of the recent Hugo winner
Moon plus Gavin Rothery - concept designer and VFX supervisor, Barrett Heathcote - visual effects editor and Hideki Arichi - art director (MLYT) (
1,
2,
3,
4,
5)
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 7:19 AM PST - 30 comments
September 9
The World Giving Index (
scribd) (
.pdf) by the
Charity Aid Foundation1 was
just released. It lumps three different types of charitable behaviour – giving money, giving time and helping a stranger - and produces the “World Giving Index”. Australia and New Zealand
came out on top. The study also found that being happy is more of an influence on giving money to charity than being wealthy.
[more inside]posted by wilful at 10:16 PM PST - 20 comments
Judge Rules "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" Is Unconstitutional - Judge Virginia A. Phillips of Federal District Court struck down President Clinton's
Don't Ask, Don't Tell (DADT) policy in an
opinion (Scribd) issued late Thursday, ruling on the constitutionality of a complaint brought by the
Log Cabin Republicans (PDF). President Obama's Justice Department has until a September 23 deadline to submit objections to the court regarding Judge Phillips's permanent injunction, which is uncertain given Obama's previous support of his Department of Justice defending the legality of DADT, despite his opposition to DADT in principle.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 9:59 PM PST - 91 comments
Earlier this summer, a little-known '80s singer named R.P. Astley, responsible for a few blips on the radar such as "
Eternally Conjoined" and "
Under No Circumstances Will I Ever Release You"
(the latter of which created a brief meme in which one would "PaulTumble" one's friends by pretending to point them to the video, but instead sending them to something quite interesting and novel instead) has released
*fist clench, drawing-in gesture aimed at camera* a new track, "
Lights Out," his first new song in 17 years
*hand gesture at camera*.
[more inside]posted by WCityMike at 6:42 PM PST - 89 comments
Stop-motion PAC-MAN is the 5th video performance of the GAME OVER Project from the French-Swiss artist Guillaume Reymond. This giant game was played by 111 human pixels who moved from seat to seat over the span of 4 hours. (
Previously)
posted by gman at 2:18 PM PST - 14 comments
Apple has suddenly reversed their stance on 3rd-party tools for iOS development. (From the
horses's mouth.) This means that programmers will be able to use Adobe Flash (and other tools) to make iPhone (iPad, etc.) apps. It does NOT mean that Flash apps (swfs) will be able to run in iPhone or iPad browsers. That is still verboten. It means that developers won't be stuck using just XCode (Apple's code editor/compiler) and the Objective-C language. Alternatively, programmers will be able to use Actionscript (Flash's language) or some other language. Apple will allow cross-compiled apps to be sold in their app store. Meanwhile, porn is still not allowed. Responses:
1,
2,
3.
posted by grumblebee at 9:54 AM PST - 280 comments
Last week, the New York Times magazine
published an explosive article about the phone-hacking exploits at the Rupert Murdoch-owned British tabloid
News Of The World under the then-editorship of Andy Coulson, now the
the Government's chief of communications. Following the NYT's investigation, questions about the "unhealthy" relationship between the Metropolitan Police and the
press (particularly Murdoch's
News International, which also includes The Sun, The Times and the Sunday Times), and further claims that an independent inquiry was abandoned so as
not to upset the Metropolitan Police, assistant Met Commissioner John Yates was
questioned [video; 4 mins] on Tuesday by the Home Affairs select committee. Following an
emergency debate in Parliament today, which concerned the fact that MPs of all parties may have had their phones hacked (and therefore had their
Parliamentary Privilege breached), the
Standards and Privileges Committee, the most powerful committee in Parliament, is to
open an inquiry which will be able to compel witnesses to give evidence. Meanwhile, former News of the World reporters are coming out the woodwork, claiming that hacking at the paper was
"rife", and the pressure is on Coulson to resign his £140,000 job at No. 10, with a
poll [pdf] which says 52% of the public says he should go.
[more inside]posted by Len at 9:10 AM PST - 46 comments
“
We strive for a future that we cannot touch, and memories of our life’s past leave traces that form a road behind us.
