BOCOG announced their official Olympic mascots recently. One of them is based on the Tibetan Antelope. Students for a Free Tibet don't like the idea.
posted by tellurian at 8:35 PM PST - 57 comments

If you watch television news stations, you've probably already heard that the latest missing white girl has been found. Naturally, the media is now obsessed with figuring out what led to the murder of the girl's parents. In the unending quest for information, TV news stations have shown the myspace pages of the two teens. And like many other teenagers, the two have xanga journals as well. But several sources, both blogs and mainstream news sites, have publicized the location of these pages. Is this responsible journalism?
Previously on MeFi: Blogging from prison; diary of a killer?
posted by kyleg at 8:09 PM PST - 74 comments

Human Uprgades [flash interface]
posted by philcliff at 7:50 PM PST - 29 comments

Tape It Off The Internet started as a joke, but now they want to beat out the flickrs of video and iTunes, with its $1.99 tipping point, in the world of TV show downloads. If they ever actually release the thing, that is.
posted by TunnelArmr at 5:10 PM PST - 15 comments

ChiliBeer: [flash] Capsaicin has many, many medical uses and a few not so medical ones. Alchohol and capsaicin have been shown to help with heart disease, maybe they are just trying create a heart disease tonic? The good news is there are no interactions with cocaine.
posted by bigmusic at 5:09 PM PST - 20 comments

Radical Cartography. A collection of interesting maps such as place-name etymology, the US suicide rate, animal/vegetable production and an interactive tourist map of Nice, FR.
posted by greasy_skillet at 3:50 PM PST - 16 comments

Volvo Ocean Race round the world, in a sailboat. Leg one, Spain to South Africa is underway. Check out the Virtual specator application a fantasic way of following a not particularly viewer friendly event.
posted by Keith Talent at 3:00 PM PST - 9 comments

Alito documents show he is firmly against abortion. [news filter] So we all kind of new this to be true. But now there are documents showing it. From the Reagan Library of all places. This story also sheds a little light on the topic.

"Of course he's against abortion," his mother said,

posted by stilgar at 2:38 PM PST - 61 comments

Adel is innocent. I don't mean he claims to be. I mean the military says so. It held a secret tribunal and ruled that he is not al Qaeda, not Taliban, not a terrorist. The whole thing was a mistake: The Pentagon paid $5,000 to a bounty hunter, and it got taken. The military people reached this conclusion, and they wrote it down on a memo, and then they classified the memo and Adel went from the hearing room back to his prison cell. He is a prisoner today, eight months later.
posted by dash_slot- at 2:21 PM PST - 46 comments

The riots in Paris have becomes such a popular topic for bloggers that even the BBC have noticed, even going as far to produce a TV news package (H.264 video, AAC audio, in MP4 container) about blogging.
posted by Mwongozi at 1:25 PM PST - 24 comments

HELLBENT - The first gay slasher movie. Taking place at the famed West Hollywood Halloween Carnival, there is a serial killer on the loose. A group of four gay friends will have to fight for their lives to make it through a night where flamboyant costumes, beautiful people, drugs, music, dancing and sex are everywhere. Trailer (quicktime, NOT SAFE FOR WORK). The soundtrack looks pretty good.
posted by Captaintripps at 12:39 PM PST - 65 comments

London Topological and Britain of Drains. Cool urban exploration photos from underneath England by International Urban Glow.
posted by kirkaracha at 12:28 PM PST - 6 comments

Anthropodermic book bindings: books bound in human skin. Living in Edinburgh, I knew they existed, but I didn't realise there were so many of them.
posted by Flitcraft at 12:25 PM PST - 28 comments

What is Web 2.0? The air for the next bubble? Infosphermekinalization? Badgers? Register readers chime in on the hype. Complete with pie charts and tag clouds.
posted by whatnot at 12:10 PM PST - 56 comments

Everyone remember MaryRomantic? (Previously on Metafilter) She had a list of demands that a man must meet that bordered on neurosis. Now she counsels! She's known as MaryGentle and will help you with your " excessive water consumption and thirst" and "caffeine abuse" through various personal affirmations.
posted by geoff. at 11:25 AM PST - 40 comments

Ever just stopped and listened? Acoustic Ecology encourages us to be aware of the sound environment around us, and to take responsibility for it.

The World Forum for Acoustic Ecology, as well as publishing a beautiful journal called Soundscape, is a starting point for finding many sound resources. Listen to soundscapes from Denmark and California, and field recordings from Vietnam and Vancouver. Take an audiovisual tour of NYC or Portland, Oregon. Experience cicadas, birds, frogs and other animals. Take a soundwalk through the park. Create your own international sound journey. You can even hear sounds from underwater or from the Northern Lights in the sky. And when you're done, learn how to make your own recordings.
posted by chrismear at 10:52 AM PST - 15 comments

"The spiritual, physical, intellectual, social or economic well-being of the general public".
Within the MacDowell Colony's rustic stone and clapboard cottages, Thornton Wilder wrote Our Town, Aaron Copland composed Appalachian Spring and Dubose and Dorothy Heyward wrote Porgy and Bess. Jonathan Franzen finished writing The Corrections and Alice Sebold worked on The Lovely Bones. For decades, the town considered the colony a tax-exempt charitable organization. Not anymore.
posted by matteo at 10:44 AM PST - 9 comments

Traditionally, (video) a DJ uses two turntables, but recently a series of new products has challenged the primacy of vinyl. While local record shops have been closing left and right, online stores have begun offering digital downloads. One digital-only outlet recently sold their 1,000,000th mp3. And now, a new store has taken the DJ completely out of the equation by making mix cds on demand.
posted by empath at 10:32 AM PST - 59 comments

