October 11, 2012

Bottles Beware!

Bottles Beware! 81 plastic water bottles meet their doom. (SLYT)
posted by Monkeymoo at 9:00 PM PST - 56 comments

Julius is -- different

Does your icon need flogging? (also) Is your writing humdrum? Do your photos just show what you see [previously]? Want to see the world from a new angle, or put a better face on things? Julius can help. [some short videos] [more inside]
posted by dmayhood at 8:14 PM PST - 1 comments

Chris Friel Photography

Chris Friel: one photo a day. [Via]
posted by homunculus at 6:10 PM PST - 4 comments

Biden/Ryan faceoff

The Biden/Ryan showdown is upon us. [more inside]
posted by triggerfinger at 5:31 PM PST - 2103 comments

TakeNote: An Exploration of Notetaking in Harvard University Collections

TakeNote: An Exploration of Notetaking in Harvard University Collections [via mefi projects, nasreddin is Curator and Coordinator] [more inside]
posted by mlis at 4:59 PM PST - 7 comments

LEGO Batcave

LEGO Batcave
posted by Egg Shen at 4:51 PM PST - 19 comments

"Try to keep your delusions in check"

Chuunibyou (中二病), or "Middle-school 2nd Year Syndrome", is "a colloquial and rather derisive term in Japan which describes a person at the age of fourteen would either act like a know-it-all adult, or thinks they have special powers no one else has." [more inside]
posted by Marisa Stole the Precious Thing at 4:40 PM PST - 45 comments

Wait, why do you have a wine glass full of blood in the first place?

What Snake Venom Does To Blood (SLDubbedYTP)
posted by The Whelk at 3:51 PM PST - 38 comments

The fashion canteen

Davé is a restaurant that caters to writers, actors, film directors, and rock stars. The polaroids of Davé Part One Part Two Part Three Part Four
posted by unliteral at 3:50 PM PST - 7 comments

The 50 best films of the ’90s

The Onion's A.V Club has posted their list of the fifty best films of the '90s (part 1)(part 2)(part 3). [via]
posted by SomaSoda at 3:20 PM PST - 190 comments

Mmmm!

"Buffalo mozzarella is the Great White Whale of American cheesemaking: a dream so exotic and powerful that it drives otherwise sensible people into ruinous monomaniacal quests."
posted by Chrysostom at 2:24 PM PST - 61 comments

Look, I made a Poe!

Put A Poe On It
posted by Potomac Avenue at 2:18 PM PST - 34 comments

Footy & the Forty-Fives

45Football is based on a collection of about 1000 vinyl 7" records on football. Listen to classics like "We're Never Going to Stop" (LFC, 1983), and "Undici uomini d'oro" (AC Milan, 1979).
posted by modernnomad at 1:45 PM PST - 8 comments

Typical Pentagon boondoggle

The Global Language Online Support System (or GLOSS), produced by the Defense Language Institute in sunny Monterey, CA, offers over six thousand free lessons in 38 languages from Albanian to Uzbek, with particular emphasis on Chinese, Persian, Russian, Korean, and various types of Arabic. The lessons include both reading and listening components and are refreshingly based on real local materials (news articles, radio segments, etc.) rather than generic templates. [more inside]
posted by theodolite at 1:27 PM PST - 23 comments

Pokémon, Paradigmatically

Pokémon, Paradigmatically
posted by naju at 1:02 PM PST - 27 comments

Libraries, Google, and the Transformation of Fair Use

The Hathi Trust, a partnership between 66 universities and 3 higher education consortia, is breathing a little easier now that Judge Harold Baer, Jr. of New York's Southern District has found that the Trust was within its fair use rights to allow Google to scan member library holdings, and then making the resulting files available for the reading impaired, and for use in search indexing and data mining. While this is excellent news for the educational institutions involved, it doesn't completely exonerate Google's role in the scanning project. It's notable that just last week Google abandoned it's own fair use claim in settling a different case involving the same book scanning project. Of the four factors used when considering fair use cases, Judge Baer ruled on the side of the Hathi Trust on all four.
posted by Toekneesan at 11:56 AM PST - 6 comments

The Railway Man

Eric Lomax, River Kwai prisoner who forgave, dies at 93.
posted by tykky at 11:51 AM PST - 32 comments

"To most Americans, there is something inexplicably foreign about cricket"

Wickets and Wonders: Cricket’s Rich Literary Vein - a meditation on the literary history of cricket, and a few of the more well-known books surrounding gigaioggie.
posted by Wordshore at 11:49 AM PST - 14 comments

Montaigne's Library

On the day he turned thirty-eight, Michel Eyquem de Montaigne retired from public life to the tower of the Château de Montaigne, there to spend the next ten years composing an assay of his life's experience. That his mind might thrive, he turned the tower into a "Solitarium" and its top floor into a sumptuous library, lining its round walls with some 1,500 books. Even the roof beams were made to bear his thoughts: on them he inscribed 46 quotations, here collected and translated.
posted by Iridic at 10:58 AM PST - 22 comments

Push the buttons, Frank.