When we stop, there are no traffic lights and no give way signs; only ourselves in the here and now.” -
Here and Now:
Sonia Yee [more inside]posted by infinite intimation at 6:28 AM PST - 2 comments
September 8
"My brother says that some day two men in white coats will come and take me away. Someone said that if they are men, after looking at the shop, they will forget what they came for and I should remain free". A
photo tour of the home workshop of Mr. Jacques Jodoin, including
a video walkthrough.
posted by woodblock100 at 9:36 PM PST - 31 comments
Emily Yoffe (a columnist for
Slate) has a job that sends her on all manner of exciting adventures. Usually, they involve clothing, but not this time. For
her most recent article, she shed her clothes -- all of them. Apparently, journalists enjoy visiting nudist resorts because
Lonely Planet's Tamara Sheward recently did the same thing and has some advice for would-be copycats. (Complete with a gallery of the
best nude events and beaches.) But sorry bachelors, apparently most nudist clubs only allow couples and single women.
Eureka, in the UK, is an exception. (No links contain sexual content.)
posted by GnomeChompsky at 6:58 PM PST - 35 comments
An ABC Investigative Unit team hit the streets of western Sydney, where young people are struggling to break a vicious cycle of unemployment and family breakdown, to find out what's being done to stop them from falling through the cracks.
In a great article by ABC reporters Eleanor Bell and Ed Giles, they found that the lack of resources, infrastructure and support for families in these communities is getting worse, not better but that despite this, many locals are still proud of their community.
posted by Effigy2000 at 6:46 PM PST - 18 comments
"Ramin and Rokni Haerizadeh on
making art about sex and politics in the Middle East..." and how they fled and what they're up to now.
More images
here.
posted by artof.mulata at 5:15 PM PST - 1 comments
Less than a year after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the United States detonated
the fourth and fifth nuclear weapons under the name
Operation Crossroads in July 1946. Beyond testing the capabilities of nuclear bombs,
the Navy said it wanted the Bikini tests treated like "the story of the year, maybe of the decade, and possibly of a lifetime." Only two of the three bombs were detonated, and the project was shut down over the next months. To celebrate the efforts of Operation Crossroads,
a cake in the shape of a mushroom cloud was featured at a publicized event on November 5, 1946. In response to this display, Reverend Arthur Powell Davies, the minister of the Unitarian All Souls Church in Washington, D.C.,
gave a sermon on the "utterly loathsome picture" and the message it sent to other nations. That sermon
set off a flurry of replies and reactions, that extended around the world, including a connection formed between
Reverend Davies' All Souls Unitarian Church and school children in Hiroshima.
[more inside]posted by filthy light thief at 10:54 AM PST - 62 comments
Sarah Nicole Prickett, who, as an
interesting fashion writer, is something of a rarity, reviews the covers of September fashion issues for Toronto’s
Eye Weekly (
Part 1;
Part 2). It is, on the whole, a sorry lot. Just for instance: “The September issue of British
Vogue stars Kate Moss, for no other reason than six months have passed and she is still not dead or, worse, fat.... The level of fail can’t be expressed even in Caps Lock.”
posted by joeclark at 10:54 AM PST - 14 comments
‘We feel that the stories in this book are such that if your nerves are not of the strongest, then it is wise to read them in daylight.' For a certain time, in every second-hand bookshop in the UK you would always be able to find a musty and dog-eared copy of one or more of the
Pan Books Of Horror Stories edited by the splendidly named Herbert Van Thal. Now the first is
being re-printed.
[more inside]posted by fearfulsymmetry at 10:06 AM PST - 21 comments
You can tell how strongly a man or woman yearns for freedom by counting the condiments in his or her refrigerator. -
Tom Nealon's series on the secret history of condiments.
posted by nickrussell at 8:31 AM PST - 38 comments
Gravitational wave detectors: the universe ripples, they listen.
These detectors (
LIGO,
GE600, TAMA300, AIGO) are listening for the gravitation waves: black holes spinning and colliding, or neutron stars inspiralling to their final fates in a black hole.
[more inside]posted by Wolfster at 7:23 AM PST - 9 comments
Nectarine Demoscene Radio streams Amiga demoscene music ("modules") 24-7. Registered users can queue up songs, comment and chat to each other with the "infamous oneliner". That's it.
posted by KMH at 4:51 AM PST - 12 comments
September 7
Hypercities, currently in beta, is a
collaborative effort to enable users to travel forward and backward in time within major cities of the world, watching changes take place over both the short (political protests in Tehran) and long (history of the city of Rome) term. Locative technologies are pushing the same ability into smartphones:
Walking Through Time (Android, iPhone) allows the user to overlay their current location with a map of the past.
