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In 1973, The Who released their sixth album, Quadrophenia. The epic double album tells the story of a boy named Jimmy Cooper who deals with mental illness on top of the run-of-the-mill stresses of teen life. But Jimmy Cooper isn't just any London teen.  Jimmy Cooper is a Mod. [more inside]
posted by Pirate-Bartender-Zombie-Monkey at 8:38 PM PST - 68 comments

Jerry Garcia & David Grisman -- Two Soldiers
Jerry Garcia & David Grisman -- Handsome Cabin Boy
Jerry Garcia & David Grisman -- Man Of Constant Sorrow
Jerry Garcia & David Grisman -- When First Unto This Country
Jerry Garcia & David Grisman -- Dreadful Wind and Rain
Jerry Garcia & David Grisman -- Russian Lullaby
Jerry Garcia & David Grisman -- Sweet Sunny South
Jerry Garcia & David Grisman -- Old Rockin' Chair
Jerry Garcia & David Grisman -- Down Where The River Bends
Jerry Garcia & David Grisman -- Shady Grove
Jerry Garcia & David Grisman -- Friend of the Devil
Jerry Garcia & David Grisman -- Ripple [more inside]
posted by y2karl at 8:34 PM PST - 16 comments

Mark Hirsch worked as a professional photographer for almost 20 years. He was laid off, then he was hit by a truck. He all but stopped working, until he got an iPhone. His friend goaded him into using the camera, and he started taking pictures of "That Tree." A little more than a year later he was profiled in "How a tree helped heal me."
posted by nevercalm at 6:57 PM PST - 14 comments

If you're reading this it's already too late... Hiding messages in hotels since 2006. By David Bussell. [Via]
posted by homunculus at 5:25 PM PST - 57 comments

Game of Brands: The Game of Thrones Houses as Modern Corporations (Article contains spoilers if you're not up on the end of the current season of the series.) Ads, logos, the whole thing, for such companies as Air Targaeryen, the Lannister Investment Group... [more inside]
posted by mephron at 3:54 PM PST - 35 comments

Gary Shteyngart (previously-ish) tries on a pair of Google Glasses (SLnewyorker)
posted by bbuda at 3:35 PM PST - 55 comments

A layperson-friendly analysis of a seminal (1100+ cites) study on obesity that found no correlation between environment/upbringing and obesity, whilst finding very strong correlation between genetic heritage and obesity. To sum up: adopted children's body weight matches their biological parents, not their adoptive parents.
posted by seanmpuckett at 3:33 PM PST - 70 comments

The Tournament of Literary Friends. "Serious readers know we shouldn’t go looking for friends in fiction. Better to look for moral questions, social truths, emotional possibilities—the stuff of life. And yet, isn’t it sort of fun to imagine playing Eschaton with Michael Pemulis or cruising Mexico with the Savage Detectives? Isn’t imagining ourselves among fictional people actually pretty central to the experience of reading?" Novelist Katherine Hill and her husband draw up a tournament bracket of their likely/ideal friends from literary fiction. From the Paris Review.
posted by sweetkid at 1:56 PM PST - 84 comments

"I hope we come to the meeting today with solutions and not excuses for me to wiggle myself out of the repeated lies I have told over the last 6 months." Tony Bennett, the Indiana Superintendent of Public Instruction, had a big problem. Christel House Academy, a public charter school in Indianapolis founded by time-share magnate and major GOP donor Christel DeHaan, had come in with a C on the state's A-F grading scale, thanks to poor scores by 9th and 10th graders in English and math. "They need to understand that anything less than an A for Christel House compromises all of our accountability work," Bennett wrote to a staffer. Fortunately, Bennett's team found a solution, revealed today in staff e-mails obtained by the AP -- change the state's grading scale so that the offending grades didn't count. Will Bennett be able to hold on as Indiana's top education official? Not to worry: in January, he moved on to the same job in Florida. [more inside]
posted by escabeche at 1:44 PM PST - 72 comments

Top 10 most iconic data graphs of the last decade.
FastCoLabs enlisted three data visualization experts to compile this list to answer the question posed in Simply Statistics, a blog from three Johns Hopkins biostatistics professors. via [more inside]
posted by mcstayinskool at 1:11 PM PST - 27 comments

How the Western Was Lost (and Why it Matters)
posted by Artw at 11:17 AM PST - 226 comments

Psychologists recount a valuable lesson about the fragility of statistical validity and the state of publishing. "Two of the present authors, Matt Motyl and Brian A. Nosek, share interests in political ideology. We were inspired by the fast growing literature on embodiment that demonstrates surprising links between body and mind to investigate embodiment of political extremism. Participants from the political left, right, and center (N = 1,979) completed a perceptual judgment task in which words were presented in different shades of gray. Participants had to click along a gradient representing grays from near black to near white to select a shade that matched the shade of the word. We calculated accuracy: How close to the actual shade did participants get? The results were stunning. Moderates perceived the shades of gray more accurately than extremists on the left and right (p = .01). Our conclusion: Political extremists perceive the world in black and white figuratively and literally. Our design and follow-up analyses ruled out obvious alternative explanations such as time spent on task and a tendency to select extreme responses. Enthused about the result, we identified Psychological Science as our fallback journal after we toured the Science, Nature, and PNAS rejection mills. The ultimate publication, Motyl and Nosek (2012), served as one of Motyl’s signature publications as he finished graduate school and entered the job market. The story is all true, except for the last sentence; we did not publish the finding." [more inside]
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 10:56 AM PST - 19 comments

