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Herman Cain has a new joint. From Herman Cain, the main who broke the mold of bizarre political advertising, comes CainTV.
posted by dbiedny at 10:15 PM PST - 47 comments

"Had I ever given a compliment that made someone feel worse? Or that had no effect at all? I decided to learn how to deliver good ones. I devised a plan in which I would give a lot of them in a short time and work to figure out exactly how the best compliments worked, and why."
posted by vidur at 8:41 PM PST - 53 comments

Homemade Fire Tornado!!!!
posted by Confess, Fletch at 7:52 PM PST - 53 comments

Remember Nondrick from Livin' in Oblivion? Chris Livingston documents his descendent's non-adventures as a non-player character in Skyrim in PC Gamer's The Elder Strolls. [more inside]
posted by Ritchie at 7:52 PM PST - 22 comments

Isaac Asimov has a weakness for the US national anthem.
posted by madcaptenor at 7:27 PM PST - 85 comments

How to look your best the morning after (SLYT): makeup celebrity Lauren Luke aka panacea81 does a stealth PSA for domestic violence charity Refuge. (Interview)
posted by DarlingBri at 7:21 PM PST - 16 comments

Up-close with Atlantis. A photo gallery of Space Shuttle Atlantis, as it awaits decommissioning in the VAB.
posted by bitmage at 6:53 PM PST - 10 comments

Infographic essay on the meaning of life. Visual design by Marco Bagni Music by sarco-o (see also i am sarco
posted by boo_radley at 6:11 PM PST - 8 comments

Recent technologies developed at American universities are making communication easier for the sight and hearing impaired. Last summer a Stanford undergrad developed a touchscreen Braille writer that stands to revolutionize how the blind negotiate an unseen world by replacing devices costing up to 10 times more. Thanks to a group of University of Houston students, the hearing impaired may soon have an easier time communicating with those who do not understand sign language. During the past semester, students in UH’s engineering technology and industrial design programs teamed up to develop the concept and prototype for MyVoice, a device that reads sign language and translates its motions into audible words, and vice versa.
posted by netbros at 5:10 PM PST - 4 comments

Fallout 3 vs. Reality - A fan of the video game series Fallout 3, which depicts a post-apocalyptic world, travels to Washington, DC and Las Vegas to take photos of the locations as they exist today and compares them to screen captures from within the game. (via Reddit thread)
posted by Argyle at 4:38 PM PST - 51 comments

Coming to Lifetime - Steel Magnolias
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 4:33 PM PST - 30 comments

Virus (復活の日 Fukkatsu no hi, literally "Day of Resurrection") is a 1980 Japanese post-apocalyptic film about the release and spread of a deadly virus. [more inside]
posted by jiawen at 4:20 PM PST - 17 comments

Save the Words: Adopt words that have been abandoned by the English language.
posted by Fizz at 2:18 PM PST - 83 comments

When, where, how and why —since the origin of life on Earth about 4 billion years ago— did organisms' input/output functions become conscious input/output functions?

This week there's a who's who of cognitive science meeting at the The Evolution and Function of Consciousness conference at University de Québec à Montréal (scroll down a bit for the massive speaker list). The conference is in commemoration of the Turing Centenary (previously). And the best-of-the-web thing is: all of the videos (and discussion threads) are or will shortly be available on line! [more inside]
posted by mondo dentro at 2:16 PM PST - 46 comments

Watch competitive eater Takeru Kobayashi Eat 397 Hot Dogs, 32 Eggs, 337 Chicken Wings, 13 Sandwiches, 25 Peeps, 30 Tacos, 16 Bananas, and Chug 25 Bottles of Milk. Also, how to eat hot dogs like Takeru Kobayashi.
posted by crunchland at 2:15 PM PST - 43 comments

What's the best way to show your Hufflepuff House pride? Why Lady Gaga parody videos, of course.
posted by The Whelk at 2:08 PM PST - 53 comments

The Race Card Project by Michele Norris of NPR.
posted by mrgrimm at 12:27 PM PST - 19 comments

For a time, Max Linder was considered the greatest of film comedians. Star of over 500 films (examples, 1, 2), inventor of the mirror gag, he was arguably the first film star. His life changed forever when he fought on the front lines in World War I, surviving three serious wounds, including a gas attack. Thereafter, he began bouts of depression. In 1925, he talked his new bride into a suicide pact, dying on Halloween. [more inside]
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 12:26 PM PST - 11 comments

These cards, produced in 1938 by Philadelphia-based Gum, Inc. (later Bowman), produced a political furor unlike any other. The idea for these cards was introduced by George Moll, a Sunday-school teacher and Gum, Inc.'s advertising counsel. Warren Bowman, owner of Gum, Inc., claimed that he wanted to "teach peace by exposing the horrors of war." [link is to an archive of trading cards featuring cartoonish racism/violence/godknowswhat] [more inside]
posted by Think_Long at 12:21 PM PST - 9 comments

Roosevelt Island in New York City has a pneumatic garbage collection system. As part of the planned development of the island in the early 1970s, network of 20-inch tubes takes trash from the island’s 16 residential towers to a central collection point, replacing streetside garbage collection.
posted by exogenous at 12:15 PM PST - 40 comments

Yasser Arafat's sudden illness and death in 2004 were a result of polonium poisoning, according to recent findings by the University Centre for Legal Medicine in Lausanne, Switzerland.
posted by dunkadunc at 11:38 AM PST - 220 comments

