May 4, 2010

A Castle in the Making

Ozark Medieval Fortress – Thirty masons, carpenters and stone carvers authentically dressed, will work all year round for twenty years, the time required to build a fortress in the Middle Ages.
posted by tellurian at 9:50 PM PST - 74 comments

Loooooong Gone

Ernie Harwell, long time voice of the Detroit Tigers and previously the Baltimore Orioles, has died at age 92. Previously here. MLB's commissioner's statement.
posted by JoeXIII007 at 7:39 PM PST - 50 comments

Is this page cerulean or ultramarine?

Over 140,000 people participated in the xkcd Color Survey, naming various colors and the results are in. Among other cool things, you can see a nice map of RGB colors to color names and see the most commonly identified 954 color names. The webcomic is not the first institution to survey people about color choices and present pretty results. At the heart of color naming is a deeper debate about language, whether colors are universal, and how words shape perception. One highly influential view suggests that there are 11 universal basic colors, though the number of colors identified in native tongues varies across the world, but even the English origins of color words are complex. Perhaps you should test your own color perception, or just see a huge chart of color names in different languages. [also, prev.]
posted by blahblahblah at 7:34 PM PST - 42 comments

Hire Education

College, Inc. PBS's FrontLine investigates the rise of for-profit colleges. Dangling the promise of a degree that will attract a job, for-profit colleges have been consistent performers for Wall Street and have exploded in enrollment alongside their community college counterparts as a result of the down economy. Positioning themselves as an alternative to traditional schools for the working and adult student set, who benefits the most from this departure from the traditional college model?
posted by dr_dank at 7:33 PM PST - 64 comments

Where were you when The IDEA knocked at the windows of your mind?

The IDEA - The Indian Documentary of Electronic Arts - Seven somewhat dated collections of essays, music, videos, and thought curated and designed by Shankar Barua, backed by totally awesome early Internet-era graphics, and hosted at Laurie Spiegel's also-rad retiary.org.
Please note that many individual pages of The IDEA gazettes are very-very heavily loaded, by [2001's] WWWeb standards, with images/audio/video. In other words, if you can get past ugly old broken HTML and auto-playing music, you may find a lot to like in here.
posted by carsonb at 6:53 PM PST - 3 comments

The George Clooney of FPPs

The Rosa Parks of Blogs and other absurd comparisons by real people of famous people.
posted by flatluigi at 6:05 PM PST - 46 comments

Gaming the New York Times

Imagine: your book, a bestseller. A fishy Amazon gift card scheme run by "ResultsSource" apparently helped California Gubernatorial Candidate Steve Poizner get his book to #5 on the New York Times Bestseller list. Reporting by This American Life and Capitol Weekly [more inside]
posted by thisisdrew at 5:31 PM PST - 24 comments

Alert the BNP

The remains of a man from Africa who lived and died in 13th-century England have been unearthed in Ipswich. Analysis of the skeleton shows that the individual originated in what is now Tunisia, but lived for at least a decade in England. This is not the only surprising recent information regarding African presence in pre-modern England. A paternally linked gene known from Mali, Senegal and Guinea-Bissau has been present in the male lineage of a Yorkshire family for at least 250 years, and may reach back to the time of the Roman occupation. [more inside]
posted by Countess Elena at 4:54 PM PST - 46 comments

You have choices.

AlternativeTo finds substitutes to expensive and/or crappy desktop and mobile software. "Tell us what application you want to replace and we give you great alternatives, based on user recommendations."
posted by gman at 4:27 PM PST - 15 comments

Ion Propulsion "Dawns"

Star Trek nerd alert: Standard orbit, Mr. Sulu." Captain Kirk barks out NASA announces Dawn, an ion propulsion rocket to two asteroids, Vesta and Ceres.
posted by Cranberry at 4:04 PM PST - 17 comments

I am immortal, I have inside me five thousand rings

It sprang to life sometime in the 3rd millennium, outliviving the kingdoms of ancient Egypt, it survived six of the seven wonders of the ancient world, and it's older than Judaism. It survived 5,000 years (give or take a few hundred), and was cut down in 1964 by Donald Currey, a graduate student in geography. He was studying the Little Ice Age (prev), and he was looking for an old Bristlecone pine in the White-Inyo mountain range of California (prev), as a record for climatic conditions from that period. As that tree, nicknamed Prometheus, is no longer living, the record for oldest tree goes to a tree from the same stand, Methuselah. If trees aren't your thing, there are quite a few long-living organisms of other sorts. For more fun and photos, join Rachel Sussman on her journey to photograph them. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 1:57 PM PST - 43 comments

Nashville...Waterline?

The Middle Tennessee region, including Nashville, is experiencing extensive flooding after weekend storms dropped a record-breaking 13-15 inches of rain over the weekend. [more inside]
posted by ghharr at 1:21 PM PST - 92 comments

Kindle popular

Amazon is sharing the books and passages that Kindle readers highlight the most. [more inside]
posted by AceRock at 1:12 PM PST - 81 comments

Needs more Blanka

Street Fighter Legacy "Like many Street Fighter fans, Joey Ansah was sick and tired of Hollywood treating our beloved characters like complete (dreck). Unlike many Street Fighter fans, Ansah has the means and contacts to do something about it."
posted by kid ichorous at 12:51 PM PST - 37 comments

"This is so exciting to have a nice Travel Assistant and traveling companion! Wow! I'm so glad I met you."

