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Cthulu hosts a dial in show
posted by lilbrudder at 11:06 PM PST - 15 comments

Charles Krafft is a porcelain artist who creates detailed munitions made of fine china, painted servingware commemorating modern atrocities, and "Spone" art, bone china made using human bones as the base material.
posted by jonson at 10:51 PM PST - 11 comments

Massive gallery of concert photos. Some bands, you may not have heard of; others, well there's a few of those too.
posted by KevinSkomsvold at 10:43 PM PST - 8 comments

Paco Rosic is nearing completion of a one-half scale replica of the Sistine Chapel in Waterloo, Iowa - all painted with about 2,000 cans of spray paint.
posted by madamjujujive at 8:26 PM PST - 5 comments

A concise history of the British safe and safe-cracking.
posted by exogenous at 8:09 PM PST - 8 comments

The cloud chamber may no longer the particle detector of choice (that would be the bubble chamber) but easy to build yourself (in modern or vintage style) and watch cosmic rays in the comfort of your own home.
posted by jessamyn at 8:06 PM PST - 13 comments

VBlogger and journalist jailed for refusing to give up footage of protest
Josh Wolf is a video blogger and freelance journalist who was jailed by a U.S. district court on August 1, 2006 for refusing to turn over a collection of videos he recorded during a July 2005 anarchist protest in San Francisco, California. During that event, anarchists allegedly set a police cruiser on fire. [more inside]
posted by stenseng at 7:25 PM PST - 58 comments

Shooting War: a graphic novel by Anthony Lappe and Dan Goldman. The 11-chapter first act has been lauded in Rolling Stone, Wired and The Village Voice. It's 2011: President McCain is fighting for political survival, America is stuck in Iraq, and there's another oil embargo. 'Vlogger' and indie icon Jimmy Burns happens to catch a terrorist attack in NYC on his web cam, making him the new face of wartime journalism.
posted by spaltavian at 6:39 PM PST - 36 comments

If you've run out of places to pierce yourself, you can now pierce your car.
posted by mr_crash_davis at 6:31 PM PST - 25 comments

October 1 through till October 8 is National Trichotillomannia Awareness Week. What is Trichotillomania^ (or Trich, for short), you ask? Put simply, Trich is a compulsive hair pulling disorder that causes people to pull out their own hair from the scalp, eyebrows or pretty much anywhere on the body. Because they often pull repeatedly from the same spots, they may develop bald spots that are difficult to disguise and which sufferers are often very ashamed of. Sometimes they may even injest the hair, which is sometimes fatal. It is unknown exactly how many people suffer from it, but it is known that the vast majority of those afflicted are female. But for those few people who suffer with it, help is at hand! There's a documentary about it which you can watch, a website devoted to helping people learn how to deal with it, blogs and even an anonymous AskMe question. For those interested in learning more about what National Tricotillomannia Week entails, check out this page.
posted by Effigy2000 at 5:52 PM PST - 32 comments

Revolutionary twelve pound folding bicycle designed by Clive Sinclair (who previously brought the world calculators--including a wrist calculator--, computers, and an electric vehicle, the C5. Sinclair has had successes and failures, but this new bicycle may change the way thousands of people commute to work. Until now, "folding bicycles" have been little more than conventional bikes with hinging mechanisms and smaller wheels. The well known Brompton and Bike Friday bikes typically use 16" wheels, while Montague makes full-size bikes that fold, and Dahon makes both. Yes, they might fit in your car's trunk. Or you can check them as baggage with the airlines and have your own bike with you on vacation. But they all weigh 25 to 30 pounds, so while the size was a bit more convenient, they were not the breakthrough their makers claimed. The unconventional Strida showed a glimpse of what was possible, but at 22 pounds, still was overweight for easy schlepping. Finally, with the A-Bike it seems that for the many folks that live a mile or two from a train or subway station, it will be practical to ride the A-Bike to the station, then fold it up (26"x12"x6") and carry it along. Short video here, download "A-Bike Teaser Trailer." I want one!
posted by centerpunch at 3:16 PM PST - 159 comments

Cereal Box Archive Here is an archive of hundreds of cereal boxes, with even more to come.
posted by bob sarabia at 2:53 PM PST - 23 comments

Something wicked this way comes. There are a huge number of October 6th put options for the big indexes, just like the massive put options that took place just prior to 911. Fear the "October Surprise."
posted by augustweed at 2:44 PM PST - 44 comments