Don't Look at This! TV's Frank has a YouTube channel! And a hilarious twitter account! (Don't miss his live tweets of the debates.) And a brand new, star-studded, satirical, musical podcast spectacular: The Wonderful Pundits of Oz!
Actually, it's Frank Conniff, mild-mannered stand-up comic and veteran TV writer (MST3K, Invader Zim). And he'd like you to know that Governor Chris Christie is a large man. [more inside]
posted by Atom Eyes at 10:13 AM PST - 11 comments

How to Manipulate Science Reporting

Back in September a group of French Biologists published a "ground breaking" study on the impacts of GMO Corn. funded by CRIIGEN. [more inside]
posted by JPD at 9:57 AM PST - 57 comments

"The vaginal corona is a permanent part of a woman's body throughout her life. It doesn't disappear after she first has sexual intercourse, and most women don't bleed the first time."

My Corona: The Anatomy Formerly Known As The Hymen & The Myths That Surround It is Scarleteen's reprint of a booklet (PDF) produced by the Swedish Association for Sexuality Education (Time for more accurate terminology: Hymen renamed "vaginal corona"). More mythbusting: You can't pop your cherry: Hymen 101 (NSFW-ish video, less than 4 min.); SBTB's Where is the hymen? and Virginity clichés in romance; and 20 Questions About Virginity: Scarleteen interviews Hanne Blank.
posted by flex at 9:16 AM PST - 41 comments

Searching for Iran’s lost funk

"...it should be made clear that Tehran in the ’70s was not an equivalent to New Orleans, Chicago or Detroit. There was no funk haven per se, but within the Iranian pop world some tracks did appear, and those records are a rare treasure trove for funk aficionados." — Searching for Iran’s lost funk [more inside]
posted by furtive at 8:52 AM PST - 7 comments

Why Obama Now

Why Obama Now - from Simpsons/Family Guy animator Lucas Gray [more inside]
posted by East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabaddi Champion '94 at 8:32 AM PST - 61 comments

NOT FINAL SOFTWARE

Nine minutes of gameplay of the upcoming SimCity reboot. RPS has more.
posted by griphus at 8:19 AM PST - 94 comments

"A historiography of one's present amnesia"

Chris Kraus' new novel, Summer of Hate, is out, published by Semiotext(e). Read the first chapter here. No spoilers inside, but some spoilers in the links. [more inside]
posted by outlandishmarxist at 7:45 AM PST - 10 comments

Interrobang!

13 obscure punctuation marks that we should be using...
posted by Renoroc at 6:13 AM PST - 113 comments

Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite

Lennon's Poster — A short film follows the recreation of the Pablo Fanque circus poster [previously] that inspired John Lennon to write 'Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite' for the Beatles album 'Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band'. Using the traditional methods of wood engraving and letterpress printing, a team of experts brings Lennon's poster to life.
posted by netbros at 6:05 AM PST - 12 comments

Ephemeral New York

Ephemeral New York 'chronicles an ever-changing, constantly reinvented city through photos, newspaper archives, and other scraps and artifacts that have been edged into New York’s collective remainder bin.' [more inside]
posted by zarq at 6:02 AM PST - 5 comments

The 2012 Nobel Laureate in Literature Is Chinese Novelist Mo Yan

Mo Yan has been awarded the 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature. A Chinese novelist, born as Guan Moye, his pen name means "don't speak." His most famous novel, Red Sorghum: A Novel of China, was turned into an acclaimed film in 1987. Here are some interviews with Mo Yan: Granta, National Endowment for the Humanities and Paper Republic. Speculation was rife in China before the announcement whether Mo Yan would receive it, and the matter was controversial. For people who haven't read any books by Mo Yan, the Swedish Academy recommends Garlic Ballads [NYT]. For more news over the day, keep an eye on The Literary Saloon and The Guardian's liveblog.
posted by Kattullus at 4:27 AM PST - 24 comments

A computer scientist goes all in for poker

Computing Texas Hold'em - Dr. Avi Rubin, a Johns Hopkins professor, computer security and electronic voting security expert, writes about learning and playing poker. [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 1:36 AM PST - 17 comments

It's a jungle in there

It's the hottest new metaphor for the brain, they say. Your brain is a rain forest. [more inside]
posted by Twang at 12:56 AM PST - 39 comments

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