Christian right leader George Rekers takes vacation with "rent boy"
posted by Faint of Butt at 12:10 PM PST - 379 comments

Rough Trade

Do It Yourself: The Story of Rough Trade (goog vid, BBC, 1:28) The history of the legendary indie label/shop, home to such bands as Scritti Politti, The Smiths, The Fall, Cabaret Voltaire, The Feelies, Robert Wyatt, The Slits, and many more.
posted by puny human at 11:54 AM PST - 11 comments

I think it’s immoral, I know it’s illegal, and it makes me want to barf.

Fan Fiction and Moral Conundrums : Diana Gabaldon, author of the bestselling Outlander book series, takes on the legal and moral issues of fan fiction. She's got a lot of people to convince.
posted by desjardins at 11:08 AM PST - 189 comments

The Thirty Dollar Centrifuge

How do you diagnose anemia in a third-world country without electricity? Use the salad-spinner-based thirty dollar centrifuge, developed by Rice undergraduate students Lila Kerr and Lauren Theis.
posted by jjray at 11:03 AM PST - 25 comments

Information Repository for the Kent State Massacre

Information repository for the Kent State Massacre from Ohio's WKSU-FM. With audio, video, photographs, and interviews of people who were there in honor of the 40th anniversary. Previously 2
posted by destro at 10:42 AM PST - 11 comments

INTERNET

Assimilate book-ism to webism and the book looks like nothing so much as an unreadably long, out of date, & non-interactive blog post. . . Web 2.0 has been revelatory in lots of ways—user-generated naked photos, for one—but the torrent of writing from ordinary folks has certainly been one of the most transfixing. Over the past five years the great American public has blogged and Tweeted and commented up a storm and fulfilled a great modernist dream: the inclusion, the reproduction, the self-representation of the masses.
posted by four panels at 10:29 AM PST - 15 comments

Mos Dub

Mos Def + Dub = Mos Dub
posted by chunking express at 10:23 AM PST - 29 comments

Obama Goes to Kalamazoo

Do you remember who your high school graduation commencement speaker was? Yeah, me neither. Fortunately, the class of 2010 at Kalamazoo Central High School in Kalamazoo, MI won't have that problem: KCHS was just selected as the winner of the White House Race to the Top Commencement Challenge, and will host President Obama at this year's commencement ceremony.
posted by 40 Watt at 9:30 AM PST - 61 comments

Cairo tribe recycles 80% of city waste - highest in world

The 2009 film Garbage Dreams, which is currently airing on PBS, documents the Zabbaleen a tribe that lives off of collecting and recycling trash from Cairo. They manage to recycle 80% of trash (vs 32% in the U.S.), the highest level in the world, well above most first world recycling levels, using primitive techniques shown in the film. As depicted in the film, and on NPR, since 2003 Cairo has been hiring foreign companies, who recycle much less, taking away their livelihood. They are trying to raise enough money (you can donate, buy a t-shirt or help) to grow their Recycling school, to teach more of their children their practices. Good interview with the film director here.
posted by Berkun at 9:27 AM PST - 13 comments

Take me out to the ballg ... don't tase me, bro!

Buy me some peanuts and crackerjack, I don't ca ... TASER! Phillies fan disrupts game by running onto field, and gets tasered in center field. It's cool, he asked his dad for permission first.
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 8:57 AM PST - 130 comments

Times Square Bomber says he acted alone

Faisal Shazad has been arrested in connection with the Times Square bombing as he attempted to leave the country. The suspect was allegedly trained in Pakistan, though he claims he acted alone.
posted by misha at 8:18 AM PST - 273 comments

If red and blue America seemed to be talking past one another about family values, it's because they were.

"In red America, families form adults; in blue America, adults form families." Do liberal and conservative states operate with different conceptions (*cough*) of family? [more inside]
posted by Bromius at 8:17 AM PST - 85 comments

Miss not the discourse of the elders. - Ben Sira

The Grand Generation (1993 - 27 min.) is a warm and inspiring portrait of six elderly Americans whose vigor belies their age. The film is a cogent reminder that most of us probably don't hear nearly enough of what the very oldest among us have to say. [more inside]
posted by flapjax at midnite at 6:44 AM PST - 7 comments

It comforts them to see an incomprehensible terror from beyond the reach of time reduced to cuddly, huggable teddy bear.

Cthulu Is Not Cute. (NSFW)
posted by shakespeherian at 6:34 AM PST - 81 comments

Ok, you guys are dead to me.

Life imitates art.
posted by Christ, what an asshole at 3:05 AM PST - 26 comments

The sun never sets on the British Empire; it sets on me.

Who are the grandfathers of noise music? The Nihilist Spasm Band formed in 1965 when eight men, using homemade instruments, began creating noise together in London, Ontario. None of these men were traditionally trained musicians, yet they are often credited as being the major influence behind modern noise music, inspiring Japanese noisemakers like Hijokaiden and Masonna, as well as western artists like Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth. [more inside]
posted by threetoed at 1:20 AM PST - 28 comments

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