September 3, 2010
U! RU! URU ACHIM!
The one song played at every bar mitzvah isn't "Celebration," or "I Gotta Feeling," or even "New York, New York" -- it's "Hava Nagila." But what is it? A 9-minute documentary tells the story of how a wordless meditative nigun became a song everybody in the world, Jewish or not, could sing. Seriously, everybody. Harry Belafonte and Danny Kaye. Harry Dean Stanton with Bob Dylan backing up on harmonica. Polish metal band Rootwater. A guy who plays the ukulele behind his head. The Modern Female Choir of Zhejiang. The Dark Knight. What appears to be a group of comedy fiddlers ("featuring John and Pancho") from John Hagee's church in San Antonio. Even ... um... this guy. (Previously on MetaFilter: The closest you're going to get to the Beatles covering "Hava Nagila.")
Tiny ponies
There is a Horse in the Apple Store, a story and a meditation on exceptional things that "no one, for whatever reason, notices."
iPod, iPhone, iDal.
"Every input in agriculture is a war chemical. Every agrichemical is a war chemical." Physicist Vandana Shiva on monoculture, agricultural imperialism, and protests in Delhi conscribed to the hours of 9-5. [more inside]
Bring in 'The Imp'
Even though only four issues were published, Daniel Raeburn's 'The Imp' is widely regarded as a classic publication of comics criticism. Long out of print, he has now put them online for free. The four insanely comprehensive issues each cover Daniel Clowes, Chris Ware, Jack Chick and Mexican Historietas (violent and bizarrely sexual comics-NSFW). [more inside]
Like Punk'd But With Real Bombs
Combat operations in Iraq are over! Except, the AP says "our content should not refer to the end of combat in Iraq, or the end of U.S. military involvement." Meanwhile, in Iraq, a new show has been airing since Ramadan that has been described as "Punk’d, Iraqi-Style, at a Checkpoint." You can watch 14-minutes of the show (in Arabic, no English subtitles), here.
Mind What you Wear
"Keep your man hot. But for when you cannot, Make sure no one else will do it for you. Do not use for birth control!" (Very, very NSFW)
AllOurIdeas
Like voting things against other things? Princeton University has applied this concept to the suggestion box to create All Our Ideas, a website where you can create a suggestion box and allow others to vote on and add suggestions. As an example, here's one for MeFi! [more inside]
Economy
How to End the Great Recession. Robert Reich's prescription for the economy.
[Warning—painted Victorian bosom below]
On Tor.com, Mefi'sown Patrick Garcon (smoke) is writing lively essays on Victorian fantasy illustration, from the Pre-Raphaelites to Orientalism. [via mefi projects]
Iranian Typography
Iranian Typography Now makes a nice appetiser to a book like Graphic Design from the Arab World and Persia (annoyingly small flash gallery) where calligraphy goes digital and comes alive as it collides with graphic design, art, graffiti, and even light.
Worse than Three Mile Island?
Over fifty years after Los Angeles' first nuclear meltdown, the State of California is finally getting around to decontaminating the radioactive fallout.
There can only be One
It's a simple concept: Given a choice between two random movies, which one do you like best? That's the driving force behind Flickchart, an addictive review site for movie lovers. Faced with two posters, click the one for the title you prefer (weeding out the ones you haven't seen). Good! Now do it again. And again. And again. With each new face-off, Flickchart perfects a growing list of your favorite films -- and there can be no ties. This leads to some difficult dilemmas: Star Wars or Raiders of the Lost Ark? Citizen Kane or The Godfather? WALL-E or Spirited Away? But you needn't struggle alone -- Flickchart is also social. By drawing on the data of tens of thousands of fellow users, you can create remarkably specific lists: Martin Scorsese's Best Period Films. The Best Road Movies of the 1980s. The Worst Movies of All Time. If you rank enough films, you can generate interesting personalized charts, like "Your Favorite Musicals" or "The Best Movies You Haven't Seen." These filters carry over to the ranking system, letting you judge nothing but Horror movies or 1960s movies or unranked movies or movies from your top 100. You can also comment on popular match-ups, lending your voice to contentious debates like Ghostbusters vs. Back to the Future or Jaws vs. Predator. Not a movie fan? Don't worry. Flickchart will be expanding into books, games, and music soon. Until then, you can give your own data sets the Flickchart treatment using this tool from CNN. [more inside]
You may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to the Mandelbrot
Buy it, use it, break it, fix it. Trash it, change it, melt - upgrade it.
Hackspaces are open resources for community, group, or solo work on digital media, electronics, robotics, and art installations. Many allow drop-ins, and are run on a voluntary, non-profit basis - there’s likely one near you. Just want to repair something by yourself? iFixit, previously known for their teardowns of Apple products, have launched an open wiki to create manuals on how to repair everything from vehicles to household appliances.
Great Debate Disasters, Pt 45
Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer blanks catastrophically in a TV debate. No matter how strongly you feel about her immigration bill, it's hard not to feel for her. After all, public speaking is America's greatest fear, so the trainwreck might conceivably even help her. But then, here's her equally terrible reaction to press questions afterwards about her false claims that immigrants behead people. Not a good day for the controversial Arizona gov, who has now sworn off debates. [more inside]
The Student Loan Scam
The Student Loan Scheme: Gateway Drug to Debt Slavery...Americans now owe more on their student loans than they do on credit cards. With for-profit universities under recent scrutiny, many argue that the student loan industry itself is in need of more reform.
Nothing to fear
Look out!
