February 13, 2015

Valentine's day fireworks

"The only cure for a broken heart is reversed slow motion." In this 4-minute video, your friends at the Slow Mo Lab irreverently explode some Valentine's Day clichés. Quite literally. (Not suitable for the corny or hopelessly romantic.)
posted by Sir Rinse at 11:18 PM PST - 7 comments

Walking in... single shot videos of city life

Kees Colijn's "Walking in..." project is a series of fascinating single shot videos, each up to two hours long, filmed as he walks through cities such as Yangon in Myanmar, Varanasi in India, Makassar in Indonesia and Pokhara in Nepal (Youtube links). See and hear everyday life in these places, not just the slick travel show version.
posted by AnnaRat at 10:45 PM PST - 15 comments

Building Lego Creations for SCIENCE

How scientists are using Lego to manipulate insects. An unusual scientific paper has just appeared online detailing how entomologists can use Legos to build apparatuses to handle museum specimens. This is important: museum specimens are what we use to study biological history, and preserving them is increasingly less well funded. Fortunately, innovations like this fall into a larger biological tradition of building your own equipment. [more inside]
posted by sciatrix at 9:32 PM PST - 7 comments

“I think it’s about authenticity,”

Don't Judge A Book By Its Author by Aminatta Forna [The Guardian]
‘I have never met a writer who wishes to be described as a female writer, gay writer, black writer, Asian writer or African writer’ … Aminatta Forna on her frustration at the book world’s obsession with labels and identity.
posted by Fizz at 6:37 PM PST - 10 comments

What do we do now? / Now we're ten years older / The bands we loved are dead

After eight years, 57 releases, and a successful kickstarter, the purveyor of soft and sweet indiepop music WeePOP! Records is closing shop today. To celebrate, they've put together a retrospective mix in two parts for your enjoyment: Part 1 and Part 2. [more inside]
posted by vibratory manner of working at 6:36 PM PST - 7 comments

What the Sharing Economy Takes

Uber and Airbnb monetize the desperation of people in the post-crisis economy while sounding generous—and evoke a fantasy of community in an atomized population. [more inside]
posted by standardasparagus at 6:00 PM PST - 87 comments

fake sun

An artificial skylight "It looks like the sun... but it isn't. It's a brand new type of artificial skylight called CoeLux which, for the first time, recreates the scientific process that makes the sky appear blue. It also creates an illusion of depth to make the 'sun' appear to be far above. "
posted by dhruva at 4:19 PM PST - 58 comments

"Your voice was the soundtrack to much of my early childhood..."

Gary Owens, Announcer of ‘Laugh-In’ Fame, Dies at 80. Here's Corey Snow's Thank you, Gary - A Tribute to Gary Owens
posted by mikelieman at 3:27 PM PST - 45 comments

John Kitzhaber resigns

Less than 2 days after releasing a statement that he had no intention to resign, Oregon Governor John Kitzhaber has announced that he will step down on February 18th. Over the last four months, a number of ethical issues have come to light surrounding Kitzhaber's fiancé Cylvia Hayes, culminating in a criminal investigation, currently underway.

Secretary of State Kate Brown will be sworn in as Governor at 10am on the 18th, making her the first out LGBT Governor in the US.

(Kitzhaber previously)
posted by polymath at 3:08 PM PST - 35 comments

Where’s the new TALES FROM THE HOOD?

Horror’s scariest trend is the nonexistent black filmmaker. Via Joe Dante.
posted by brundlefly at 2:41 PM PST - 34 comments

A Time Traveler's Guide to Beer

In the May 1975 issue of Oui magazine, Robert Christgau and Carola Dibbell reviewed four dozen American beers, plus eleven imports.
posted by Iridic at 1:18 PM PST - 92 comments

10 ‘Saturday Night Live’ Sketches

Sunday night, NBC will celebrate 40 years of Saturday Night Live with the SNL 40th Anniversary Special, a three-hour event featuring appearances from past cast members, hosts, and musical guests. SNL has a rich history that is certainly worthy of tribute — and there has been no shortage of them on the Internet this week. But, as everyone knows, it’s also a show that has run out of steam in recent years. While the episodes are never exactly bad, the comedy has a tendency to rehash one trite and tired joke: men kissing men. It’s the show’s laziest “punchline,” and one that is never very funny.
posted by josher71 at 12:49 PM PST - 126 comments

Fool the Axis—use Prophylaxis!

How the Military Waged a Graphic-Design War on Venereal Disease In many ways, such a coordinated public effort to alter sexual behavior was unprecedented. At a time when discussion of sexual activity was anything but frank, the VD posters of World War II addressed the topic directly using clinical language, ominous symbolic imagery, and jingoistic slogans to help enlisted men steer clear of sexually transmitted infections. While American sex-ed programs have taken many forms over the last hundred years, the military’s VD campaign left a unique trail of ephemera in its wake, featuring imagery that’s both gorgeous and deeply unsettling.
posted by Michele in California at 12:45 PM PST - 30 comments

Fund THIS, Venture Capital...

