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When "Rationalism" makes you dumber: Scientific American writer John Horgan's recent talk to a large skeptic conference was cut short when he called for turning skepticism towards "hard targets" such as psychiatric drugs, medical overtesting and militarism, and away from "preaching to the choir" rants against the paranormal and superstitious. [more inside]
posted by blankdawn at 11:06 PM PST - 107 comments

Weird Skateboarding: Ritchie Jackson, Almir Jusovic, Jason Park, Kilian Martin, Gou Miyagi, William Spencer, no but seriously Willy Spencer.... Is This Skateboarding?
posted by carsonb at 11:00 PM PST - 15 comments

Chinese students gaming entry into and passage through Western universities The advertisements were tailored for Chinese college students far from home, struggling with the English language and an unfamiliar culture. Coaching services peppered the students with emails and chat messages in Chinese, offering to help foreign students at U.S. colleges do much of the work necessary for a university degree. The companies would author essays for clients. Handle their homework. Even take their exams. All for about a $1,000 a course.
posted by modernnomad at 9:31 PM PST - 50 comments

Norway's Virus make weirdness and dissonance surprisingly catchy and groovy, an uneasy truce between jazz and metal resembling a mixture of Talking Heads and Voivod. Stereogum offers a couple of looks at upcoming new record Memento Collider. "There’s Crzal's [of Ved Buens Ende, Aura Noir, Satyricon, and more] cool, controlled vocal, sometimes backed by a wistful maybe-theremin. There's clean-ish guitar that’s fringed with the fry of radiation. There’s the equally hooky and knotty basswork provided by Plenum, a returning member whose other gig, Manimalism, is one of the more interesting projects to surface lately. There’s Einar Sjursø’s subtly massive drumming, perfectly providing the right snap to every rise and fall. There are nearly eight minutes of grooves patiently fighting over the title of 'that groove.'" [more inside]
posted by Existential Dread at 8:35 PM PST - 6 comments

If you only know Indigo Girls from their few hits from decades ago, you might not be aware that they get pretty intense on every album. Let's look at their deeper tracks from each of the Girls and how they evolve across time, starting with the beginning of their label recording career in 1989, Indigo Girls and the tracks Blood And Fire [Amy] and Love's Recovery [Emily]. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 6:34 PM PST - 45 comments

Tormund thinks Brienne is beautiful (possible spoilers for the Game of Thrones HBO series)
posted by deathpanels at 6:09 PM PST - 47 comments

Imagine it's the Fall of 1987 and you recently saw The Princess Bride (trailer). Then you heard that Fred Savage was back, in an oddly familiar setting with another story, this time about dinosaurs. You might be thrilled to see Dinosaurs! A Fun-Filled Trip Back In Time! (full film), even if you've already seen Will Vinton's clayanimation that was used as part of a dream sequence of sorts. Flash forward to the present day and you might do a bit of research on the "prehistoric monsters" featured in the short film and find some of the details less than accurate. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 5:48 PM PST - 6 comments

Frisson (Wikipedia), dubbed "skin orgasms" by some researchers, is the sensation of shivers, often accompanied by the physical manifestation of goosebumps, which some listeners experience in response to particularly emotional or unexpected passages in music. Writing in The Conversation, Ph.D. candidate Mitchell Colver explores "Why do only some people get 'skin orgasms' from listening to music?" [more inside]
posted by rekrap at 4:34 PM PST - 108 comments

How can design techniques encourage animal phobics in opening up to a positive perspective on the feared animal?

Does not contain pictures of animals.
Trigger warning for tone: in parts, comes across as minimizing.
posted by wonton endangerment at 9:31 AM PST - 17 comments

You Know You Should Use Sunscreen. But Are You Using It Right? [SLNYT] [more inside]
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 9:28 AM PST - 179 comments

Here in the northern hemisphere the days are getting warm enough to start wishing for some cool air. Let's dream together of snowy mountains and fun ways to get down them. Sure, we could alpine ski or snowboard, some of us may telemark, and lots of us go sledding, but we're dreaming here so let's make things more unusual. [more inside]
posted by Songdog at 8:39 AM PST - 12 comments

"This is all hilarious, of course — a 14-year-old girl utterly fanatical about the Founding Fathers — that is until you realize that it isn’t going away." Joe Posnanski of NBC Sports on taking his 14 year old daughter, Elizabeth, to see Hamilton.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 8:25 AM PST - 71 comments

Portland isn’t the biggest city, the most historical city, or the best weather city. If it isn’t quirky donuts that we promote, what’s it gonna be? You think Seattle people actually like the Space Needle? Hell no. It looks like a giant alien dick. But you’ve got to hand it to them, they put that alien dick on t-shirts, aprons, and frisbees and sell it year round. Voodoo has become a Portland institution, and it’s time to accept it. What is civic pride if not the ability to look out-of-towners directly in the eye and say “you should buy this stupid bullshit.”
posted by Bella Donna at 8:24 AM PST - 132 comments

25 Literary Yo Mama Jokes
posted by Daily Alice at 8:22 AM PST - 36 comments

We praise people that are “courageous” enough to quit their 9-to-5 and dive into the deep end of the exciting unknown. We idealize and romanticize the idea of being our own boss and being in charge of our own schedule. To take a risk and reap the bountiful benefits. Yet no one talks about the real sustainability or self-sufficiency of this formula when the playing field is never even.
posted by Kitteh at 7:42 AM PST - 81 comments

How Tumblr Users Transformed a Homophobic Post Into a Dystopian Science Fiction Lovefest [more inside]
posted by moody cow at 6:31 AM PST - 27 comments

that's what it is!
posted by Sebmojo at 6:13 AM PST - 7 comments

TS Eliot's rejection of Orwell's Animal Farm [The Guardian] Digitised for the first time by the British Library, Eliot’s rejection is now available to read alongside others including Virginia Woolf’s to James Joyce. Eliot’s letter is one of more than 300 items which have been digitised by the British Library, a mixture of drafts, diaries, letters and notebooks by authors ranging from Virginia Woolf to Angela Carter and Ted Hughes. The literary archive reveals that Orwell was not the only major writer to suffer a series of rejections: the British Library has also digitised a host of rejections for James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, showing how his patron Harriet Shaw Weaver attempted to find a printer for the novel she had published in serialised form in The Egoist. [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 5:16 AM PST - 19 comments

The Guinness World Record for Worlds Longest Pizza has been broken. (not to be confused with the record for World's Largest Pizza) After a mile-long pizza was created at Expo Milano last year, pizza-makers in Naples (recognized by most as the place modern pizza was invented) upped their game, building a 1.15-mile coast-hugging track and five motorized wood-fired ovens on wheels, and in 11 hours, 250 pizza chefs turned "2.2 tons of flour, 2.2 tons of mozzarella cheese, 3,527 pounds of tomato sauce, 200 liters of olive oil, and 66 pounds of fresh basil" into a continuous pizza that Guinness approved of. [more inside]
posted by oneswellfoop at 12:36 AM PST - 35 comments