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"Idiosyncratic Terrorist Breaks Out on His Own in Sahara Bloodbath" International terrorist Moktar Belmoktar, responded the way talented employees with bruised egos have in corporations the world over: He quit and formed his own competing group. And within months, he carried out two lethal operations that killed 101 people in all: one of the largest hostage-takings in history at a BP-operated gas plant in Algeria in January, and simultaneous bombings at a military base and a French uranium mine in Niger just last week.
posted by artof.mulata at 10:04 PM PST - 37 comments

Do you contribute to open source projects on github? Want to know how you're doing? Check your Open Source Report Card.
posted by empath at 9:23 PM PST - 40 comments

Eric Schliesser is collecting some memorable opening lines of philosophy journal articles.
posted by LobsterMitten at 6:46 PM PST - 41 comments

Abbi Jacobson got a letter in the mail, sent from Lt. Joseph O. Matthews, addressed to his wife, and was sent to her exact MacDougal Street address 70 years ago. [more inside]
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 6:17 PM PST - 20 comments

Anita Sarkeesian has uploaded the second video in her Tropes vs. Women in Games series. The video was temporarily removed after "her harassers abused YouTube's flag function to get the video removed".
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 6:00 PM PST - 226 comments

Fat City. Physician Karen Hitchcock writes eloquently in The Monthly on obesity in Australia and the obesity-as-disease paradigm.
posted by nicolas léonard sadi carnot at 5:12 PM PST - 105 comments

A very sad tale of one of the most respected action movie directors in cinema history.
posted by shimmerbug at 3:34 PM PST - 110 comments

An honest, heartbreaking, and ultimately informative postmortem on the positively rated game Retro/Grade presented at the 2013 Game Developers Conference.
posted by SpacemanStix at 3:07 PM PST - 16 comments

If product reviews annoy you with their lack of a definitive answer, you may already know electronics and gadget review site The Wirecutter, which tells you, definitively, what the best TV, office chair, smartphone, umbrella, and $100 earbuds are. Now there is The Sweethome, which does the same for home goods: ice cube trays, shower caddies, skillets, household drills, and the best toilet paper (unless you don't live near Walmart).
posted by blahblahblah at 2:08 PM PST - 77 comments

"Britain's poor were absolutely and relatively better off until Thatcher was elected in 1979. Since then, the bottom half of society is worse off than it was in 1983." "In 1945, when Thatcher turned 20, the richest 0.01 per cent people in Britain received 123 times the mean national average income. By the time she turned 40 in 1965 that had halved to 62 times, and the year before she came to power, in 1978, it was at its minimum: just 28 times the average income."
posted by marienbad at 1:27 PM PST - 107 comments

Russian scooter driver has a pretty crappy day.
posted by mudpuppie at 12:52 PM PST - 52 comments

"Arrested Development's fourth season is triumphant when it's not completely falling apart." That seems to be the critical consensus, which sees the season as ambitious but flawed—a "hot mess", if you will. The American Prospectcompares Season 4 to the housing crisis; Daniel Fienberg simply calls the season's length "exhausting". But how has binge watching affected the critical response? Showrunner Mitch Hurwitz asked viewers not to watch the whole season in one glut: "[Y]ou can’t really laugh the whole time. You have to take a break. There’s so much material." Some critics agree with Hurwitz; others argue that this season is "essentially a 7-1/2 hour long episode" and that binge watching is the only way to appreciate the new show. (Sadly, Hurwitz's original plan—to have the new episodes be watchable in any order—fell through.)
posted by Rory Marinich at 12:31 PM PST - 369 comments

Shut Up and Listen is a radio show by and for artists and DJs with learning disabilities aired on five stations in the UK. Produced by the Brighton-based charity Carousel, the organizers also run Blue Camel Club, England's largest music night for learning disabled artists and their fans in the UK with regular attendance of more than 600 people.
posted by parmanparman at 9:53 AM PST - 2 comments