[more inside]posted by Bora Horza Gobuchul at 9:12 PM PST - 17 comments
On Wikipedia, Cultural Patrimony, and Historiography. "The Iraq War: A Historiography of Wikipedia Changelogs" is a twelve-volume set of all changes to the Wikipedia article on the Iraq War. The twelve volumes cover a five year period from December 2004 to November 2009, a total of 12,000 changes and almost 7,000 pages. The set is part of a project exploring history and historiography facilitated by the internet, and visualising information, opinion, narrative and discussion, by James Bridle.posted by shakespeherian at 7:03 AM PST - 38 comments
The Running of the Dead: How the shift from slow zombies to fast zombies inverts the political statement in the
Dawn of the Dead remake, the Hobbesian influence on zombie narrative, and the implications for
28 Days Later. In four parts.
posted by 0xFCAF at 12:33 AM PST - 192 comments
September 6
Sovereign debt issued by governments is immense. In 2009, worldwide sovereign debt exceeded $34 trillion and is now the largest risk to the global financial system.
Many of the potential problems and risks are surprising, even to those well-versed in their particular area of finance. What happens if Things Go Really Bad?
...out of the multitude of potential scenarios, I have settled upon one which is really bad, but doesn’t involve asteroids, mass extinctions, or apes taking over. It is consistent with prior bad episodes of sovereign debt default.
Here is the Really Bad scenario. It’s not a worst possible scenario. It is more like the Long Depression or the Great Depression reoccurring under 2010 conditions.
In the Really Bad scenario, 45% of the countries with large outstanding sovereign debts are in default within a 2-3 year period."
A five-part article series on the imminent dangers of sovereign default from a guest columnist at
Calculated Risk blog. Some of this strays into finance ubernerd territory but Part 5C in particular is the
likely the playbook for the next financial crisis.
[more inside]posted by storybored at 8:38 PM PST - 61 comments
Soundmaps are field recordings of the unique audio ecology of a particular place and time. Often they are cities:
New York,
Berlin,
Montreal,
New Orleans,
Barcelona,
London (previously),
Madrid, and
many others. Sometimes they move through space:
Ramallah. Sometimes they are
mixable (probably my favorite, from Portugal). They might be of entire countries (
Spain, the
United States (previously), the
United Kingdom, or continents (
Africa, while on a bike!). Sometimes they cover the
entire world:
aporee (you may prefer the map interface). Some attempt to
preserve sounds that are in danger of being lost. And sometimes soundmaps are of the
deep ocean.
Most of the sounds are, appropriately, licensed under Creative Commons.
posted by Bora Horza Gobuchul at 5:38 PM PST - 8 comments
50 Posts About Cyborgs. "September 2010 is the 50th Anniversary of the coining of the term 'cyborg'. Over a month, this site will update 50 times with links to material — most of it new — celebrating 50 years of one of the 20th Century's more enduring concepts. Then it'll go dark."
[Via]posted by homunculus at 3:08 PM PST - 15 comments
Swarming spacecraft to self-destruct for greater good. "Future space probes that operate in cooperative swarms must commit hara-kiri if they begin to fail and risk damaging their comrades, says a
recent patent application by NASA.
The agency foresees a day when space missions are undertaken not by one large spacecraft but by swarming formations of much
smaller, cheaper ones. Such craft could collectively provide a "floating optics" system for a space telescope comprising separate craft flying in formation, for instance.
However, should one spacecraft in such a swarm begin to fail and risk a calamitous collision with another, it must sense its end is nigh and put itself on a course that takes it forever away from the swarm – for the greater good of the collective."
posted by Fizz at 11:42 AM PST - 34 comments
Got an iPhone? Always wanted to fly a helicopter?
AR Drones allow you to fly a quadricopter with mounted video cameras through your iPhone.
