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Flora Brasiliensis [flash needed] was published between 1840 and 1906. It contains taxonomic treatments of 22,767 species of Brazilian flora. The beauty of the illustrations and the level of detail you can magnify to is magnificent (sorry, direct linking to example images is not possible but trust me, go and have a look).
posted by tellurian at 10:47 PM PST - 9 comments

What animals are endangered? (2006, updated from 2004) One in four mammals. One in three amphibians. Raw data and photos behind what others call the mass extinction crisis. Polar bears expected extinct in 25 years. In a little good news, Great Apes may be granted human rights in Spain (like the mountain gorilla -- all 660 that remain). In other news, without salmon, widespread bankruptcy expected in California's fishing industry. Me? I can only afford an electric sheep.
posted by salvia at 8:44 PM PST - 41 comments

Manlyweb.com -- One Real Damn Manly Site. We set out to create a web site for real men. Men who do their own engine work. Men who don't just read it for the articles. Men who know that good whiskey doesn't need to be mixed with anything, except maybe an ice cube or two.
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 7:56 PM PST - 79 comments

"Do we have the political will, do we have the military power, will we spend the resources required to achieve our aims [in Iraq]?" writes retired Army Gen. Barry McCaffrey in a memo addressed to the heads of the social science department at West Point summarizing his findings after a week-long fact-finding trip in Iraq. It will take ten years and billions of dollars, but the McCaffrey Memo claims that to leave Iraq prematurely would risk "a ten year disaster of foreign policy in the vital Gulf Oil Region." Fred Kaplan thinks the costs are too high.
posted by shivohum at 7:53 PM PST - 18 comments

“Even if one is not at all in agreement with her, with her politics, her ideology, one cannot help but respect her, admire her, even love her.”* Golda Meir, a key founder and later Prime Minister of Israel, was born on this day in Kiev in 1898. She was famously quotable (though one of her more famous quotes was actually more of a misquote). The University of Wisconsin fascinating set of photos of her life, from her youth to her old age.
posted by blahblahblah at 7:23 PM PST - 8 comments

Christopher Hitchens vs. Juan Cole (via).
posted by homunculus at 7:21 PM PST - 60 comments

A NOAA report says Earth's surface and atmosphere are both warming, and that earlier work that found otherwise contains flaws. In other news, global warming has started to weaken an important wind circulation pattern over the Pacific Ocean, a study suggests. The change could alter climate and the marine food chain in that area; polar bears and walrus pups sad.
posted by kliuless at 7:03 PM PST - 25 comments

Science imitates Star Trek, again. Physicists Nicolae Nicorovici and Graeme Milton have published a paper in the Proceedings of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences outlining a theoretical means for constructing a cloaking device. A superlens constructed from a metamaterial with a negative refractive index could be used to create a resonance that cancelled the light coming off of a (very small) object, rendering it invisible.
posted by justkevin at 5:53 PM PST - 11 comments

Nutsack too hairy? Let Philips Electronics help.
posted by jonson at 5:19 PM PST - 65 comments

Advances in traffic management are slowly being recognized as superior to stoplights. (java, video, video)
posted by bigmusic at 4:31 PM PST - 37 comments

Steering Them Wrong: How Schools Push Kids to Accept Pro-Gay Dogma.
posted by Mean Mr. Bucket at 4:08 PM PST - 129 comments

Power Surge: The Constitutional Record of George W. Bush Not much of this report from the Cato institute will be surprising to MeFites, but it is a great document [31 page PDF] that summarizes Bush's consistent disregard for the Constitution and drive for greater executive power.
posted by knave at 3:32 PM PST - 27 comments

No Death Sentence for '20th Skyjacker' Moussaoui (he Newsfiltered), and as he was led from the courtroom, the defendant, who had looked for the last few weeks like he was campaigning for martyrdom, clapped his hands and said “America, you lost. I won.” (I had severely underestimated this character's skill at Political Theater) In spite of the final spit-in-the-face-of-the-US, MSNBC.com's Unscientific Instapoll has 51% saying it was the right decision, while CNN.com's Poll says 63%, and Foxnews.com's poll... is about tax cuts. Disclaimer: Yes, I do some writing for the Entertainment section at MSNBC.com, but the News department does not know I exist and doesn't want to. And newssite instapolls are so-o-o Web 1.0, I know, but still, what's with the non-outrage?
posted by wendell at 2:54 PM PST - 76 comments

Solved: the case of the disappearing royal member. King Tut's penis was there all along.
posted by ibmcginty at 2:28 PM PST - 36 comments

In May 1968 a general strike broke out across France. The strike started at the University of Nanterre and spread to the streets as 80,000 students, teachers and workers demanded the fall of Charles de Gaulle's government, and they were joined by many other people protesting the brutality of the police. Timeline. Reports shown in cinemas. An eyewitness account from Solidarity. This revolt also gave rise to some amazing posters, printed by the 'Popular Workshop' at the Ecole des Beaux Arts. Also of note was the graffiti sprayed about the city, many taken from Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle and the Situationalist International. 1968, it seems, was an interesting time to be around. Boredom is counterrevolutionary.
posted by Zack_Replica at 2:16 PM PST - 17 comments

