January 30, 2013

Don't Tell Hillary Swank

Hilary/Hillary: The Most Poisoned Baby Name in US History in which Hilary Parker, Ph.D. candidate in Biostatistics at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, uses her statistical mojo to determine just how unique was the drop-off of babies named Hilary/Hillary the year after Bill Clinton was elected President.
posted by oneswellfoop at 11:52 PM PST - 83 comments

Pangaea um?

Just how badly does the Mercator projection distort our planet?
posted by special-k at 11:47 PM PST - 50 comments

At Her Feet

wikiFeet is the celebrity feet encyclopedia that anyone can edit. Its users post, rate and ogle the feet of notable women including Britney Spears (1270 photos), Yvonne de Carlo (26 photos), Eva Braun (7 photos) and Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor (1 photo).
posted by dontjumplarry at 11:11 PM PST - 46 comments

I Am Not Afraid Of You And I Will Spice Your Soup

Yo La Tengo's 13th album, Fade, marks the first time in 15 years the band has made official music videos. 2 to be exact: the colorful & playfully psychedelic Before We Run, and the serene & educational I'll Be Around. Bon Appétit chats with Ira Kaplan about the use of recipes in the latter video.
posted by mannequito at 11:00 PM PST - 12 comments

Wild is the Windy City

Chicago has been having some fairly remarkable weather lately, even by their standards. On the 25th of January there was more than an inch of snowfall recorded for the first time in 335 days, a new record. Then a surge of warm air from the south brought a temperature of 63 degrees at O'Hare airport on January 29th, a new record for that date, exactly one week after a temperature of 9 degrees was recorded (which, combined with the 35mph winds on that date, produced a windchill factor of about -20f). The current forecast (at time of posting this) calls for a high of only 14f on Friday (Feb. 1st), another significant temperature swing within a few days.
posted by MattMangels at 10:40 PM PST - 37 comments

Peekaboo

Can you find Momo?
posted by Scoop at 8:34 PM PST - 24 comments

Bloomberg has given 1.1 billion to Johns Hopkins

To date, Michael Bloomberg has donated a total of $1.1 billion to his alma mater, Johns Hopkins University, making him the most generous living donor to any educational institution in the United States.
posted by deathpanels at 8:26 PM PST - 41 comments

my cat is sad

Spencer Madsen wrote a poem about his cat.
posted by Room 641-A at 8:11 PM PST - 50 comments

To build the future, we looked to the past.

"You may find my actions extreme, but for a crew of sufficient numbers, if a suitable destination could be found, no return destination would be needed. Therefore, I have had to improvise, with our ship, with our crew." The goal was to make a short sci-fi film, but without CGI, greenscreens, or other digital trickery, instead relying on camera tricks, miniature photography, and stop-animation. And now it is done: C 299,792 km/s [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 7:43 PM PST - 41 comments

The Challenge

The Sinner Team is a group of Russians who like bungee jumping and body modifications. They combine the two in interesting ways. THE CHALLENGE is a documentary of their experiences. If you are squeamish about unusual body piercings, you should probably not watch this.
posted by boo_radley at 6:20 PM PST - 21 comments

A PERSONAL TALE OF UNWINNABLE REALITIES

Revenue Canada worker fired for his online customer service game [more inside]
posted by grippycat at 4:11 PM PST - 68 comments

A Mind That Rebelled at Stagnation

In 1984, Grenada Television produced a television series called Sherlock Holmes. The famous detective has been portrayed by numerous people including Robert Downey Jr., Basil Rathbone, and Benedict Cumberbatch, but British actor Jeremy Brett played one of the most holmesian detectives ever put to screen. Brett was known for his passion and skill as Holmes, as well as the humor and grace that he brought to the role. He was accompanied by a Watson played by David Burke, no slouch himself in accompanying the consulting detective. Granada was able to adapt 42 of Conan Doyle's stories during the show's ten year lifespan. Below is the entirety of the series on various youtube channels. [more inside]
posted by holmesian at 3:47 PM PST - 84 comments

Battered Vinyl Retaliates

BBC DJs Mark and Lard show of some of their treasured vinyl recordings which are "particularly hard to find these days in this kind of condition": Mull of *Kintyre, Messing about on the River, Rocking around the Christmas Tree, Bright Eyes (more). NSFW - although somehow they got away with broadcasting it in the middle of the afternoon.
posted by rongorongo at 2:59 PM PST - 13 comments