[more inside]posted by Biru at 7:32 AM PST - 35 comments
Space Loteria. The Mexican memory game
Loteria illustrated using characters from the Star Wars universe. Click on a card to see it larger, along with its traditional counterpart.
posted by adamrice at 7:14 AM PST - 13 comments
September 5
F for Fake (French: Vérités et mensonges) is the last major film completed by Orson Welles, who directed, co-wrote, and starred in the film. Initially released in 1974, it focuses on Elmyr de Hory's recounting of his career as a professional art forger; de Hory's story serves as the backdrop for a fast-paced, meandering investigation of the natures of authorship and authenticity, as well as the basis of the value of art. Loosely a documentary, the film operates in several different genres and has been described as a kind of film essay. [more inside]posted by KokuRyu at 10:32 PM PST - 26 comments
"
Places like Picher are why Congress passed the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act of 1980—better known as the Superfund bill." - Wired Magazine on the most toxic town in America,
Picher, OK , and
the people who still live thereposted by The Whelk at 5:26 PM PST - 21 comments
Betty Mabry better known as Betty Davis was
the muse of her husband Miles, who she introduced to
the influences of Jimmy Hendrix, Sly Stone, James Brown and Carlos Santana among others.
However she should more righteously be better known as the Queen of Funk with some of the hardest, driving, rawest sound ever then heard in 1973. (The Music is after the fold)
[more inside]posted by adamvasco at 1:25 PM PST - 32 comments
Psychedelic Information Theory: Shamanism in the Age of Reason,
readable online, is
an analysis of the physical mechanisms of hallucination, shamanic ritual, and expanded states of consciousness. By presenting these methods in physical terms, Psychedelic Information Theory offers a rational and objective model for shamanic transformation and therapy in modern clinical practice. [more inside]posted by nickyskye at 12:49 PM PST - 18 comments
Only in Japan, Real Men Go to a Hotel With Virtual Girlfriends: Dating-Simulation Game a Last Resort For Honeymoon Town and Its Lonely Guests. "Some devoted fans will go so far as to pay twice the rate—most hotels in Japan charge per guest not per room—to indulge the fantasy that they are not there alone. A night's stay, at most, can cost $500 though many rooms are cheaper.
In Atami, the Love Plus+ fans—mostly men in their twenties and thirties—stand out. Unlike the deeply tanned beach crowd wearing very little, they are often pasty and overdressed for the heat in heavy jeans and button-down shirts."
[more inside]posted by Fizz at 10:23 AM PST - 49 comments
Young Caucasian Jackie Chan wannabes jumping around like they can't afford skateboards. Their multiple compound fractures and lifelong disabilities and pain conditions (not pictured) are your two minutes of reasonable amusement. [СЛЙТ]
posted by dgaicun at 8:44 AM PST - 89 comments
While controversy erupts
again over the corrupting influence of video games, some developers are working on projects it is very hard to get angry about.
Chime, an XBox game to be released for PC tomorrow, is one such project.
[more inside]posted by DNye at 7:44 AM PST - 18 comments
September 4
Social Networks and Data Mining: Where it is and Where it's Going Telecoms operators naturally prize mobile-phone subscribers who spend a lot, but some thriftier customers, it turns out, are actually more valuable. Known as “influencers”, these subscribers frequently persuade their friends, family and colleagues to follow them when they switch to a rival operator. The trick, then, is to identify such trendsetting subscribers and keep them on board with special discounts and promotions. People at the top of the office or social pecking order often receive quick callbacks, do not worry about calling other people late at night and tend to get more calls at times when social events are most often organised, such as Friday afternoons. Influential customers also reveal their clout by making long calls, while the calls they receive are generally short. Companies can spot these influencers, and work out all sorts of other things about their customers, by crunching vast quantities of calling data with sophisticated “network analysis” software. Instead of looking at the call records of a single customer at a time, it looks at customers within the context of their social network.
posted by Weebot at 7:10 PM PST - 22 comments
EA's new
Medal of Honor video game allows players to
take the role of Taliban insurgents killing American troops. In response, the US military has
banned sales of the game on all military bases, including in privately run businesses (such as GameStop) present on bases. Military members (who game) don't seem too happy about the decision
here. (More military member comments, some pro, some against, can be found
here.) You can watch someone playing as a Taliban insurgent
here. (Warning: MoH gameplay is rated 'M' for mature.)
posted by GnomeChompsky at 7:06 PM PST - 90 comments
Pat Jordan from the New York Times meets William Shatner: James T. Kirk TJ Hooker author Priceline Spokesman ("and shareholder") horse buff at a
farm Starbucks Gas Station horse park Tony Roma's mall equestrian ground
“I always did assume they were laughing at me. Lately it’s come to my attention they are laughing with me.”
