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"The Architecture of Access to Scientific Information: Just How Badly We Have Messed This Up" Lawrence Lessig speaking at CERN on April 18, 2011. Long (~50 min), but wonderful and totally worth it (and the second half is about Youtube and remix culture).
posted by unknowncommand at 10:54 PM PST - 53 comments

The Canadian Pirate Party is official, registered, and running 10-12 candidates in the current federal election. The recent debate over usage-based billing convinced at least one of its candidates of its potential appeal to voters. They are unabashedly an issue-based party, whose platform deals with intellectual property, privacy, net neutrality, and government access/openness. [more inside]
posted by kevinsp8 at 9:50 PM PST - 13 comments

Nerds Ruin Everything. XKCD Sucks. Gamers Are Embarrassing. Defunct: Game Journalists Are Incompetent Fuckwits Stuff Geeks Love. Classic: Five Geek Social Fallacies
posted by Lovecraft In Brooklyn at 7:51 PM PST - 215 comments

TV On The Radio's Gerard Smith Dead At 34. Smith was TV On the Radio's bassist. [more inside]
posted by codacorolla at 7:10 PM PST - 90 comments

One year after BP's Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, a hydraulic fracturing operation in northern Pennsylvania experiences a blowout resulting in the release of fracking liquids. The use and chemical content of fracking liquids is a point of contention when debating what role natural gas will play in the future of energy.
posted by nowoutside at 6:58 PM PST - 84 comments

Puzzle Hunters - a high-quality, original animation by Matt Wilson (formerly of Bonus Stage)
posted by LSK at 6:12 PM PST - 4 comments

Avoid the News: Towards A Healthy News Diet. (large-ish PDF) Go without news. Cut it out completely. Go cold turkey. Make news as inaccessible as possible . . . . After a while, you will realize that despite your personal news blackout, you have not missed – and you’re not going to miss – any important facts. If some bit of information is truly important to your profession, your company, your family or your community, you will hear it in time – from your friends, your mother-in-law or whomever you talk to or see. When you are with your friends, ask them if anything important is happening in the world. The question is a great conversation starter. Most of the time, the answer will be: “not really.”
posted by jason's_planet at 4:58 PM PST - 113 comments

"My NY Mets sketchbook. I create an entry after each Mets game or commentary on the crazy stuff going on around the team."
posted by clorox at 4:17 PM PST - 9 comments

British photojournalist and filmmaker Tim Hetherington was killed by artillery fire in Libya today. He was 41 years old. [more inside]
posted by Rangeboy at 3:22 PM PST - 72 comments

"Weird" Al Yankovic wanted to do a parody of Lady Gaga's "Born This Way," so he did what he usually does: he contacted the artist and asked permission. Lady Gaga said she'd have to hear the lyrics, so Weird Al wrote the lyrics and sent them to her. Gaga then said she's have to actually hear the song, so Weird Al went into the studio and recorded it - at which point Gaga refused to give her permission. Weird Al responded by doing something he's never done in his entire career: he's asserted his fair use rights and made an unapproved parody available to the public.
posted by mightygodking at 11:04 AM PST - 538 comments

The Thinking Atheist: 'Nothing More To Talk About' (SLYT) - Many religious family members pray for their atheist and agnostic loved ones graciously, honoring personal boundaries and showing respect for the skeptic's right to form his/her own worldview... This video is not about them...
posted by MrBCID at 10:37 AM PST - 381 comments

On April 20th, 1979, President Jimmy Carter was attacked by a giant swimming swamp rabbit. With pics, 'cause it happened. [more inside]
posted by davidjmcgee at 10:27 AM PST - 75 comments

Paige Johnson works as a nanotechnology researcher at the University of Tulsa, Oklahoma. [...] Her current landscape research is focused on the strange and fascinating story of atomic gardening, a post-war phenomenon in which plants were irradiated in the hopes of producing beneficial mutations.
Pruned talks to Paige Johnson about atomic gardens.
posted by shakespeherian at 10:00 AM PST - 22 comments