I am become Hello Kitty, destroyer of worlds: Domestic Cat Holocaust USA

In a report that scaled up local surveys and pilot studies to national dimensions, scientists from the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute and the Fish and Wildlife Service estimated that domestic cats in the United States — both the pet Fluffies that spend part of the day outdoors and the unnamed strays and ferals that never leave it — kill a median of 2.4 billion birds and 12.3 billion mammals a year, most of them native mammals like shrews, chipmunks and voles rather than introduced pests like the Norway rat.
That cuddly kitty is deadlier than you think
See also Feral Cats Kill Billions of Small Critters Each Year
See also The impact of free-ranging domestic cats on wildlife of the United States
posted by y2karl at 2:50 PM PST - 174 comments

The Streets Aren't Paved With Gold, Even Under All the Vomit

One point needs to be made clear. It's not that the British government dislikes Bulgarians or Romanians; somebody needs to pick up the slack now the Polish builders have become too expensive. They're just worried that people in Budapest or Sofia don't know that Britain is, well, a bit shit, that you can't find a decent goulash for love nor money and that you may just not like it there. So they're proposing an ad campaign to warn of the dangers of living in Britain. Knowning that in this, its darkest hour, their country needs them, Guardian readers have responded in their literal dozens to contribute ad ideas. It's not as if they're short on material, after all.
posted by MartinWisse at 1:12 PM PST - 102 comments

You can easily hear the effects of the horn.

The Ceiling Janus. Just a beautifully designed ceiling-mounted rotating speaker, for instant room-filling psychedelia at the turn of a knob. [more inside]
posted by anazgnos at 12:55 PM PST - 31 comments

it ain't the middle of life but I'm still / lost in the woods

Anselm Hollo, Finnish-born poet, translator, and teacher, has died. A major figure in the poetry avant garde for decades, Hollo was a professor at the Naropa Institute's Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. Robert Archambeau writes: "Hollo's grasp of the gulf between the sublimity of which poetry is capable, and the absurdities into which poets fall in pursuit of that chimera, a 'career in poetry,' made him the ideal person to hold the title of United States Anti-Laureate, to which he was elected by the Buffalo POETICS list back at the turn of the century."
posted by aught at 12:06 PM PST - 7 comments

Love and a gross misuse of office resources in mid-century New York City

Disney's Oscar-nominated animated short Paperman has just been made available for your viewing delight on the official Walt Disney Animation Studios YouTube channel! [more inside]
posted by brieche at 12:01 PM PST - 85 comments

"In the future, everything will be terrifying."

Dougal Dixon is a scientist, author, and illustrator. While he is most famous for his work on dinosaurs, his books After Man: A Zoology of the Future and Man After Man: An Anthropology Of The Future attempt to explore what might happen in the far future. The Posthuman Art Of Dougal Dixon. [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 11:35 AM PST - 26 comments

Down and Out in Paris and Berlin

Russians without Russia is an elegantly designed digital archive of the magazines and newspapers produced by the Russian exile communities of 1920s and 30s.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 10:20 AM PST - 12 comments

A TV made from TV remote controls

Chris Shen built a low-resolution video display called Infra using the infrared LEDs of an array of 625 remote controls. [more inside]
posted by exogenous at 9:59 AM PST - 38 comments

Typography Nerds Take Note

Courier Prime, a new, updated, better-looking and free (beer and speech) version of Courier has been released. It's been designed for screen plays but very much suitable for other uses, including documents, the web and mobile applications. [more inside]
posted by jeffamaphone at 9:57 AM PST - 69 comments

PRINTER IS JAMMED. OPEN DOOR, CLEAR FOOD, THEN PRESS OK.

Looking to print your own house, jewelry or dessert? Then check out Engadget's Consumer Guide to 3D printers.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 9:06 AM PST - 81 comments

The Best Camera is the One You Have With You

A Traveling Photographer is a short video by Kevin Russ, who has been journeying thought the American west taking amazing pictures with his iPhone. [via]
posted by quin at 9:00 AM PST - 20 comments

To caricature and simplify at the same time!