A subtly poignant interview of a cultural
visionary hero icon has-been phoenix one-man universe.
posted by nickrussell at 6:52 AM PST - 62 comments
September 3
It's a simple concept: Given a choice between two random movies, which one do you like best? That's the driving force behind
Flickchart, an
addictive review site for movie lovers. Faced with two posters, click the one for the title you prefer (weeding out the ones you haven't seen). Good! Now do it again. And again. And again. With each new face-off, Flickchart perfects a growing list of your favorite films -- and there can be no ties. This leads to some
difficult dilemmas:
Star Wars or
Raiders of the Lost Ark?
Citizen Kane or
The Godfather?
WALL-E or
Spirited Away? But you needn't struggle alone -- Flickchart is also social. By drawing on
the data of tens of thousands of fellow users, you can create
remarkably specific lists:
Martin Scorsese's Best Period Films.
The Best Road Movies of the 1980s.
The Worst Movies of All Time. If you rank enough films, you can generate interesting personalized charts, like "Your Favorite Musicals" or "The Best Movies You Haven't Seen." These filters carry over to the ranking system, letting you judge nothing but Horror movies or 1960s movies or unranked movies or movies from your top 100. You can also comment on
popular match-ups, lending your voice to contentious debates like
Ghostbusters vs.
Back to the Future or
Jaws vs.
Predator. Not a movie fan? Don't worry. Flickchart will be expanding into books, games, and music soon. Until then, you can give your own data sets the Flickchart treatment using
this tool from CNN.
[more inside]posted by Rhaomi at 4:00 PM PST - 202 comments
Hackspaces are open resources for community, group, or solo work on digital media, electronics, robotics, and art installations. Many allow drop-ins, and are run on a voluntary, non-profit basis - there’s likely
one near you. Just want to repair something by yourself?
iFixit, previously known for their teardowns of Apple products, have launched an open wiki to create manuals on how to
repair everything from vehicles to household appliances.
posted by Bora Horza Gobuchul at 2:36 PM PST - 22 comments
Before anybody gets a heart attack, he aten't dead. The Guardian has a
new interview with Terry Pratchett, talking about his writing and state of health.
[more inside]posted by kmz at 11:41 AM PST - 46 comments
"In the depth of winter I finally learned there was in me an eternal September. This definite, very real September I'm writing in, however, is the only place and time I want or need. Football season is over; football season has begun. The rest is life, and it can and will wait until February, the question that always answers itself by becoming March, and then April, and then back to September again, where we do not root for Tennessee, because that is simply not done here."posted by ivey at 11:35 AM PST - 10 comments
In an attempt to make sense of the 6.4 million words that comprise the more than 573.000 paged lines in the wikileaks 9/11 pager intercept data, researchers Mitja Back, Albrecht Kuefner, and Boris Egloff from the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, have now conducted a statistical analysis of the emotional content of these pages.posted by Joe Beese at 10:00 AM PST - 7 comments
"Out of the blue, in the middle of a recession, the phone rang. What would it cost, the caller asked the founder of
DonorsChoose.org, to fund every California teacher's wish list posted on the Web site? The founder, Charles Best, thought perhaps the female caller would hang up when he tossed out his best guess: "Something over $1 million," he told her. A day later, Hilda Yao, executive director of the Claire Giannini Fund
mailed a check of more than $1.3 million to cover the entire California wish list, 2,233 projects in all, with an extra $100,000 tossed in to help pay for other teacher needs across the country. (DonorsChoose: previously on MeFi) [more inside]posted by zarq at 8:57 AM PST - 82 comments
Surely
this.......will warm your black, cynical, withered MeFi hearts ya misanthropes! Labrador Retriever/Dolphin love! (SLYT)
posted by spicynuts at 8:19 AM PST - 28 comments
Vox, the social networking/blogging platform set up by [former] LiveJournal parent company SixApart, is
closing down.