Are you American enough? The website of character actor R. Lee Ermey (perhaps best known as Gunnery Sergeant Hartman in Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket). The flash intro alone is worth the price of admission.
posted by John of Michigan at 2:15 PM PST - 38 comments

Pentecostals are a lively group. According to some, they rank among the fastest growing religions in the world, especially among the poor. A map shows their concentrations in America.
posted by Brian B. at 11:37 AM PST - 64 comments

Detecting the erotic (like detecting the humorous) is one of those things that people can do better than any known machine. This new patent seems largely based on "Finding Naked People", a paper in the field of Computer vision.
posted by GeorgeHernandez at 10:50 AM PST - 12 comments

Discworld cake from cake decorator Jane Fisk. (She does some other neat stuff, too.)
posted by LeeJay at 10:50 AM PST - 28 comments

[NSFW] Much of contemporary liberal thought rests on the idea of the Social Contract. In this scheme, we agree to give up a certain amount of freedom in exchange for the protection and opportunity that society provides. Our individual lives mirror this. We defer to others when politeness requires it. We assert ourselves and our needs with pleases and thank yous. Most of daily life has some power dynamic to it, expressed with the subtlety that civilization demands. And what is implicit in daily life is made explicit in the role-playing of BDSM, based on the idea of a Power Exchange, where one party explicitly agrees to give up a certain amount of power to another. For most people who are into this, the “scenes” are circumscribed by rules, usually discussed beforehand, such as appropriate safewords, time limits, etc. For a small subset of this group, the typical safeguards are cast aside and the slave surrenders all aspects of his or her life to the master. The female submissive Polly Peachum has written about this lifestyle in her essay “Violence in the Garden” about her life as a 24-7 slave and the sexual dimensions of that relationship.
posted by jason's_planet at 10:50 AM PST - 219 comments

"I don't think that form of public humiliation to get social control is the best form possible." Though in Middlesbourough that is exactly what's happening. Of course, it's not confined[mefi thead] to the one town, but this place has the most active form of public surveillance I've seen and they seem quite excited about it. Others are eager to try the system for themselves. Perhaps this will inspire theatre? Or you could learn to avoid the cameras. Is public safety destroying public discourse?
posted by cal71 at 10:49 AM PST - 41 comments

More languages are in danger than ever, but some argue that this is no big deal. Is language extinction only worrisome because it means a loss of diversity?
posted by Arthur "Two Sheds" Jackson at 9:04 AM PST - 32 comments

The Twelfth Annual Interactive Fiction Competition begins today. Non-contestants can take part in the proceedings by grabbing a torrent of the competing games and judging them over the next six weeks. If you're new to interactive fiction, Emily Short's "How to Play" will acquaint you with its conventions. And if you're enough of an I.F. expert that even a full slate of Comp games won't satisfy you, you can find every competition entry since 1995 archived at Baf's Guide.
posted by Iridic at 8:51 AM PST - 3 comments

London to Brighton in Two Minutes (2006) [HI Apple Quicktime, LO Adobe Flash] preceeded by London to Brighton in Three-and-a-Half Minutes (1983) [RealMedia, context] preceeded by London to Brighton in Four Minutes (1953) [RealMedia, context]
posted by riotgrrl69 at 8:02 AM PST - 21 comments

The costs of climate change adaptation are estimated at US$1 Trillion* (wordwide, by 2050), equal to one year's growth. "Our analysis suggests that there are technologically feasible and relatively low-cost options for controlling carbon emissions to the atmosphere. Estimates suggest that the level of GDP might be reduced by no more than around 2-3% in 2050 if this strategy was followed, equivalent to sacrificing only around a year of economic growth for the sake of reducing carbon emissions in 2050 by around 60% compared to our baseline scenario. But if this is to be achieved, it will take further concerted action by governments, businesses and individuals over a broad range of measures to boost energy efficiency, adopt a greener fuel mix, and introduce carbon capture and storage technologies in power plants and other major industrial facilities". * that's less than half one cock-arse war!
posted by wilful at 3:38 AM PST - 13 comments

The Croquet Project is a staggeringly ambitious attempt to create 'an operating system for the post-browser Internet' - a multi-platform, open-source, extensible, decentralised, peer-to-peer, 3D virtual reality metaverse [2,3], designed for 'highly scalable deep collaboration', led by Alan Kay.
posted by MetaMonkey at 2:37 AM PST - 37 comments