February 26, 2013

A hapless fool, a few steps behind the rest

Yahoo's Blow to Work-Family Balance: Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer, the first pregnant woman to ever become CEO of a corporation, has ordered all telecommuting employees back to the office. (Previously on MeFi)
posted by MattMangels at 10:51 PM PST - 186 comments

No surfers were harmed in the making of this video

Nervous seals, a pack of orcas, surfers, and a guy with a camera. February 23rd--Orcas in the lineup near Tofino, British Columbia.
posted by jokeefe at 10:44 PM PST - 16 comments

Q is for Q-bert, who fell down the stairs

The Game Over Tinies. Created by Brentalfloss. [more inside]
posted by louche mustachio at 9:37 PM PST - 29 comments

There are no words to describe the awful feeling I have inside of me

Heartfelt Minneapolis punks Off With Their Heads have just revealed Start Walking, the first video from their upcoming album Home. It follows on from the sound of their last album, 2010's In Desolation, and it's songs like Drive.
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 8:01 PM PST - 6 comments

The Yellow River Surging Northward Rumblingly

Zhang Kechun's photo series "The Yellow River" contains 40 photos of China's second longest river, ranging from cinematic to surreal, plus a lyrical introduction to the series. [via BoringPostcards at MetaChat]
posted by filthy light thief at 7:21 PM PST - 8 comments

L'Année dernière à Marienbad

The famous avant-garde movie Last Year at Marienbad is on YouTube. [more inside]
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 7:17 PM PST - 26 comments

Willemstad is the new San Pedro de Macoris

If you were going to set out to build a successful national baseball team you probably wouldn’t select a country with most of its land sitting below sea level. Camden Depot presents a brief history of honkbal, as the Netherlands nine get ready to compete in the 2013 World Baseball Classic, exactly 100 years after the formation of Quick Amsterdam, Europe's first baseball team. Last time around, the Dutchmen knocked the mighty Dominican Republic out of the tournament. This year's Dutch team, led by veteran Andruw Jones and Orioles prospect Jonathan Schoop, both natives of Willemstad on the island of Curacao, puts more Dutch talent on the field than there has been since Bert Blyleven's last game. (Blyleven is the Netherlands' pitching coach.) Don't leave it till game time -- learn to speak honkbal now!
posted by escabeche at 7:14 PM PST - 13 comments

C.P.U Bach isn’t a game.

C.P.U. Bach was an interactive music program released by MicroProse in 1993 for the 3DO. Designed by Sid Meier and Jeff Briggs, it generated Baroque pieces in the style of Bach along with accompanying visuals.
posted by griphus at 7:08 PM PST - 12 comments

Florida woman finds owl stuck in her car grill

Woman thought she hit, killed bird
posted by cjorgensen at 5:02 PM PST - 54 comments

Fourth Wave?

'I'm sick of being ashamed." Three days ago, an anti-harassment activist said those words to me in a flat above Cairo's Tahrir square, as she pulled on her makeshift uniform ready to protect women on the protest lines from being raped in the street. Only days before, I'd heard exactly the same words from pro-choice organisers in Dublin, where I travelled to report on the feminist fight to legalise abortion in Ireland. I had thought that I was covering two separate stories – so why were two women from different countries and backgrounds repeating the same mantra against fear, and against shame?
[more inside]
posted by eviemath at 4:35 PM PST - 19 comments

Counting Roses

Iconclastic game designer Kenji Eno passed away last week. [more inside]
posted by byanyothername at 4:30 PM PST - 15 comments

"More Burroughsian music"

sine fiction; vol.xx: the drowned world. via { feuilleton } [more inside]
posted by Doleful Creature at 3:47 PM PST - 8 comments

The future, but with monthly updates

I used Google Glass - "But what’s it actually like to have Glass on? To use it when you’re walking around? Well, it’s kind of awesome."
posted by unliteral at 3:37 PM PST - 229 comments

The Quantified Man

The culture of hyper capitalism. "Our work is being re-quantified — in a big way — and Chris Dancy, a director in the office of the chief technology officer at BMC Software, thinks it’s time for employees to take these metrics into their own hands." [Previously on MF] [more inside]
posted by instinkt at 3:22 PM PST - 24 comments

Go Thunderbirds!