posted by mippy at 7:36 AM PST - 64 comments
Blu Mar Ten is an electronic-type production group that started out in the mid 1990s as the duo Leo Wyndham and Chris Marigold. Initially making drum'n'bass in
an atmospheric vein and dropping their
first single in 1996, the duo signed to LTJ Bukem's
Good Looking label
the next year, where they resided until 2001. After parting ways with GLR, they mixed things up and dropping a
UK Garage/breaks single,
a techno single, and even
a mashup of
Thin Lizzie and
The Carpenters, all before finally releasing their
first album in late 2003. Jump ahead to 2009, and
the duo is a trio, with
two more
albums to their collective name, and their revamped website that is now home to
a collection of mixes new and old,
a growing collection of videos, and a peak into
the evolution of a track.
[more inside]posted by filthy light thief at 7:03 AM PST - 5 comments
September 2
So where would you go looking if you wanted to find the deepest and sickest cold wave synth-beats of all? Then I think we would have to look all the way back to
John Bender, avant-garde
synth pioneer, who released three seminal
albums in the early
'80s and then just disappeared, forever. What else sounds this fantastic, and has that addictive, computerized, lo-fi ice beat? Maybe Ultravox, and the frosty, hollow majesty of
Hiroshima Mon Amour. Or
Soviet with Candy Girl, or Lori and the Chameleons and
Touchposted by puny human at 7:59 PM PST - 12 comments
"
Earlier this week, Tribune's KTXL Sacramento aired what it says is the first-ever TV station ad for marijuana. The Fox affiliate aired a 30-second spot, paid for by Sacramento-based medicinal marijuana advocacy group CannaCare and produced by KTXL, advertising a medical marijuana dispensary."
CannaCare Commercial.posted by hippybear at 7:14 PM PST - 20 comments
Ugly Vegas Carpets Want You to Keep Playing. "Mathematician-philosopher Alfred North Whitehead once said, “It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.” This certainly rings true with Chris Maluszynski’s Las Vegas Carpets series, whose name explains it all. The photos draw out the psychology of Las Vegas through the simple observation of carpet."
posted by Fizz at 5:12 PM PST - 51 comments
An idle brain may be the self's workshop. 'Recent research suggests that mind-wandering may be important and that knowledge of how it works might help treat such conditions as Alzheimer's disease, autism, depression and schizophrenia.' Once upon a time, scientists didn't regard idle musings of the wandering mind as very important. 'But in the span of a few short years, they have instead come to view mental leisure as important, purposeful work — work that relies on a powerful and far-flung network of brain cells firing in unison. Neuroscientists call it the "default mode network."''Understanding that setting may do more than lend respectability to the universal practice of zoning out: It may one day help diagnose and treat psychiatric conditions as diverse as
Alzheimer's disease,
autism,
depression and
schizophrenia — all of which disrupt operations in the default mode network. Beyond that lies an even loftier promise. As neuroscientists study the idle brain, some believe they are exploring a central mystery in human psychology: where and how our concept of "self" is created, maintained, altered and renewed.'
[more inside]posted by VikingSword at 12:12 PM PST - 20 comments
Nanotech researchers have developed, quite by accident, the first all-natural metal organic framework (MOF) made from renewable sources. And it turns out, you can eat them too.
“They taste kind of bitter, like a Saltine cracker, starchy and bland”
Doesn't sound very promising as a snack food, but it is very interesting to those looking to use MOF to
store gases, say hydrogen, in a more renwable manner.
You can actually
make these for yourself, you just y-cyclodextrin, potassium benzoate, water, and, well, Everclear. Yum?
posted by cross_impact at 11:45 AM PST - 47 comments
"
DateHarvardSQ is a unique online dating platform matching discerning women with Harvard University educated men determined to make a difference in the world as foremost doctors, lawyers, businessmen, academics and professionals. DateHarvard
SQ is owned and operated by a dedicated team of Harvard University graduates, whose goal is to help their community of peers find meaningful relationships across the globe." Ladies, be sure to check out to
Preview the Harvard Men waiting for your Smile.
posted by grouse at 11:05 AM PST - 90 comments
Victor Borge (
previously,
gtwo but not fivegoteleven) was well known five his
"inflationary language" routine. The fivemula: number sounds in ordinary language are "inflnined" to the next-highest numbers -- "twoderful" becomes "threederful," "threelips" become "fourlips," "fivefathers" become "sixfathers," and so on.
