The day in posts: 08/19/2005

Late night Friday flash fun for those of us who don't do well with the hard stuff: Toss a salad with Cookie Monster!

Here's all the rest of them. Enjoy!
posted by DeepFriedTwinkies at 11:02 PM PST - 9 comments

Masters of Deception "There are a number of incredible artistic works featured in Masters of Deception, which require movement to appreciate their full impact. Additionally, I had in my possession various interviews with some of the book's featured artists that I wanted to share with my readership. Unfortunately, the publisher was unwilling to produce a CD to accompany the book. I have created this web site, therefore, to augment and enhance the reader's experience by presenting those works and interviews that I could not present in book form." Al Seckel. enjoy.
posted by hortense at 10:43 PM PST - 3 comments

Photographing flying insects. Most of the pages are devoted to a very detailed tutorial, but pages 2, 4, 9 & 10 show the results of the various setups. Some spectacular hi-speed (bee wings frozen in mid buzz) stuff in here.
posted by jonson at 8:26 PM PST - 31 comments

Jack Cafferty pulls a Jon Stewart --Cafferty, CNN's resident curmudgeon, goes off live on the coverage of the BTK killer. (video here at Crooks and Liars) ... This is a ghoulish exercise on the part of the news media and if ratings are the reason, then I’ll say it again, we ought to be ashamed of ourselves. There was no reason to give this guy a platform to talk to everybody in the country ... With cameras in courtrooms almost everywhere nowadays, what is the media's responsibility?
posted by amberglow at 6:54 PM PST - 82 comments

A break in the strange case of Judge Joseph Crater. In 1930, Judge Crater, later dubbed "The Missingest Man In New York", stepped into a cab and was never seen again. He left behind a mourning wife and one of New York's most enduring mysteries. For 75 years, his disappearance has been the butt of many dumb jokes and also has been the subject of the occasional book.
posted by Joey Michaels at 5:46 PM PST - 5 comments

No mere slap on the wrist for Merck. Jury awards grieving widow $253.4 Mil in Vioxx suit. The first of thousands of cases like it. (washpost)
posted by punkbitch at 5:33 PM PST - 52 comments

Wanna buy some? I guess it's okay, If it's for a good cause....
posted by longsleeves at 5:09 PM PST - 14 comments

Sushifinder helps you find sushi restaurants in selected US cities. The site has editorial reviews, as well as user reviews and ratings. One helpful feature allows you to type in a street corner (e.g. 3rd and Main) and it will find the sushi joints nearest to that location.
posted by pitchblende at 4:52 PM PST - 17 comments

The Antichrist Checklist : The most recent entry in Slacktivist's extremely insightful and entertaining series on mocking and deconstructing the Left Behind books. Being written from the perspective of a non-fundie Christian just makes it even more powerful. Slacky reveals how manufactured the cooked-up, hacked-together "prophecy," that fuels the series is. If you believe all that nonsense, and can make it through this series with your wacky premillennial dispensationalist beliefs intact, then I'm sorry but there is no hope for you.

Highlights of this week's installment, the best I've seen in a while: the antichrist, the paucity of the biblical evidence for him/it, and this sentence: "The composite sketch derived from all these descriptions yields a portrait that looks a little like Nebuchadnezzar, a little like Antiochus Epiphanes, a little like Nero or Diocletian, and a little like Victor von Doom."
posted by JHarris at 4:25 PM PST - 24 comments

Top 10 Things I Like in My Apartment by Jaime Stewart of Xiu Xiu.
posted by The Jesse Helms at 2:50 PM PST - 34 comments

A new food blog! Slashfood. Looks like a good one. They seem to be covering pretty much everything. Instant bookmark!
posted by braun_richard at 1:41 PM PST - 25 comments

Friday flash fun! Try Poom! You move a constantly changing floor around in a virtual 3-D space so that a ball will bounce on it. Curiously entertaining...

There goes the rest of my day. via zannah
posted by jasper411 at 1:25 PM PST - 27 comments

"Like any red-blooded, masculine man of the male gender, I love PVC weaponry. You should too. If the concept of heading down to Home Depot and transforming $100 worth of random pipe bits into a killing machine doesn’t appeal to you, you’re a frikkin' pansy. For those of you who laugh at hypersonic shards of plastic puncturing your spleen, here’s a look at how I’ve kept myself busy for the past week: building a PVC-pipe flamethrower."
posted by fandango_matt at 12:25 PM PST - 64 comments

"Since I was a little boy I have always dreamed that one day man would journey to the moon and beyond. I now try to create images that show the possibilities of space flight with the technologies that are currently available today or what could be in the near future. In doing so, I try to depict what a manned space mission might actually look like to one of the 9 planets in our solar system." [Not Flash, but fun for Friday anyway.]
posted by OmieWise at 11:11 AM PST - 14 comments