Drivers in West Vancouver will soon see a 3D image in the street of a small girl chasing a ball. The BCAA Traffic Safety Foundation is teaming with Preventable to create the image with the goal of enhancing traffic safety. [more inside]
Three outside children and another wife.
"I'm open to joy. But I'm also more cynical"
Before anybody gets a heart attack, he aten't dead. The Guardian has a new interview with Terry Pratchett, talking about his writing and state of health. [more inside]
FOOTBALL SEASON IS OVER. FOOTBALL SEASON HAS BEGUN.
"In the depth of winter I finally learned there was in me an eternal September. This definite, very real September I'm writing in, however, is the only place and time I want or need. Football season is over; football season has begun. The rest is life, and it can and will wait until February, the question that always answers itself by becoming March, and then April, and then back to September again, where we do not root for Tennessee, because that is simply not done here."
BEAR Robot Overview
BEAR Robot Overview. (SLYT).
Crap graffiti
7.2 Wake up Call
At 4:35 am local time, a 7.2 earthquake hit just outside of Christchurch New Zealand. Reports are just coming in of power outages, damage, etc. 7.2 is considered a major earthquake.
James Gurney— illustrator and artist of Dinotopia— has a blog!
James Gurney (of Dinotopia fame) blogs at Gurney Journey daily about making art, making worlds, and making faces.
Damn, I'm good!
Duke Nukem Forever is fully playable and coming soon, says games developer Gearbox and publisher 2K Games. If you're at PAX, there's going to be demo stations on the floor.
Free access to Sage journals until October 15
Programming cats
"Have you ever wondered how many cats you would have if you started with just one female and left it alone with males for 5 years?"
via Forrst
SplashSplashSplash
Wikileaks Emotional Diary of September 11th
In an attempt to make sense of the 6.4 million words that comprise the more than 573.000 paged lines in the wikileaks 9/11 pager intercept data, researchers Mitja Back, Albrecht Kuefner, and Boris Egloff from the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, have now conducted a statistical analysis of the emotional content of these pages.
Fantasia, Americana, Wonderland.
Take a solo trek through the back streets of toontown or gaze upon pastoral fantasia. You'll find an astonishing variety of familiar and fantastic locales at Bob Richards' Animation Backgrounds blog. [more inside]
Earth from Day to Night
Time lapse footage of Earth taken by Don Pettit during his time on the International Space Station. [more inside]
A Back to School Surprise in California
"Out of the blue, in the middle of a recession, the phone rang. What would it cost, the caller asked the founder of DonorsChoose.org, to fund every California teacher's wish list posted on the Web site? The founder, Charles Best, thought perhaps the female caller would hang up when he tossed out his best guess: "Something over $1 million," he told her. A day later, Hilda Yao, executive director of the Claire Giannini Fund mailed a check of more than $1.3 million to cover the entire California wish list, 2,233 projects in all, with an extra $100,000 tossed in to help pay for other teacher needs across the country. (DonorsChoose: previously on MeFi) [more inside]
Pretty Big Pen, Jim
Surely This!!
Surely this.......will warm your black, cynical, withered MeFi hearts ya misanthropes! Labrador Retriever/Dolphin love! (SLYT)
A great athlete has passed away
A great athlete has passed away Jim McLaren passed away on August 30, 2010. Jim was an athlete and graduate of Yale University. He lost part of one leg, but came back to kickass times in marathons and triathlons – including Ironman. He did Kona in less than 11 hours.
Then, during the 1993 Orange Country Triathlon a volunteer misjudged his speed and waved a waiting van forward. The van collided with Jim and sent him into a signpost, making him a quadriplegic. He went on to be a motivational speaker, was the genesis behind the CAF and won an Arthur Ashe Courage Award (2005).
A hunter shoots a bear
Sin Vox
Vox, the social networking/blogging platform set up by [former] LiveJournal parent company SixApart, is closing down.
Dead Tree Books
Books are made out of trees, right? Artist Randall Rosenthal follows a slightly different path in that transformation. Books, newspapers, cutting boards, baseball cards, and legal pads also come from trees.
The process Randall Rosenthal uses to make books and other objects out of trees is a does not involve a paper mill, though.
Blu Mar Ten: drum'n'bass'n'more, and maybe something about a grapefruit rider
Blu Mar Ten is an electronic-type production group that started out in the mid 1990s as the duo Leo Wyndham and Chris Marigold. Initially making drum'n'bass in an atmospheric vein and dropping their first single in 1996, the duo signed to LTJ Bukem's Good Looking label the next year, where they resided until 2001. After parting ways with GLR, they mixed things up and dropping a UK Garage/breaks single, a techno single, and even a mashup of Thin Lizzie and The Carpenters, all before finally releasing their first album in late 2003. Jump ahead to 2009, and the duo is a trio, with two more albums to their collective name, and their revamped website that is now home to a collection of mixes new and old, a growing collection of videos, and a peak into the evolution of a track. [more inside]
Space geeks rejoice!
Gingers and daywalkers rejoice!
The human body is made up of more bacteria cells than human cells. Now, researchers at Harvard have isolated the genes responsible for producing amino acids that can block ultraviolet light and managed get E. coli bacteria to produce them too. Can I interest you in some sunblocking bacteria living on your skin?
Poets for the Revolution
Musicians don't often end up on FBI watch lists, but the Last Poets did, thanks to their links with the Black Panthers.
They were the rappers of the civil rights era.
Made in Amerikkka.
Niggers Are Scared Of Revolution!.
Before the White Man Came.
True Blue. [more inside]
They were the rappers of the civil rights era.
Made in Amerikkka.
Niggers Are Scared Of Revolution!.
Before the White Man Came.
True Blue. [more inside]
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