Nat King Cole Trio - Sweet Lorraine
Nat King Cole Trio - Route 66
Nat King Cole Trio - Embraceable You
Nat King Cole Trio - Moonlight in Vermont
Nat King Cole with Coleman Hawkins & the Oscar Peterson Trio - Sweet Lorraine
posted by y2karl at 10:58 AM PST - 16 comments

Bringing VICE to HBO: To win over the cable network, the Vice team assembled a “best of” reel that included stories on North Korean labor camps, Liberia and the gun markets of Pakistan and later produced a pilot that included stories about Afghan suicide bombers and underground heroin clinics. [more inside]
posted by thisisdrew at 10:16 AM PST - 22 comments

With the election of Pena Nieto to the presidency, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) ends a twelve-year absence from the seat. [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 9:53 AM PST - 29 comments

"So, one night I can remember sitting up in bed telling my mother (Connie Rosen) that I couldn't sleep because I was sure I was going to fail. She brought me some hot milk with brown sugar in it and told me that I mustn't tell anyone but I couldn't fail. She said that actually the whole thing was really decided by the headteacher. He or she did a 'recommendation'. If anyone failed who the headteacher thought should have passed, the schools found a way for that person to go to grammar school." -- Michael Rosen on his experiences growing up going to school in 1950ties Britain, with the Eleven Plus and the start choice of Grammar School or Secondary Modern. [more inside]
posted by MartinWisse at 9:19 AM PST - 25 comments

The Codeless Code. An illustrated collection of (sometimes violent) fables, concerning the Art and Philosophy of software development [more inside]
posted by Deathalicious at 7:46 AM PST - 62 comments

Take down the fishin' pole and meet me at the fishin' hole: Reports are that entertainer Andy Griffith has died at the age of 86. A comedian, actor, and musician, he created an icon of American decency by portraying sheriff Andy Taylor in his fictional TV town of Mayberry, featured on the Andy Griffith Show and Mayberry RFD. By all accounts, a kind a decent man. You can still visit his museum and peruse his archives.
posted by Miko at 7:32 AM PST - 157 comments

How Money Makes People Act Less Human: Earlier this year, [Paul] Piff, who is 30, published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that made him semi-famous. Titled “Higher Social Class Predicts Increased Unethical Behavior,” it showed through quizzes, online games, questionnaires, in-lab manipulations, and field studies that living high on the socioeconomic ladder can, colloquially speaking, dehumanize people. It can make them less ethical, more selfish, more insular, and less compassionate than other people. It can make them more likely, as Piff demonstrated in one of his experiments, to take candy from a bowl of sweets designated for children. “While having money doesn’t necessarily make anybody anything,” Piff says, “the rich are way more likely to prioritize their own self-interests above the interests of other people. It makes them more likely to exhibit characteristics that we would stereotypically associate with, say, assholes.”
posted by Mooski at 7:03 AM PST - 71 comments

Nervous Structure - an interactive projected light display. [more inside]
posted by quin at 6:53 AM PST - 5 comments

Most folks are familiar with Kathryn Bigelow's film The Hurt Locker, in no small part due to the six Oscars that it won at the 82nd Academy Awards. Some twenty years earlier, Ms. Beigelow made another move with a certain three actors who have a habit of showing up together in films made by Bigelow's husband. Rotten Tomatoes lists this film at number 34 on its list of Top 50 Horror Movies, depite its meager box office performance. It is one of several films featuring music by Tangerine Dream. A remake of the film had been under consideration recently, but was shelved due to the presence of another film franchise in the same genre.
posted by DWRoelands at 6:08 AM PST - 81 comments

Rooms photographed from above by Menno Aden.
posted by nthdegx at 4:05 AM PST - 26 comments

The Hollow Crown is a season of 4 of Shakespeare's history plays being broadcast by the BBC. Avoiding past mistakes these are made for a television audience and set on location. [more inside]
posted by epo at 3:26 AM PST - 46 comments

Super Doomed Planet Comics is a webcomic covering such topics as literary success, noodles, and neckties. Occasionally obliquely and surrealistically political, it is typically just surreal. And best of all, it will teach you how to do the poetry.
posted by yankeefog at 3:09 AM PST - 14 comments

In 1982 Actor/Director John Cassavetes gave up a long weekend to star in a film student's short. The end product, The Haircut, is a charming, nearly magical, story of a man going for a haircut and getting much more. The director,Tamar Simon Hoffs, had a daughter Susannah who played in a band then called The Bangs, later The Bangles, who appear near the finish.
posted by Isadorady at 1:53 AM PST - 11 comments

Shelagh was here - an ordinary, magical life: The Toronto Star dedicated unprecedented coverage to the funeral of 55-year-old Shelagh Gordon – interviewing more than 100 of her friends and family – to show how a modest life can have a huge impact. "She didn’t have a great job, she wasn’t married and never had children, so she wasn’t successful in either the traditional male or female sense, Ms. Porter said. But people would keep telling stories about her kindness. 'She had a lot of magic in her life, and that’s reassuring... That you can live a full, interesting, ordinary life.'" The link includes an extensive interactive photograph of stories from those at Shelagh's funeral, and a video with clips from the memorial as well. Via the NYT: Redefining Success and Celebrating the Unremarkable. (previously: you are not special)
posted by flex at 1:06 AM PST - 17 comments