Yvonne Strahovski, of Chuck fame, lampoons Katy Perry, Ke$ha, and Gaga in Three Pop Stars, One Song. Somewhat NSFW-ish, but the lyrics are quite witty and the tune is ear-worm-y. [SLCH]
posted by shiu mai baby at 9:59 AM PST - 32 comments

Writer Cath Elliot, recently nominated for the Orwell Prize for political writing, posts about what are, sadly, often the occupational hazards of being a political woman online. (NSFW language; author has tagged post with a trigger warning fwiw)
posted by mippy at 9:45 AM PST - 50 comments

Conceptual art collective, and part-time unemployment agency, Workforce Central Florida recently began the "Cape-a-bility Challenge" that has been taking some flack for spending $73,000 giving 6000 red capes (costing $14,000 for the capes alone) to the unemployed in their battle against the verbosely named existential super-villian Dr. Evil Unemployment. [more inside]
posted by wcfields at 9:45 AM PST - 34 comments

"Cumbia is one of the world's great dance grooves. It is made up of merry guitars and accordions, torrid brass, and insistent, deep-toned drums and percussion, pounding out a lopsided, strutting 4/4 rhythm with a kick like nitroglycerine. Cumbia is the result of three colliding cultures that settled in Colombia at different times. Indigenous peoples were followed by the Spanish conquistadors, who added on Moorish influences from the sack of Granada. Finally, African slaves were brought in, and they supplied both the rhythm and the means to bring it forth. From its beginnings as a courtship dance among the slave population, cumbia gradually became the soul of the entire nation." PRI's The World asks, which do you prefer, Cumbia old or Cumbia new? For Cumbia old the list is long: Amaneciendo! :: Cumbias En Moog "Cumbia De Sal" :: Cumbia Sampuesana :: Pedro Laza - Cumbia del Monte :: Gabriel Romero - La Subienda :: Cumbia plegaria :: Soledad - Lucy Gonzalez :: La Zenaida :: For Cumbia new start here: Chancha via Circuito and then check out the ZZK Mix Tapes: Fauna Megamix :: Tremor :: King Koya
posted by puny human at 9:44 AM PST - 24 comments

Meet Doctor Doom "Forty years ago, with his band Pentagram, Bobby Liebling invented a style of fiendishly heavy metal that hardly anyone heard. He spent the ensuing decades in a haze of hard drugs and big trouble. (5 arrests, 35 detoxes, more than 200 hospital visits.) Now, with the genre he spawned on the rise and a young wife and baby boy in tow, Liebling is feeling the first rumblings of success. Here's where things start to get weird." [more inside]
posted by zarq at 8:03 AM PST - 26 comments

iPhones Found to Track Your Movements, Keep Record Security researchers have discovered that without any input from the user, iPhones permanently record the movements of their owners. Download an open-source app (Mac) here to reveal your own geo history.
posted by modernnomad at 7:22 AM PST - 380 comments

Famous dictators and the books/poetry they write. [more inside]
posted by gman at 7:09 AM PST - 21 comments

Amazon has announced that library lending will be available on the Kindle later this year. Teaming with Overdrive, the program will start with 11,000 libraries in the United States. One of the key features touted by the company will be that users "can highlight and add margin notes to Kindle books you check out from your local library. Your notes will not show up when the next patron checks out the book. But if you check out the book again, or subsequently buy it, your notes will be there just as you left them." Could this be a possible death blow to the Nook?
posted by NotMyselfRightNow at 6:50 AM PST - 94 comments

The poor in Ethiopia are often unable to buy newspapers, so they 'rent' papers for 20-30 minutes at a time from local entrepreneurs.
posted by reenum at 6:29 AM PST - 26 comments

Could you live in repurposed freight containers? How about a pig sty or a water tower? You can really fix a water tower up nicely. Folks can live in all kinds of things, including an old cement factory. [more inside]
posted by kinnakeet at 6:16 AM PST - 38 comments

Lovely and haunting photographs of 25 Shipwrecks from around the world. [more inside]
posted by benzo8 at 1:27 AM PST - 25 comments

Riki Lindhome and Kate Micucci take a closer look at issues regarding the availability of medical marijuana. [more inside]
posted by KChasm at 12:51 AM PST - 41 comments