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Anybody out there remember The Left Banke? They were a kinda Beatle-y 60's pop/rock outfit out of New York City. Critics labeled them "baroque-pop", apparently due to the "classical" influences in their music. They're surely best known for their catchy little harmony vocals hit from 1966, Walk Away Renée. And in a reversal of the more common trend of white artists covering Motown hits, a rather unexpected version by The Four Tops turned up. Arguably, the song wasn't exactly a perfect fit for the soul vocal quartet at the time they first recorded it, but more recent performances show that they've grown comfortable with it over the years: maybe it's the slower tempo. Here's the lyrics. And the story behind the song. And what the hell, the Wikipedia page. And Songfacts. They all have something of interest to offer concerning this durable little number, originally written by a 16-year-old!
posted by flapjax at midnite at 11:39 PM PST - 51 comments

Radio 1.0 meets Web 2.0. TUN3R is a virtual AM/FM radio for the internet, complete with a little dial and a boss key, creating a uniquely satisfying way to search for radio stations. On a related note, also worth perusing is this discussion of the expanding world of social music sites. That list misses quite a few neat sites including the graphically stylish Musicovery; the Hype Machine, which pulls music from blogs; and Goombah, which reads your iTunes library, but there are many more. [some prev]
posted by blahblahblah at 10:22 PM PST - 16 comments

Remember all that talk about the Gulf stream turning south and England entering an new Ice Age?
Well, better take a look at this one: (at the bottom)... Ok, this is the Jet stream, not the Gulf stream, but turbulence is turbulence and chaotic systems have a way of quickly migrating to new attractors, often first displaying a kind of turbulence during the transition phase. Here's a link to a .pdf that may be helpful (or not...)
I tell you - Winnipeg (Canada's Global Warming Success Story) just keeps lookin' better and better! But, hopefully, never this good...
posted by sporb at 10:15 PM PST - 11 comments

Michael Korn has gone missing. According to the Colorado Daily Michael Korn threatened the lives of evolutionary biology professors at CU-Boulder. PZ Meyers has Korn as a guest at his scienceblog. He's a tad concerned. Bug Girl pays attention to these type of threats. Meanwhile, Deb Frisch has her own timeline & a fan club which is clocking its first year anniversary!
posted by filchyboy at 10:13 PM PST - 13 comments

Gawker's Poll for Most Annoying Liberal Arts College.
posted by Esoquo at 10:04 PM PST - 75 comments

Macrohistory. Prehistory to yesterday. This site describes humanity from prehistory to the 21st century - stories about ideas and events. Maps. Timelines index. Country profiles.
posted by nickyskye at 10:01 PM PST - 14 comments

Banjo
posted by Mblue at 8:47 PM PST - 61 comments

Kiiiiiii for any occasion, or just for fun! Kiiiiiii, that's K & 7i's, is a Japanese girl duo whose sound has been described as "Noise Pop" and "Experimental Fun Music." They've made a couple of bizarre music videos, played concerts in Japan and America over the last seven years, and now have an album and a live DVD. Listen to more on their myspace page, grab an .mp3 and read the history, and try to download 5 .mp3s from their site.
posted by CrunchyFrog at 8:10 PM PST - 22 comments

"The [textbook] industry charges outrageous prices for new textbooks while simultaneously doing everything it can to make older versions unusable or obsolete. There is simply no reason that a new calulus textbook should cost $157. The study of calculus, at least the type of calculus that most of us need to study in high school or undergraduate programs, has not changed significantly in decades." - Textbook Revolution.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 8:00 PM PST - 77 comments

The Sphinx Observatory atop the Jungfraujoch in the Swiss alps is one of the most amazing man-made objects I've ever seen. A UNESCO world-heritage site, it holds the distinction of being the highest (in altitude) structure in all of Europe. Approachable by a train that runs inside the mountain (via a tunnel dug between 1896 & 1926 at the cost of a small fortune, not to mention many lives), the Observatory rests atop a glacier which has been hollowed out to feature a year round gallery of never-melting ice scultptures (glacial ice is spectacularly pretty), and an elevator up to the research station.
posted by jonson at 7:39 PM PST - 30 comments

The maps of the London Underground and the Washington Metro are iconic in their cities and a favorite of experts on information graphics. They share a similar philosophy: sacrifice geographical accuracy in order to clearly illustrate the system. What if the New York Subway map were drawn the same way? What about the Interstate system?
posted by silby at 7:32 PM PST - 85 comments