The North American Hallowe'en Prevention, Inc. asks, Do They Know It's Hallowe'en?
posted by mrgrimm at 11:00 AM PST - 16 comments

Explosion & Fire in Downtown San Francisco Just happened. Could be a gas line - at this point, no one knows.
posted by echolalia67 at 10:42 AM PST - 106 comments

Ambigrams are words or phrases that can be read in more than one way or from more than a single vantage point, most commonly right-side-up and upside-down. Ambigram.Matic is the world's first and only online Ambigram Generator! Flip any word, different words of the same length, or even an entire (symmetrically spaced) sentence on its head, and read it both ways!
posted by mr.dan at 10:01 AM PST - 19 comments

Nanotube sheets! "The ribbons are transparent, flexible, and conduct electricity. Weight for weight, they are stronger than steel sheets, yet a square kilometre of the material would weigh only 30 kilograms. 'This is basically a new material.'" Applications could include flexible TV screens, light panels and that digital paper they keep telling us is coming soon.
posted by me3dia at 9:37 AM PST - 31 comments

Holography For The Masses! A magical journey of making holograms with a $7.99 laser pointer and higher-power laser diodes.
posted by mr.curmudgeon at 9:07 AM PST - 5 comments

Hybrid supercar. The West Philadelphia High School Electric Vehicle Team has built a 300 hp hybrid car which gets 50 mpg on bio-diesel, accelerates from 0 to 60 in less than 4 seconds and looks sweet. That is a pretty nice high school project.
posted by caddis at 8:43 AM PST - 34 comments

Remember Kelo? After winning a landmark eminent domain ruling from the Supreme Court, the New London Development Corporation now wants to pay residents based on value they held in 2000, rather then 2005, which would leave them unable to buy equivalent new home in today's real estate bubble.

Then also want to charge back rent. In some cases up to $300 thousand. Susette Kelo herself now owes $56k.
posted by delmoi at 8:34 AM PST - 66 comments

45,000 pounds + four 130 foot rotors + up to 200 mph Jet Stream winds = Energy Problem Solved
Like the monster mother of all kites, a company called Sky Windpower (which sports an excellent website about high altitude wind power) has been founded by an Australian engineer with three others to attempt to harness the near limitless windpower of the jet stream with a machine they call an FEG (Flying Electric Generator).
They're currently seeking $4 million to build a 200 kilowatt prototype but still need to get FAA clearance to fly it. The production models would generate 20 megawatts each and would be flown in farms of up to 600 turbines to generate enough power to light up two cities the size of Chicago. Power and control of the huge machines would be handled by a three inch thick tether connected to a winch on a ground station.
Man, I love Popular Science!
posted by fenriq at 8:19 AM PST - 35 comments

What if there were an established international legal precedent for addressing the terrorism problem? Maybe there is. And maybe it involves a plank. Or an eyepatch. Or, like, a hook instead of a hand. [via aldaily]
posted by willpie at 8:08 AM PST - 19 comments

Randy "Biscuit" Turner, singer for the legendary punk-funk/skate-punk band Big Boys died yesterday.
posted by bluno at 8:02 AM PST - 12 comments

Women Photographers.
posted by sgt.serenity at 7:58 AM PST - 9 comments

The St. Patrick's Four haven't received the media attention of Cindy Sheehan. Are small pockets of anti-war protests on the rise?
posted by bluesky43 at 7:38 AM PST - 18 comments

Remember the Twixters? Now meet the Yeppies: Young, Experimenting Perfection Seekers^1,2,3. "Another survey, another invented tag for a group of young people. This survey was for eBay, carried out by Kate Fox, a social anthropologist at the Social Issues Research Centre. It argues that young people are now shopping around and experimenting to find, as she puts it, 'the perfect job, the ideal relationship and the most fulfilling lifestyle.'" - as noted by World Wide Words. [See also: this Venn diagram.] Will researchers ever tire of all this name-calling, though? If they really want to RTFM about this particular generation, they should just watch Wonderfalls.
posted by Lush at 6:42 AM PST - 18 comments

"The neutron bomb has to be the most moral weapon ever invented." -- Sam Cohen, inventor of the neutron bomb. [an article by Charles Platt on boingboing.net]
posted by iffley at 6:24 AM PST - 53 comments

The New England Journal of Medicine published several articles this week on remaining, statistically significant gender and racial disparities in the quantity and quality of various medical procedures and care management resources made available to black and white Americans. These disparities may possibly help our understanding of the cause of some of the unexplained differences in mortality rates between populations. "Although the reasons for these differences are unknown, their persistence emphasizes the need for a continued search for explanations so that inequities in clinical care may be eliminated..." (registration req'd)
posted by Rothko at 4:52 AM PST - 23 comments