"I think sportsmanship is knowing that it is a game, that we are only as a good as our opponents, and whether you win or lose, to always give 100 percent." - Sue Wicks. When the Coronado High School Thunderbirds basketball team entered their last game of the season, Coach Peter Morales had more than winning on his mind.
posted by whimsicalnymph at 2:17 PM PST - 22 comments

Out of ammo, nearly dead, monsters outside. But! I have a can of meat.

If Doom and Nethack lived in Estonia and had a baby, it'd be named Teleglitch, a recently released pixelated action roguelike that will completely murder you if you're not very careful about how you explore its procedurally-generated corridors, fighting off former coworkers, crafting spare parts into new stuff and hunting for ammo and food and clues as to what the hell went so terribly wrong at the Militech R&D facility on Medusa 1-C. The game has a 4-level demo (Windows and Linux, Mac too apparently) which will probably kick your ass plenty all by itself. [more inside]
posted by cortex at 1:47 PM PST - 56 comments

What is American Music?

Sound American: Issue #4, The What Is American Music? Issue of the web-based magazine Sound American examines American music in some of its rich diversity. The issue includes a fabulous "mixtape" put together by Ian Nagoski of Canary Records of music recorded to 78-rpm disc by immigrant communities in the US. (***see interior note) [more inside]
posted by OmieWise at 12:16 PM PST - 6 comments

Culinary Tech

Polyscience is a company at the cutting edge of culinary technology. [Previously]
posted by lemuring at 12:10 PM PST - 20 comments

"once having given a pig an enema there is no turning back,"

Death Of A Pig, E.B. White.
I spent several days and nights in mid-September with an ailing pig and I feel driven to account for this stretch of time, more particularly since the pig died at last, and I lived, and things might easily have gone the other way round and none left to do the accounting. Even now, so close to the event, I cannot recall the hours sharply and am not ready to say whether death came on the third night or the fourth night. This uncertainty afflicts me with a sense of personal deterioration; if I were in decent health I would know how many nights I had sat up with a pig.
[more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 11:43 AM PST - 32 comments

Foo Fighters were not involved

Cockeyed.com's Rob Cockerham answers the question: Can you create time bomb soft drinks by freezing Mentos in ice cubes?
posted by Chrysostom at 11:25 AM PST - 53 comments

Sweet Valley High Ghostwriters

In an essay in the Kenyon Review, former Sweet Valley High ghostwriter Amy Boesky, now an Associate Professor of English at Boston College, writes about her experience ghostwriting, how she got started, why she kept ghostwriting while also pursuing her Ph.D., and why she eventually stopped. Interviews with other Sweet Valley ghostwriters are here, here, and here.
posted by Area Man at 11:14 AM PST - 29 comments

Not really a funyun, either

There are so many real news articles that sound as if they should be articles in the Onion that they got their own site. [more inside]
posted by Halloween Jack at 11:05 AM PST - 26 comments

The Shuls with Sandy Floors

There are only five functioning Jewish synagogues with sand floors in the world, and four of them are in the Caribbean. How has the tradition been maintained for hundreds of years? [more inside]
posted by zarq at 10:48 AM PST - 5 comments

Gun Control might have become obsolete yesterday.

Defense Distributed of Austin, TX caused quite a stir a short time ago by creating a 3d printed gun and releasing the CAD files for it for free online. But people were less alarmed after learning that the gun had failed after 6 shots. The new version is still intact and functional after firing 600 rounds. They have also created a fully functional 3d printed high capacity magazine for the AR-15 and released CAD files for it, free online. Defense Distributed's founder, Cody Wilson, also succeeded recently in eating Diane Feinstein's lunch, and also in blowing Glenn Beck's mind, while apparently trying to convert Beck to Anarchism.
posted by MeanwhileBackAtTheRanch at 10:22 AM PST - 465 comments

"My Baby, Not My Child"

Callie Mitchell, a 25-year-old student and photographer, documented her pregnancy and decision to place her child for adoption. Photographs.
posted by Anonymous at 9:40 AM PST - 16 comments

Did the piggy have a mens rea?

