MetaFilter

The coffins that George Bush doesn't want you to see. The Memory Hole filed a Freedom of Information Act request for photographs of American servicemen and women who died in Iraq. After an initial refusal, the request was granted. Over a hundred US troops have been killed in action in the last month alone.
posted by digaman at 10:14 PM PST - 101 comments

Koolio is a traveling autonomous refrigerator robot ... a cross between R2D2 and a vending machine.
posted by lola at 10:08 PM PST - 8 comments

I shared life's Growing Pains with him, and even winced through a video taped copy of Left Behind after finding the books interesting enough, but even my Christian friends think that this is just plain over the top. Ah, the born-again B-list celebrity.
posted by robbie01 at 8:34 PM PST - 83 comments

Hot Abercrombie Chick? Maybe not, "Something was amiss, and I had to prove that Hot Abercrombie Chick was either a) a totally different girl, b) a guy or c) some team of people creating an identity. And I was devoted to outing this fraud."
posted by cedar at 7:31 PM PST - 51 comments

Decrease your Erdös number!!! An Ann Arbor complex systems researcher is offering the opportunity to bid on math's equivalent of the Bacon number - the winner of this auction will, upon research collaboration, obtain an Erdös number of 5. The bidding is currently at $83.00.
posted by transona5 at 5:29 PM PST - 37 comments

The Palace of Hana & Yugen: History and Theory of Noh Theater. [more]
posted by hama7 at 4:57 PM PST - 5 comments

The September Project -- On 9/11, libraries big and small will host events where citizens can participate collectively and think creatively about our country, our government, our community, and encourage and support the well-informed voice of the American citizenry. A Day of and for Democracy.
posted by amberglow at 4:38 PM PST - 8 comments

The Game. It’s 4am. In the past twenty hours you've done everything you could ever have imagined-- been chased by black helicopters, climbed mountains, been scared out of your wits, broken the land-speed record for a mini-van, agonized over the inadequate size of your cranium, jumped for joy, and told your best friend off. Everything but sleep. You won't get to do that for at least another 8 hours. A combination of scavenger hunt, road rally and mental gymnastics, The Game sends six-person teams scurrying across the landscape in vans equipped with laptops and photocopiers, maps, bibles, walkie-talkies, GPS units, cryptographic cheat sheets and, variously, wetsuits, sledgehammers and blowtorches. Sound fun? Go for it!
posted by Daddio at 4:10 PM PST - 9 comments

The Horror of Blimps. This is just a short ROTFL funny story about a toy blimp gone bad. Brightened my day, anyway. (Thanks, Ken.)
posted by tbc at 3:52 PM PST - 16 comments

The Land Shark. Three wheels, three seats. 250 mph on land, 50 mph in the water. Yours for only £10-16,000, once they start building them. At least you can get a shirt now.
posted by gottabefunky at 3:18 PM PST - 7 comments

communimage. A collaborative art project.
posted by Gyan at 2:19 PM PST - 5 comments

A huge number of internships are illegal. So claims a labor lawyer in this USA Today story. Are unpaid internships a form of white collar exploitation we should crack down on? Just how much of the workforce is unpaid, or working on tiny stipends? And is it like this in other Western countries?
posted by inksyndicate at 1:37 PM PST - 43 comments

Every culture can be kind of defined by what they drink in order to avoid dying of diarrhea. In China it's tea. In Africa it's milk or animal blood. In Europe it was wine and beer. Salon talks with Neal Stephenson. [premium/free day pass]
posted by xmutex at 11:46 AM PST - 9 comments

Citypop's a stay-at-home dad in New York City. While his medical resident wife grinds out 80 hour weeks, he narrates the hurdles (botched circumcision, apartment fire, roach invasions) of raising a boy in the strange universe of Manhattan's Upper East Side.
posted by zsazsa at 11:16 AM PST - 17 comments

the biggest website rip-off of them all
paid for with your tax dollars. the CPA rips the excellent brookings institution. via the sleuths at tpm
posted by specialk420 at 10:56 AM PST - 32 comments

10th anniversary of Mellow Gold, Beck's first major label release. Marked by streaming of entire album. Over the next two weeks there will be more about the history and making of Mellow Gold, featuring interviews from those associated with Beck and the record.
[Registration required but they are quiet happy with a bogus email address]
Learn how to play along with Beck here and read lyrics to and story behind all his songs, including Loser '....I started the song by writing the verses, and attempting to rap like Chuck D [of Public Enemy]. When [Carl] played it back I thought, ‘Man, I’m the worst rapper in the world—I’m just a loser.’
posted by kenaman at 10:22 AM PST - 27 comments

Trudeau removes B.D.'s helmet... and that's not all. Garry Trudeau's decision to have central character B.D. seriously wounded has riled some Doonesbury readers and, of course, many cautious newspaper editors. In the same panel as the one showing B.D.'s inury, he's pictured for the first time without his helmet. Maybe it's a gimmick, but it hit me hard.
posted by soyjoy at 10:12 AM PST - 95 comments

Piri Reis Map I am a sucker for those books that hypothesize that Earth was visited by extra-terrestrials in the distant pass. One artifact that is brought up in nearly all of them is The Piri Reis Map, a document that seems to be a map includes parts of the world (such as Antarctica's ice-covered mountains) that were thought to be very recent discoveries. But, are they a hoax?
posted by synecdoche at 1:13 AM PST - 14 comments