The Internet of Useless Things is a parody site full of bad 'connected-ness' ideas,
like FitSpoon, "a connected spoon that tracks your eating speed and compares with others via a cloud database. When you’re eating too fast, holes open in the spoon releasing the contents."
and the euphemism-filled ThroneMaster that lets you "gamify your daily motions." [more inside]
posted by oneswellfoop at 12:08 PM PST - 31 comments

The Assassin in the Vineyard

Who would poison the vines of La Romanée-Conti, the tiny, centuries-old vineyard that produces what most agree is Burgundy’s finest, rarest, and most expensive wine? [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 11:03 AM PST - 21 comments

The Stanford Undergraduate and the Mentor

"This case, which has been picked up by the media, does not fit neatly into the narratives that have fueled an ongoing national conversation about sexual assault of students on campus. But it exposes the risks of Stanford’s open door to Silicon Valley and the pressure that universities are under to do more for students who say they’ve been raped. It also reveals the complexity of trying to determine the truth in a high-stakes case like this one."
posted by crazy with stars at 10:12 AM PST - 76 comments

Enter Franklin

How Peanuts got its first black character. Come for an interesting back-and-forth between Charles Schulz and a reader. Stay for a jaw-dropping example of what another strip was doing at the same time.
posted by the phlegmatic king at 10:11 AM PST - 74 comments

The Ouroboros of Scientific Evidence

"Do whatever it takes to not fool yourself, period, that's the scientific method" - Neil deGrasse Tyson. What if we can't do that?
posted by LiteS at 9:29 AM PST - 37 comments

TV’s Old Product-Placement Era Could Be Nearing Its End

Madison Avenue is looking differently at so-called product placement, the decades-old practice of inserting name-brand cans of soda, gadgets, and cars into the scenes and dialogue of TV programs. [...] The days of jamming the mention of a Subway sandwich or Dr. Pepper into dialogue in, say, CBS’ “Hawaii Five-0” or NBC’s “Chuck” or the CW’s “90210” — all actual examples — may be coming to a close.
posted by Chrysostom at 9:03 AM PST - 92 comments

No Pain, No Gain

The global appeal of the novel has led some fans to hallow it as a classic, but, with all due respect, it is not to be confused with “Madame Bovary.” Rather, Fifty Shades of Grey is the kind of book that Madame Bovary would read.
Anthony Lane reviews Fifty Shades of Grey.
posted by jenkinsEar at 7:55 AM PST - 215 comments

“Hello, my name is Yusor Abu-Salha.”

Hello, my name is Yusor Abu-Salha. "In May 2014, Yusor Abu-Salha – one of the victims of Tuesday’s shooting in Chapel Hill –recorded a StoryCorps interview with Mussarut Jabeen, who was her 3rd grade teacher." (Direct MP3)
posted by kmz at 7:44 AM PST - 85 comments

CNTRL_F+"Race"=0 Results

Citylab on the new data tool PlaceILive: "While PlaceILive is obviously a more serious endeavor than some of those awful "ghetto-tracker" neighborhood apps we've written about before, (previously) the site does wcore areas with high poverty rates and low educational attainment levels lower on its Life Quality Index score.

"We just genuinely believe that if there are more educated people, it is a nicer neighborhood, and the same with income," Legeckas says.

That may not necessarily be true, but it points to a broader problem with statistics-driven quality-of-life measures—one that Legeckas acknowledges: numbers can be deceiving."
posted by Potomac Avenue at 7:18 AM PST - 32 comments

Here's what one mom wants you to know

"Each year around Mother’s Day I go to the historic cemetery where Phoenix is buried to wash and weed his grave. Then I go to an older part of the cemetery where children were buried so long ago that their families are no longer alive to tend their graves. I hope that someday, years from now, when I am gone, maybe another mom will do that for Phoenix." [more inside]
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 6:58 AM PST - 23 comments

Christmas custard sauce is traditionally served from an orphan's shoe.

The journey of a food intolerant and an intolerable foodie. I'm Kate McCartney and I'm Kate McLennan and we're women! Welcome to The Katering Show! [more inside]
posted by h00py at 6:19 AM PST - 17 comments

Cuchillos Abajo

Carlos Llaguno Garcia, the Mexican born chef who rose from being an undocumented immigrant to executive chef at Les Halles, has died of cancer. He was 38. Carlos gained some minor television fame when he took his former mentor, Anthony Bourdain, on a tour of Puebla and Mexico City for No Reservations, and also appeared in his role as the restaurant's executive chef when Bourdain and chef Eric Ripert went back to work in the Les Halles kitchen for the show.
posted by BZArcher at 5:51 AM PST - 14 comments

How Facebook Landed Me In Rikers

How the NYPD is using social media to put Harlem teens behind bars.
posted by ellieBOA at 5:50 AM PST - 24 comments

All Her Children Fought

About two and a half years ago an odd email dropped into my inbox out of nowhere. It seemed to be a quickly written email from someone in Ireland. The writer, Liam, said he was asking if I had any stories that I thought might be worth filming. In particular, he was trying to find something under fifteen minutes long that he, and a crew of others from his village in Ireland, could enter into a film competition. And they needed it, like, yesterday.
Tobias Buckell tells how one of his short stories became a movie. All Her Children Fought is now availabe on Youtube, proving you can make a sf movie with only three actors and one special effect.
posted by MartinWisse at 2:23 AM PST - 5 comments

Shoegazers in their own words

An Oral History of Shoegaze In this oral history, Wondering Sound speaks with the bands and other figures on the margins of “the scene that celebrates itself” to discover from whence this distinctive sound sprung, and why it has stood the test of time.
posted by psmealey at 1:54 AM PST - 35 comments

« Previous day | Next day »