The End of News? From the New York Review of Books. Michael Massing, a contributing editor of the Columbia Journalism Review, discusses the decline of the mainstream media and the ideal of objectivity: Accuracy in Media (1969), the Center for Media and Public Affairs (1985), the abolition of the Fairness Doctrine (1987), Rush Limbaugh (1988), Fox News (1996), weblogs, cost-cutting at newspapers. Of course, the newspaper business has always been a difficult one, as Walter Lippmann noted in his book Public Opinion (1921): [more inside]
posted by russilwvong at 10:27 AM PST - 43 comments

"I know these desires could kill me dead, but how you gonna act instead?" So sings eros-haunted Delta-blues-steeped songwriter Chris Whitley on his superbly dark new album, Soft Dangerous Shores, and he's not kidding -- Whitley is currently "very very ill" and receiving hospice care. After Whitley's 1991 debut, Living with the Law, the slim (drug-addicted?) songwriter was acclaimed by his peers as "the real deal." When he was dropped by Sony in 1998, he released an album of stark poetic beauty recorded in a barn, Dirt Floor. Soft Dangerous Shores updates Whitley's coiled-viper resophonic guitars with dreamlike electronic atmospheres (one reviewer describes it as "a hypnotic wrestling match between juke joint blues and Kraftwerkian beats"). Instead of posting an elegy for another underappreciated self-destructive genius a la Nick Drake after his death, check out Whitley's music (via free downloads) while he's still with us on Earth.
posted by digaman at 9:42 AM PST - 46 comments

family at war an excellent documentary of a family who lost their son in iraq - particularly moving is the soldiers determined, soft-spoken mother who is examining the reasons for her loss.
posted by specialk420 at 9:33 AM PST - 8 comments

Angkor Wat guide. "Published in 1944 in Saigon, republished in 1948 and again in Paris in 1963, The Monuments of the Angkor Group by Maurice Glaize remains the most comprehensive of the guidebooks and the most easily accessible to a wide public, dedicated to one of the most fabled architectural ensembles in the world." Now online, updated, with maps and photos. (More Angkor Wat links in this previous post.) Via Plep.
posted by languagehat at 9:20 AM PST - 12 comments

Google Analytics Yesterday evening Google released Google Analytics - a free Google-hosted web tracking and measurement tool, based on Urchin (which Google purchased earlier this year). Can't see Microsoft or eBay using the service, and I found it rather slow to use, but worth giving it a try...
posted by runkelfinker at 8:43 AM PST - 38 comments

The World's Most Underrated Inventions A curious list of the world's most underrated inventions. Including: the chariot; concrete; horse collar; longbow; eyeglasses; rotary printing press; barbed wire; carborundum; and bakelite.
posted by dios at 8:29 AM PST - 41 comments

"We do not torture" (Bush, Nov. 7)
In an important clarification of President George W. Bush's earlier statement, a top White House official refused to unequivocally rule out the use of torture... (Hadley, Nov. 13) -- The fate of a House provision to ban the torture of prisoners in U.S. custody is in doubt, strongly opposed by the Administration. And don't call it torture: the preferred talking point wording is now enhanced interrogation techniques.
posted by amberglow at 8:25 AM PST - 110 comments

The National Center for Biotechnology Information Bookshelf. I was searching for an online version of the CD that came with my Neuroscience, 3rd ed. (Purves, et al). What I found was pretty amazing - a full, searchable online version of my book (albeit the older 2nd ed.), including full-color diagrams. The NLM under the NIH has a division called NCBI which hosts a horde of other cool books. [Other aspects of NCBI covered previously; book archive previously on AskMe; more inside]
posted by blendor at 8:23 AM PST - 4 comments

Sonic Youth. Mentioned as far back as Bible when the walls of Jericho are brought down by trumpets, sonic weapons have often been the stuff of legend. Now a UK company is selling a sonic device targeted specifically against gangs of youths.
posted by oh pollo! at 7:42 AM PST - 17 comments

Sound 101 Fingernails scraping down a blackboard... the scream of a baby... your neighbour's dog barking: what is the worst sound in the world? This is what this website is trying to find out. Acoustic science is concerned with the production, transmission, manipulation and reception of sound, from unwanted traffic noise to beautiful music. Acoustics is about both the physical properties of sound waves and the reaction of humans. This website is interested in the often complex ways in which people perceive and interpret sounds. The aim is to increase awareness of sound psychology by examining what makes a sound unpleasant to hear. Your votes on the site will also give us an insight into what is the worst sound in the world, and maybe why it is the worst sound.
posted by Ugandan Discussions at 4:52 AM PST - 42 comments

Should programmers refuse to write malicious programs? Doctors take an oath to do no harm. We'd all like our computers to do what we want, and would be quite upset if they didn't. Should Sony's programmers have refused to write the malware?
posted by Jerub at 4:28 AM PST - 94 comments

10 years. Though I already went on and on about this on another thread, I can't shake it: Ken Saro-Wiwa was hanged ten years ago. All he did was point out that Shell so scarred, pitted and slimed his tribal Ogoni lands that it was spontaneously catching fire. Oil company cronies showed up with guns, cleared villages. And then Nigerian government officials got pissed, and nine Ogoni were hanged. Wiki. Testimony of his brother. His foundation.
posted by toma at 4:18 AM PST - 14 comments

The atlatl. Maybe you're a little too old fashioned for black powder rifles. You're feeling a little too rugged to build your own siege weapon. You don't even really like weapons as newfangled as the blow gun or the obsidian dagger. Well, friends, then the the atlatl is for you. It might have driven the wooly mammoth to extinction, and soon, at last, you may be able to use it to kill stuff that isn't extinct.
posted by maxsparber at 12:15 AM PST - 29 comments