In the Middle Ages, animals that did bad things were tried in court. Maybe that’s not as crazy as it sounds. "In the fall of 1457, villagers in Savigny, France witnessed a sow and six piglets attack and kill a 5-year-old boy. Today, the animals would be summarily killed. But errant 15th-century French pigs went to court. And it wasn’t for a show trial—this was the real deal, equipped with a judge, two prosecutors, eight witnesses, and a defense attorney for the accused swine. Witness testimony proved beyond reasonable doubt that the sow had killed the child. The piglets’ role, however, was ambiguous. Although splattered with blood, they were never seen directly attacking the boy. The judge sentenced the sow to be hanged by her hind feet from a “gallows tree.” The piglets, by contrast, were exonerated."
posted by bookman117 at 9:27 AM PST - 49 comments

The Miami Herald’s Carol Rosenberg on How to Report From Guantanamo Bay

The Miami Herald’s Carol Rosenberg has reported from the detention center at Guantanamo Bay since the first detainee arrived in 2002. Last month, President Obama scuttled the office responsible for closing the center, which means Gitmo’s “media tent city” will be a permanent press encampment for the foreseeable future. Petra Bartosiewicz spoke with the veteran correspondent by phone from Gitmo’s Camp Justice, where Rosenberg has been covering pretrial hearings this month of the alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
posted by Elementary Penguin at 7:38 AM PST - 19 comments

Butch Heroes

"In this series of portraits I am using the format of traditional Catholic holy cards to represent butch, queer women and queer female-to-male transgendered individuals from history." Via Autostraddle.
posted by showbiz_liz at 7:35 AM PST - 22 comments

Psycho History, it's what they wanna give me

Psychohistory, the imaginary scientific field created by Isaac Asimov in his "Foundation" series, may no longer be fiction:
Song Chaoming, for instance, is a researcher at Northeastern University in Boston. He is a physicist, but he moonlights as a social scientist. With that hat on he has devised an algorithm which can look at someone’s mobile-phone records and predict with an average of 93% accuracy where that person is at any moment of any day. Given most people’s regular habits (sleep, commute, work, commute, sleep), this might not seem too hard. What is impressive is that his accuracy was never lower than 80% for any of the 50,000 people he looked at.
Full article at The Economist.
posted by Strange Interlude at 6:57 AM PST - 39 comments

The Stars Are Out Tonight

The second, rocking single from David Bowie's forthcoming album The Next Day is titled "The Stars (Are Out Tonight)". The video stars Bowie himself, and Tilda Swinton. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 6:49 AM PST - 40 comments

12:18pm

Twenty years ago, on February 26, 1993, a truck bomb exploded in the garage of the North Tower of the World Trade Center, killing six people and an unborn child. More than 1,000 were injured. [more inside]
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 6:47 AM PST - 59 comments

Documentary about homeless 15 year old artist wins first Oscar for a crowdfunded film

A documentary about homeless teen Inocente Izucar wins the first Oscar ever awarded to a film financed in part through Kickstarter. Link is to her personal site, with a trailer video about her life.
posted by carolinaherrera at 12:11 AM PST - 9 comments

The February strike

On 25 February 1941, less than a year into the nazi occupation of the Netherlands, communist union leaders called for a general strike against the increasing persecution of the Jews. The resulting two day strike in Amsterdam and various other cities in North Holland, the February Strike was the first and only massive public protest against the persecution of the Jews in occupied Europe. [more inside]
posted by MartinWisse at 12:01 AM PST - 26 comments

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