Anatomy of a hack: How crackers ransack passwords like “qeadzcwrsfxv1331” Hackers get %90 of an MD5 password database using multiple analysis techniques including Markov chains, mask, combinator and hybrid attacks. These attacks combine dictionaries of previously-recovered passwords and passphrases with brute force and statistical analysis to expand the power of password cracking.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 9:41 AM PST - 153 comments

This summer will be an exciting one for fans of renowned light artist James Turrell. While his masterwork, Roden Crater, near Coconino, AZ is as yet unfinished, there are 3 large-scale retrospectives of his work opening at the LACMA (May 26th, 2013 - April 6, 2014) , Guggenheim (June 21, 2013 - September 25, 2013) and the MFA Houston (June 9, 2013 - September 22, 2013). To whet your appetite you can watch a short PBS documentary on his work or peruse this NY times slideshow of some of his installations with the stories behind them. Previously.
posted by nathancaswell at 9:19 AM PST - 14 comments

Chris Sims, formerly of Comics Alliance (previously) , takes a look at 7 awesome moments in the greatest police training video ever.
posted by Artw at 9:13 AM PST - 30 comments

Do you like libraries? Do you like comics? Then Library Cartoons, Comics and Drawings is relevant to your interests. Need more? There's always Libraries in Pop Culture. Not satisfied yet? Unshelved is the internet's longest running librarian comic, previously featured for its pimped out bookcarts contest, but also worth visiting for the regular Friday bookclub.
posted by MartinWisse at 9:05 AM PST - 5 comments

Cecil Crowninshield, resident mystical defender of Salem Massachusetts, has put down his Lumurian Quartz topped wand and picked up the keyboard to help keep his neighbors informed of goings-on around town via a series of local news columns - Impress your date! - The Top Five Salem Sandwiches and the ghosts who stole them! - Magick On A Budgetk! When not writing his regular column, Cecil enjoys commenting on others. [via mefi projects]
posted by The Whelk at 9:04 AM PST - 13 comments

For three days in May of 2012, seventeen cartoonists gathered at the University of Chicago to discuss the philosophy and practice of comics. [more inside]
posted by Alvy Ampersand at 9:04 AM PST - 2 comments

The history of people finding Australia goes a little something like this: Aboriginal Australians separated from a migration out of Africa into Asia about 70,000 years, and Australian archaeological sites have proof of humans going back 50,000 years. Jump ahead to 1606, when there were two European voyages that made landfall and charted portions of Australia. First was Willem Janszoon's voyage in late February or early March of that year, and then Luís Vaz de Torres came a few months later. Abel Jansen Tasman was the first European to come across Tasmania, and between 1642 and 1646, his crew charted the Australian coast, more or less (Google auto-translation, original page). Then of course, there was James Cook's 1770 voyage. With all these dates in mind, how did five copper coins from an African sultanate that collapsed in the early 1500s (Google books) end up on an uninhabited island in the Northern Territory of present-day Australia? [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 7:43 AM PST - 86 comments

As part of the Affordable Care Act, The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has released data that show significant variation across the country and within communities in what hospitals charge for common inpatient services. (via) [more inside]
posted by dubusadus at 6:52 AM PST - 70 comments

Here's that bad advice you were hoping for is a Tumblr featuring carefully curated scathing advice column responses.
posted by Harald74 at 5:39 AM PST - 59 comments

"Jobbik is one of the most politically successful far-righ parties in Europe. The Hungarian party is anti-EU, anti-semitic and anti-roma,
and have thrived since the financial crisis." SLYT (Channel 4 report from Budapest, Hungary.)

Also on Vice: My Week with Hungary's Far Right

Previously about Hungary:
Roma in Hungary: A Hard Life
The Frightening Hungarian Crackdown
Hungarian Democracy Under Threat
posted by bdz at 5:17 AM PST - 25 comments