Get A-Life - an interesting read on artificial life and evolutionary computation, from the game of life (playable applet), through core wars, tierra and on to genetic programming. This approach has recently borne fruit to genetic programming pioneer and inventor of the scratchcard, John Koza, who last year patented his invention machine, actually a 1000 machine beowulf cluster running his software, which has itself created several inventions which have been granted patents. [See also: BBC Biotopia artificial life experiment, another odd BBC evolution game, Artificial Life Possibilities: A Star Trek Perspective]
posted by MetaMonkey at 12:31 PM PST - 14 comments

Canadian PM Stephen Harper eats babies. Or at least that's what many Toronto commuters read on their commutes Thursday, Friday, and Monday (they decided to leave the news up over the weekend). Another case for real news becoming more like The Onion?
posted by patr1ck at 12:22 PM PST - 58 comments

Forty men and one woman went to prison for sedition in Montana Seems that we make faulty assumptions about how we have protection and rights in our democracy, and that things used to be much better than they now are...not so. A big difference, though, is that now our Big Brothers have technology to help snare misbehaving citizens.
posted by Postroad at 11:05 AM PST - 38 comments

Sad -- such a sweet-looking kid, the smile on the face of a future suicide. Sad -- "If she only knew then how things would turn out…" Sad -- "I chose to kill her." Sad -- "You could see her personality break through the coma." Life is dukkha, said the Buddha -- a Pali term that means something like "suffering" or "the incapability of satisfaction." (Or as Mick Jagger put it, "I can't get no...") Here's the tangible evidence.
posted by digaman at 11:02 AM PST - 39 comments

My mother is very worried. ExxonMobil moved in and helped Bolivia develop, she says. Now they have food and medicine, thanks to the kindly hand of Big Business. But now Bolivia's kicking them out. After Exxon spent 3 billion dollars helping them! What will happen to the next poor country that needs Exxon's help?
posted by redsparkler at 9:56 AM PST - 110 comments

Mahatma Gandhi. Everything you ever wanted to know about Mahatma Gandhi including image galleries and his complete collected works.
posted by Roger Dodger at 9:40 AM PST - 25 comments

Newsfilter: 8.0 Quake Hits Tonga Lets hope this isn't a repeat of the Indonesian disaster, because 8.0 is huge.
posted by zeoslap at 9:25 AM PST - 57 comments

Safari is added to the spring 2006 update of the SANS Top Twenty Internet Security Vulnerabilities, following its last update in the fall which for the first time added OS/X to the list. OS/X saw its first zero-day exploit this year, there are at least seven new vulnerabilities waiting for a patch, and everyone is starting to notice. Do you still think your Mac is bulletproof?
posted by poppo at 9:00 AM PST - 92 comments

Today is the National Day To Prevent Teen Pregnancy. In the past decade, possibly no social program has been as dramatically effective as the effort to reduce teen pregnancy. Between 1990 and 2000 the U.S. teen pregnancy rate plummeted by 28 percent. This is great, except for the fact that this may be in part due to a decrease in male sperm count that will cause the human race to soon become extinct. It is also somehow related to the extinction of the taint. Previously.
posted by ND¢ at 8:52 AM PST - 48 comments

Avenue is a site of a snap photograph. Please enjoy it slowly. Here's a Japanese site of exquisite photographs. And lest I be accused of self-posting, let me say for the record that I neither took nor posed for the photos in the Orange Swan series.
posted by orange swan at 8:36 AM PST - 8 comments

A Brief History Of The Clenched Fist. With illustrations.
posted by jack_mo at 7:20 AM PST - 18 comments

Down with the Clowns? The Juggalos have been having a bit of a hard time lately. Perhaps it's because they lack a spiritual grounding. Though, lo, like many nascent faiths, the Juggalos strain for acceptance. No word yet on the details of Juggalo eschatology.
posted by klangklangston at 7:17 AM PST - 98 comments

Gotta love a website that thinks it's 1982. Jack Lawrence, Brendan Benson, Jack White and Patrick Keeler are The Raconteurs. This is their website. It's kinda neat.
posted by The Ultimate Olympian at 5:59 AM PST - 48 comments

New Zealand is a backwater when it comes to high speed internet. Today the government has done something about it.
posted by Samuel Farrow at 3:02 AM PST - 16 comments

bookmach.com Track memes and whatnot, as they propagate through the blogotronic information ethersphere, web 2.1 style_{[via mefi projects]}
posted by delmoi at 2:23 AM PST - 6 comments

Six String Shooter. "What we want to create is an invitation to an attitude of change," [Cesar López] says. "It says a lot of different things — but the main idea is that weapons can be changed from an object of destructiveness to an object of constructiveness." Swords into plowshares axes, Music from Menace, Music Out of Madness.
posted by weston at 12:14 AM PST - 5 comments

Video of guitarist who plays slide with a spoon held in his mouth.
posted by KevinSkomsvold at 12:00 AM PST - 11 comments