Two nightmarish visions of Albuquerque collide in this Breaking Bad/Weird Al mashup [spoilers for Breaking Bad through the most recent half-season]
posted by Copronymus at 10:39 AM PST - 21 comments

A Boston inventor has created a cup and straw that detect the presence of date rape drugs. The cup and straw change color in the presence of the common date rape drug GHB.
posted by chrchr at 10:23 AM PST - 93 comments

“It would be dreadfully unromantic to fall in love with a soiled invisible, wouldn’t it,” Clive Thompson reviews Wired Love, a novel about romance over the network, in this case, the telegraph network, circa 1880. [more inside]
posted by zabuni at 10:03 AM PST - 7 comments

Not Even Silicon Valley Escapes History [more inside]
posted by Pruitt-Igoe at 9:59 AM PST - 16 comments

On this day 128 years ago, Theodosia Burr Goodman was born in Avondale, a wealthy, largely Jewish, suburb of Cincinnati. An aspiring actress, she went to New York in 1908. Upon finding that there were no meaningful roles for blondes (Google books preview), she dyed her hair brunette. She gained notoriety some seven years later, with what would be her iconic black hair and dark eye shadow, in the movie version of a Rudyard Kipling poem called The Vampire. It was an overwrought melodrama called A Fool There Was, which starred Theodosia as Theda Bara, a femme fatale who lured men to their destruction. This film marked the first major motion picture publicity campaign and first studio-manufactured "star." [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 9:53 AM PST - 13 comments

Artist Sergio Albiac is creating generative portraits from selfies. You can be part of his new exhibition by submitting a photo via Google Drive. "In a nutshell, this experiment, with the participation of an Internet audience, will produce as many artworks as possible.... An automated process will create human portraits as generative collages, using as sources some images from the Hubble Space Telescope. Generated portraits will be exhibited at the flickr Stardust Portrait exhibition."
posted by Annie Savoy at 8:38 AM PST - 3 comments

"Founded in 1912 as a farm colony of Brooklyn State Hospital, the Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in Queens [New York] became, by mid-century, a world unto itself. At its peak, it housed some 7,000 patients. They tended gardens and raised livestock on the hospital’s grounds. The hospital contained gymnasiums, a swimming pool, a theater, a television studio, and giant kitchens and laundries where patients were put to work. Today, Creedmoor, still run by the New York State Office of Mental Health, has only a few hundred patients" and houses The Living Museum, an 'art asylum within an asylum' where patients can create and exhibit their art. But what is life like inside the institution itself? In 2010, Katherine B. Olsen spent weeks interviewing staff and patients. Her essay, published this week, 'Something More Wrong' takes us inside Creedmoor's women's ward. [more inside]
posted by zarq at 8:01 AM PST - 7 comments

You've just purchased a meal at a restaurant that offers a salad bar, with the stipulation that you can only take items from it once. How do you get the most out of your one trip? Simple: build a salad tower. [more inside]
posted by tocts at 7:18 AM PST - 82 comments

After explaining the situation to two or three people, my nightmare stepped up a notch with the most chilling phrase of all. "But Mr Welch, your cards haven’t been reported stolen." One man's experience of credit card fraud.
posted by Hartster at 6:28 AM PST - 137 comments

Spanning more than four months and 3,000 individual panels, spawing more than 50,000 posts and 1.4 million views on the official thread in the XKCD forums, and generating countless fan theories and speculations, Randall Munroe fame has brought his epic "Time" to an end. [more inside]
posted by brentajones at 6:28 AM PST - 30 comments

By Heart is a series on The Atlantic's website where writers speak about their favorite passages, each illustrated by Doug McLean. Here are a few of the entries so far: Stephen King on two opening lines, Hanan Al-Shaykh on One Thousand and One Nights, Susan Choi on The Great Gatsby, Jessica Francis Kane on Marcus Aurelius, Fay Weldon on The Myth of Sisyphus, Adam Mansbach on Montaigne, Ayana Mathis on Osip Mandelstam, Anthony Marra on Jesus' Son, and Mohsin Hamid on Haruki Murakami.
posted by Kattullus at 5:51 AM PST - 7 comments

Science fiction and fantasy writer/editor Jay Lake has been living with cancer for years, but in early May received notice that unfortunately he wouldn't do so for much longer (diagnostic details), with the most optimistic forecast giving him just a year left to live. If nothing else, this has given him time to wind up his affairs, as well as do something few people get the chance to: attend his own wake.
posted by MartinWisse at 1:38 AM PST - 12 comments