Charley Harper's "minimal realism" contributions to science and art are being celebrated by the graphic design blog Codex 99. Part 1 - Charley and Edie. Part 2 - The Birds. Part 3 - Tin Lizzie and Dinner for Two. Part 4 - The Golden Book of Biology. Part 5 - Bambi and Childcraft. Part 6 - The Animal Kingdom.
posted by ChuraChura at 8:43 AM PST - 10 comments

Flip Book Gangnam Style

Flip Book Gangnam Style
posted by josher71 at 8:26 AM PST - 24 comments

360-degree panorama photo taken atop the world's tallest building

This 2.5 gigapixel panoramic image (zoom) was taken from the top of Burj Khalifa in Dubai, the world's tallest building. It was taken to promote the Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum International Photography Award, the world's richest photography award, sponsored and created by His Highness Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the Crown Prince of Dubai.
posted by stbalbach at 8:12 AM PST - 69 comments

Lotus 1-2-3 is 30 years old.

Lotus 1-2-3 is 30 years old.
posted by chunking express at 7:34 AM PST - 41 comments

The Face of NFL Fandom on Facebook

With the Superbowl only days away, Facebook conducted a study of its customers' pages to see how NFL team fan representation played out across the site and geographically. Via Gizmodo.
posted by Atreides at 7:27 AM PST - 77 comments

One day at work I fall into brine and they close the lid above me

Simon Rich's sellout, as described by his great-great-grandfather, preserved in brine. [more inside]
posted by benbenson at 6:58 AM PST - 73 comments

Da Cush a Puhson Owl Tee

A complilation of a 2 year old wrestling fan's WWE wrestler impersonations from CM Punk to Kane. (SLYT)
posted by ShawnStruck at 6:56 AM PST - 8 comments

Where I Work

Where I work: LinkedIn recently asked their Influencers to write blog posts showing where they work, and explaining how they work. More than fifty responded - from Craig Newmark to Arianna Huffington to David Cameron. The workspaces range from staid offices to open bullpens, airplanes and hotel rooms, 10 Downing Street, university lecture rooms, a place for emergency naps, and everything in between. At least one of them includes a reminder to floss daily. Take a look: John C. Abell, Lou Adler, Rafat Ali, Steve Anders, Dan Ariely, Richard Branson, Tim Brown, Oliver Bussmann, David Cameron, Anand Chandrasekaran, Emily Chang, Andrew Chen, Deepak Chopra, Kevin Chou, James Citrin, Linda Coles, Claire Diaz-Ortiz, Heather Elias, Michael Fertik, Inge Geerdens, Herb Greenberg, Peter Guber, Eric Hippeau, Arianna Huffington, Aaron Hurst, Jeff Jordan, J.T. O'Donnell, Bruce Kasanoff, Tom Keene, Steve Knight, Jordy Leiser, Betty Liu, Michael Moritz, Craig Newmark, Deep Nishar, T. Boone Pickens, Ilya Pozin, Daniel Rosensweig, Naomi Simson, Trish Regan, Steve Rubel, Dharmesh Shah, Colin Shaw, David H. Stevens, Gijs van Wulfen, Martin Varsavsky, Andreas von der Heydt, Jeff Weiner, Geni Whitehouse,
posted by NotMyselfRightNow at 5:30 AM PST - 64 comments

Must Read

On Must Read, you choose the one article you think everyone should read—right now—then share it with a note explaining why. Follow people who post great must-reads, and your timeline becomes a command center for vital reading; you see their current must-reads, and nothing else. [via mefi projects]
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 4:12 AM PST - 14 comments

Jim Nabors - still alive! - married at 82

Gomer Pyle got married to his partner of 38 years, Stan Cadwallader, last week. Jim Nabors, aka Gomer Pyle of Mayberry and of the U.S.M.C., also of many records featuring his inimitable voice, particularly this rendition of "The Impossible Dream,", and the national anthem, married his partner of 38 years, Stan Cadwallader, last week in Seattle. [First link opens a news window, which can be loud.] [more inside]
posted by goofyfoot at 12:59 AM PST - 87 comments

Retrofuturist 80s Synthwave

Lazerhawk - Redline [SLYT]
posted by Doleful Creature at 12:12 AM PST - 25 comments

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