Here is a twoderful web toy that will inflnine arbitrary text, or inflnine the language of any website.
An example, using a story Borge crenined five this purpose.
[more inside]posted by grobstein at 9:56 AM PST - 24 comments
Thomas Lessman presents a selection of political
maps of Europe, Asia and Africa throughout ancient and mediaeval history. Watch the changes on the map through the
fall of Rome, peruse the patchwork of kingdoms in Southeast Asia at the heyday of the
Srivijaya Empire, or check out just
how much land Attila ruled at the height of his power. Some of his references have some good stuff as well, including more detailed maps of
Europe for the last two millennia, as well as the staggeringly comprehensive Friesian history website
previously linked on the blue.
posted by Dim Siawns at 9:51 AM PST - 14 comments
"Sure, Bono and Richard Branson can change the world. But there are millions of individuals making a difference who are not rich or famous." The Christian Science Monitor's ongoing
Making a Difference section focuses on "that unheralded community – 'to honor the decency and courage and selflessness that surround us.'”
[more inside]posted by zarq at 8:51 AM PST - 4 comments
A Widow's Journey [MP3]. "In 1989, Appapillai Amirthalingam - the most prominent political figure of the Tamil community - was assassinated at his home in the Sri Lankan capital, Colombo. Twenty years on, the Tamil Tigers have been defeated by the military. Appapillai's wife and son travel back to their homeland in search of his legacy in an attempt to understand what the future holds for Sri Lanka's Tamil people."
posted by chunking express at 6:06 AM PST - 9 comments
September 1
Snippets of poetry from the Imperium; a sample folk tale from the Oral History; brief biographies of over a dozen Duncan Idahos; two differing approaches to Paul Muad'Dib himself and to his son Leto II; Fremen recipes; Fremen history; secrets of the Bene Gesserit; the songs of Gurney Halleck -- these are just some of the treasures found when an earthmover fell into the God Emperor's no-room at Dar-es-Balat. Out of print for more than two decades, disavowed by Frank Herbert's estate, and highly sought-after by fans, the legendary
Dune Encyclopedia is now available online as
a fully illustrated and searchable PDF [direct link].
[more inside]posted by Rhaomi at 4:30 PM PST - 55 comments
Sleazefest: The Movie [
rather nsfw] is a documentary of the first Sleazefest, a two day festival of bands, barbecue, b-movies and beer that took place in August of 1994 at Local 506 in Chapel Hill, NC. The festival was extended to three days and became an annual event for the next
decade.
[more inside]posted by Potomac Avenue at 11:01 AM PST - 3 comments
Though her nomination was a joke, instigated by a group of men hoping to inhibit the local activities of the Women's Christian Temperance Union by embarrassing female voters,
Susanna Madora "Dora" Kinsey Salter surprised the pranksters by winning two-thirds of the vote in the mayoral election of 1887 in tiny Argonia, Kansas, becoming not only America's first female mayor, but also earning the distinction of being the first woman elected to
any political office in the United States. Her official notice of election read:
Madam, You are hereby notified that at an election held in the city of Argonia on Monday April 4/87, for the purpose of electing city officers, you were duly elected to the office of Mayor of said city. You will take due notice thereof and govern yourself accordingly. Though she only served one term and had no further political ambitions, she became a hero of the early women's suffrage movement.
[more inside]posted by amyms at 10:45 AM PST - 28 comments
Oliver Sacks is surviving cancer of the eye, ocular melanoma. In his latest book,
The Mind’s Eye, he "tells the stories of people who are able to navigate the world and communicate with others despite losing what many of us consider indispensable senses and abilities." In the interview, Sacks talks about his diagnosis, the after-effects of his radiation treatment (which include hallucinations that resolve themselves into words if he "smokes a little pot"), his apprenticeships with poets W.H. Auden and Thom Gunn, and the importance of science writing in an age when the authority of science is being undermined by religious zealots. Via MeFi's own, Steve Silberman, digaman.
[more inside]posted by nickyskye at 10:18 AM PST - 39 comments
