April 26, 2015

Eight thousand years of natural selection in Europe

How did Europeans become "white"? [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 8:49 PM PST - 46 comments

A Field In Pseudo-Germany

Want to play Warhammer Fantasy Battle? Not possesed of a Scrroge McDuck style moneypit or willing to sell organs in order to buy figures? Kieron Gillen and Matthew Sheret are here to help with Hipsterhammer. Jump in with guides to building Dwarf, Empire or Vampire Count armies on the cheap! Doubles as a bit of a guide to the weirdo world of Warhammer Fantasy, as distinct from your more generic Tolkienesque efforts. They even have a manifesto!
posted by Artw at 8:10 PM PST - 24 comments

The eeriness of the English countryside

Robert Macfarlane, in The Guardian: In music, literature, art, film and photography, as well as in new and hybrid forms and media, the English eerie is on the rise. A loose but substantial body of work is emerging that explores the English landscape in terms of its anomalies rather than its continuities, that is sceptical of comfortable notions of “dwelling” and “belonging”, and of the packagings of the past as “heritage”, and that locates itself within a spectred rather than a sceptred isle. Such concerns are not new, but there is a distinctive intensity and variety to their contemporary address. This eerie counter-culture – this occulture – is drawing in experimental film-makers, folk singers, folklorists, academics, avant-garde antiquaries, landscape historians, utopians, collectives, mainstreamers and Arch-Droods alike, in a magnificent mash-up of hauntology, geological sentience and political activism. The hedgerows, fields, ruins, hills and saltings of England have been set seething. [more inside]
posted by Wordshore at 4:07 PM PST - 59 comments

Don't Put Your Dry Ice In The Thermos, Mrs Worthington

While you were out, your childminders have been entertaining your offspring with dry ice experiments. You're that sort of parent, with those sorts of friends. On your return, you discover that this has gone down very well with junior, and that there's some solid CO2 left over. What could be better than to continue the science fun in the morning? All you have to do is keep the stuff cool overnight. Simple enough? Perhaps not. (Previously)
posted by Devonian at 2:11 PM PST - 65 comments

The International Journal of Proof of Concept or Get The Fuck Out

"Permission to use all or part of this work for personal, classroom, or whatever other use is NOT granted unless you make a copy and pass it to a neighbor without fee, excepting libations offered by the aforementioned neighbor in order to facilitate neighborly hacking, and that said copy bears this notice and the full citation on the first page. Because if burning a book is a sin—which it surely is!—then copying of a book is your sacred duty." [more inside]
posted by yeahwhatever at 1:35 PM PST - 9 comments

If a shark had pockets...oh, wait, this one does

Pocket shark caught: Rare shark with 2 big pockets netted off U.S. coast (pics) A pocket shark isn’t like a pocket knife, where it fits into your pocket, it is a rare shark that actually has pockets in its body, one under each fin. “Think ‘Jaws’ meets kangaroo,” [more inside]
posted by Michele in California at 1:28 PM PST - 27 comments

Do the hokey pokie

When you're sitting on the couch in your snuggie, do you ever wish you could be having sex? When you're having sex, do you ever wish you could be wearing your snuggie? Now you can with the Pokie! Comes with the exclusive Pokie Sutra.
posted by jeather at 12:54 PM PST - 72 comments

These are nobody's memories

"There is nothing borrowed, or blue." As the Sixth Circuit marriage cases head to the Supreme Court on Tuesday, LGBT organizations make their closing arguments via YouTube.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 12:32 PM PST - 16 comments

Back to the roots: the real meaning of a "power plant"

Three researchers develop E-Kaia, a phone charger that plugs into a plant. [more inside]
posted by ipsative at 12:16 PM PST - 17 comments

November: The Able Archer Wargames take place in Belgium

ICBM is a game that allows you to take on the role of a Deputy Missile Combat Crew Commander. Set in November 1983, during the Able Archer war games, it aims to accurately simulate shifts at a bunker beneath Ellsworth Air Force Base in South Dakota. [more inside]
posted by frimble at 10:51 AM PST - 19 comments

Distinctly Emasculated

[F. Scott] Fitzgerald saw homosexuality as a weakness—less a sexual predilection than something one undergoes in times of emotional distress. [Ernest] Hemingway used fiction to broadcast his virility after a sexually confusing childhood. Both were more sexually fluid than their contemporary reputations suggest. Cody C. Delistraty in The Paris Review
posted by chavenet at 10:37 AM PST - 39 comments

Denim cut-offs, floral garlands, fashion wellies - you know the drill

As a music fan, what I find even more worrying is that these “festival fashion” features only perpetuate the myth that women are incapable of enjoying music for music’s sake. More than that: these features are flat-out telling us we’re not allowed to. The subtext appears to be, “Girls: the boys have generously granted you access to their sphere; the least you can do is look pretty.
posted by acb at 10:16 AM PST - 43 comments

The Asshole Factory

They are designed to disinfect us of our fragility. To cleanse us of our flaws. To disinfect us of weakness. Love, grace, mercy, longing, forgiveness, passion, truth, nobility, dreams. Their objective is to stamp all that out; to eradicate it; to erase it. To replace it with calculation, ruthlessness, self-concern; gluttony; cruelty; anxiety, despair. By using the most sophisticated technology ever made to subjugate, oppress, and goad us into being little torturers ourselves. Our economy doesn't make stuff anymore. So what does it make?
posted by philip-random at 10:03 AM PST - 92 comments

We use products to dream things that matter.

The Random Startup Website Generator is brought to you by a pair of Georgia Tech computer science students. via Slashdot
posted by Little Dawn at 9:01 AM PST - 33 comments

Korean with a side of litigiousness

"So what does this curious tale of a mediocre restaurant prove? It proves that in London’s modern restaurant business, the combination of furiously high costs, reputations and big egos can be explosive. Indeed only one thing is clear to me. Right now the people really making money out of Jinjuu are the lawyers." Guardian restaurant critic Jay Raynor reviews Jinjuu - and the ensuing legal storm he accidentally provoked.
posted by Punkey at 7:09 AM PST - 67 comments

the lifecycle of discarded clothes

Unravel ‘Maybe the water is too expensive to wash them’: a short documentary on how Indian women recast and recycle the clothes the West throws away
posted by dhruva at 7:02 AM PST - 45 comments

Shifting perspectives: because that axe was difficult to carry.

Remember Stanley Kubrick's The Shining with Pippin Barr's Let's Play: The Shining, a browser game in Atari 2600 style. Press release.
posted by khonostrov at 5:21 AM PST - 8 comments

Maralinga’s Afterlife

At Maralinga, the British Government treated Aborigines, Australian servicemen and even its own troops as scientific guinea pigs. John Keane, whose father was there, looks at the dirty games that were played in the desert of South Australia.
posted by Wolfdog at 4:06 AM PST - 9 comments

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