Kinder Morgan oil pipeline ruptured near Vancouver, British Columbia Thick, black oil dripped from lampposts, splattered across suburban lawns and crept into Burrard Inlet after a geyser of crude spewed from a burst Kinder Morgan pipeline Tuesday. [google news] Work crews ripped into the TransMountain pipeline about 12:30 p.m., causing the oil to "explode," as one witness put it, from the ground and burble up from manholes, pouring down streets toward the ocean, according to witnesses. Kinder Morgan bought the pipeline from a Canadian utility in 2005, and is known as a "poster child for pipeline problems." More Kinder Morgan accidents.
posted by KokuRyu at 5:43 PM PST - 38 comments

Newsfilter: 30,000 customers in the San Francisco area lost power today at about 1:50pm PDT, in a series of power failures which knocked out a major datacenter hub: 365 Main. The hub controls servers for many social media sites, including Technorati, Netflix, Yelp, Craigslist and all Six Apart properties, including TypePad, LiveJournal and Vox. (6A's twitter stream has updates.) More here and here. Amusingly enough, 365 Main tempted fate and released a press release today patting themselves on the back for "two years of 100-percent uptime".
posted by zarq at 5:03 PM PST - 82 comments

The Sergeant at Arms of the US Senate, as chief law enforcement officer of the "greatest deliberative body in the world", wears many hats. Capitol security, IT support and network security, telecommunications, videography and photography, human resources, getter of you out of bed and dragger of your ass to work, and house mother for the occasional slumber party.
posted by litfit at 3:50 PM PST - 28 comments

Faceoff -- the three founders of college social networking site ConnectU have accused Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg of stealing their business plan and code. Tomorrow they face-off in a Boston courtroom. "It's a mélange of gossip about upper-crust Silicon Valley, allegations of old-school Ivy League skulduggery and an oddball cast of characters that ranges from precocious dot-com millionaires to aspiring Olympic athletes. In what other intellectual-property lawsuit are two of the plaintiffs a set of Harvard University-educated twins from Greenwich, Conn., with several international rowing championship medals under their belts? ...Despite the backstory's semblance to screenplay fodder, the outcome is anything but scripted, at least for now."
posted by ericb at 2:31 PM PST - 31 comments

Little kids are tough, but I have discovered their weakness.
posted by churl at 2:09 PM PST - 49 comments

DieKus. Haikus made out of pictures of gravestones, being plastered around New York City by a mysterious artist named Nick Beef. (whose name has some mysterious origins of its own)
posted by fungible at 1:56 PM PST - 18 comments

Who Can Sleep With Brows on the Prowl? Larry Blamire, new things maker out of ones we all remember extraordinare, and stiff dialogue dynamo is back in bad form with his latest offering, The Trail of The Screaming Forehead. Coming to festivals in Long Beach and SF this month. (previously!)
posted by Ambrosia Voyeur at 1:22 PM PST - 9 comments

Max Dohle's Stapelgedichten is a simple concept. Stack up some books, take a picture: a poem is born. Most are in Dutch, but there are some English ones as well.
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane at 11:21 AM PST - 36 comments

Quite an entrance. Single link youtube post to a pretty damn amazing performance at the Miss Black America 2001 drag show / pageant.
posted by dersins at 10:08 AM PST - 57 comments

Drew Carey - coming on down. Drew Carey announced on Letterman last night that he will be the next host of The Price Is Right. Begin crafting your "Florida Loves Drew" shirts now.
posted by daedsiluap at 9:35 AM PST - 121 comments

George Galloway suspended from parliament after uk parliamentary inquiry- gives speech prior to being ejected - (nsfw?). "It has come to something," he continued, "When the leading anti-war MP could get a fairer hearing in the Republican Senate than in the British House of Commons."
posted by sgt.serenity at 8:57 AM PST - 64 comments

"The user who submitted the video was speaking innocuously into the camera when the image of “goatse” was flashed for the briefest moment in 1/24th of a second" Live, Nationwide on the CNN/Youtube Democratic Debate.
posted by peewinkle at 8:33 AM PST - 126 comments

"This site brings together just a few of the hundreds and hundreds of new species discovered since the year 2000. Hopefully, it will inspire us to see the world as a place still being explored, and give us the courage to conserve and protect the fragile, shrinking areas of habitat left on Earth... areas which, as we see here, contain creatures we haven't even yet Imagined... " That, of course, makes living in a low impact woodland home even more appealing or scary (you choose). Although I will admit that even the best of intentions can lead to perile, as in the case of Timothy Treadwell (as previously discussed). He too wanted to be 'one with nature'.
posted by NotInTheBox at 7:35 AM PST - 18 comments

The wave equation is v = ƒλ. How does that make you feel?
posted by ikebowen at 6:18 AM PST - 50 comments

A Welsh Black Box to make biofuel whilst capturing car fumes
posted by ItsaMario at 3:29 AM PST - 26 comments

Since Rupes went to great lengths to protect Wendi, see some other examples of newspaper self-censorship
posted by Geezum Crowe at 3:25 AM PST - 14 comments