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A tumblr blog called Quote Unquote recently presented a series of interviews with indie videogame developers, conducted over the last year, as a collection. The interviews include guys like cactus, Bennett Foddy, Chevy Ray Johnston, Jasper Byrne and Jan Willem Nijman.
posted by pancreas at 9:36 PM PST - 6 comments

Homicide detectives who have reopened an investigation into the death of Natalie Wood after three decades said on Friday that the film star's husband, actor Robert Wagner, was not considered a suspect. [more inside]
posted by Trurl at 9:17 PM PST - 51 comments

A rollover accident during rush hour on an Arizona freeway nearly ended in tragedy after two small dogs jumped from the wrecked vehicle and led police on a desperate chase through the busy traffic before finally being safely captured.
posted by griphus at 7:00 PM PST - 66 comments

Tom Samui makes art from junk.
posted by tomswift at 6:55 PM PST - 5 comments

There are those points in every interactive designer’s career when he becomes fed up with producing the same set of graphics all over again for every website he designs. It could be the social network icons or gallery arrows. Similar for interactive developers that have to slice the same GIFs and PNGs each time the art director asks them to. Until now. Just Be Nice Studio came up with a typeface that includes frequently used iconographics and symbols. Although, the idea is not unique — Webdings and Windings have been around for quite some time — all of them have a lot of unnecessary symbols. Web Symbols is a set of vector html-compliant typefaces, so it might be used in any size, color and browser (okay, mostly — but IE7 for sure).
posted by netbros at 4:25 PM PST - 37 comments

Guy buys engagement ring. Guy gets dumped. Guy sells engagement ring and buys a fully armored Master Chief suit. [more inside]
posted by desjardins at 3:54 PM PST - 116 comments

Latet examples of 3D street art from around the world ~ in pictures More from Artist Joe Hill
posted by mattoxic at 3:29 PM PST - 5 comments

Nononono cat is displeased. Nononono cat is autotuned. Nononono cat is in Destiny's Child. Nononono cat brings bass. Nononono cat is stuck in a time warp. Nononono cat goes to rehab. Nononono cat plays Tetris, and Mario Brothers. Is this the Nononono cat? No. [more inside]
posted by codacorolla at 2:08 PM PST - 40 comments

"But when a saga popular with pre-adolescent girls peaks romantically on a night that leaves the heroine to wake up covered with bruises in the shape of her husband's hands — and when that heroine then spends the morning explaining to her husband that she's incredibly happy even though he injured her, and that it's not his fault because she understands he couldn't help it in light of the depth of his passion — that's profoundly irresponsible." MetaFilter's own Linda Holmes on the "psychosexual horror-show" that is The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 1. [more inside]
posted by davidjmcgee at 1:44 PM PST - 274 comments

The PLoS Impact Explorer visualises which papers in the Open Access PLoS family of journals are making an impact online.
posted by alby at 12:02 PM PST - 20 comments

What makes music boring?
posted by seriousmoonlight at 11:27 AM PST - 138 comments

Are you tired of reading about how neuroscientists have discovered the area of the brain devoted to a single, oddly-specific function, but lack access to the sophisticated neuroimaging technologies needed to refute them? NeuroSynth has you covered. [more inside]
posted by logicpunk at 11:15 AM PST - 12 comments

I'm a Runner. Yes, the interview series is best known for the Sarah Palin cover, but Runner's World has managed to snag quite a variety of famous pavement-pounders, including Wait Wait host Peter Sagal, Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist Flea, singer Shawn Colvin, Al Roker Al Roker, Episcopal bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, and another Palin you may know and love.
posted by psoas at 11:01 AM PST - 24 comments

A professor integrates a YouTube video of himself into class at Biola University
posted by MHPlost at 11:00 AM PST - 19 comments

American colleges find the Chinese-student boom a tricky fit [more inside]
posted by modernnomad at 10:40 AM PST - 58 comments

Modern Game Journalism: The Movie: The Trailer. (Alternate unofficial Youtube mirror.) For context, there was recently a large backlash by fans against reviewers that gave good but less than perfect scores for Uncharted 3. Or, even worse, a mixed review. Rock, Paper, Shotgun had a concise response. [more inside]
posted by kmz at 9:54 AM PST - 58 comments

"By putting an [unelected] senior adviser at Goldman Sachs in charge of a Western nation, it has taken to new heights the political power of an investment bank that you might have thought was prohibitively politically toxic." This is The Goldman Sachs Project [more inside]
posted by rubyrudy at 9:28 AM PST - 73 comments

The Decorated Bride - "In Lubinje, a small, picturesque village of 3500 inhabitants, a few hours from Prishtina, the capital of Kosovo, members of the Trebesh community live in colorful houses. They also have a colorful custom - or rite - of beautifying brides on their wedding day."
posted by madamjujujive at 9:26 AM PST - 46 comments

Neutrino experiment repeat at Cern finds same result "The team which found that neutrinos may travel faster than light has carried out an improved version of their experiment - and confirmed the result." [more inside]
posted by marienbad at 8:44 AM PST - 107 comments

The 21 gram keychain computer. "The tiny PC enables what its inventor calls 'Any Screen Computing,' the ability to turn any TV, laptop, phone, tablet, or set-top box into a dumb terminal for its Android operating system." [more inside]
posted by stupidsexyFlanders at 8:35 AM PST - 77 comments

Pop-up fabrication of a flapping-wing robot (SLYT)
posted by Behemoth at 7:42 AM PST - 15 comments

If We Only Had Wings explores the long-held dream of personal flight, from da Vinci's gliders to the Swiss Jetman to the in-development NASA Puffin (man, do I want a Puffin). Since the article is from National Geographic, there is also a great photo gallery.
posted by blahblahblah at 7:21 AM PST - 5 comments

Shakespeare was not a full-time writer without other responsibilities, like O’Neill or Williams. But what might look like a distraction for such authors—acting in his own and other people’s plays, coaching fellow players, helping manage the ownership of the troupe’s resources (including its two theaters, the Globe and Blackfriars)—was a strength for Shakespeare, since it made him a day-by-day observer of what the troupe could accomplish, actor by actor. [...]

'According to Pacini,' Julian Budden writes in The Operas of Verdi, 'it was the custom at the San Carlo theatre, Naples, for the composer to turn the pages for the leading cello and double bass players on opening nights.' The composer had to change his score to fit new voices if there were substitutions caused by illness or some other accident. In subsequent performances, he was expected to take out or put in arias for the different houses, transposing keys, changing orchestration. He was not a man of the study but of the theater.

Shakespeare and Verdi in the Theater.
posted by shakespeherian at 7:12 AM PST - 49 comments

Xenology may be defined as the scientific study of all aspects of extraterrestrial life, intelligence, and civilization. Dr Robert A Freitas (known mainly for his work in nanotechnology) has placed his comprehensive 1979 work on this subject entirely online. [more inside]
posted by leibniz at 6:38 AM PST - 7 comments

That's the drawback of the modern lab mouse. It's cheap, efficient, and highly standardized—all of which qualities have made it the favorite tool of large-scale biomedical research. But as Mattson points out, there's a danger to taking so much of our knowledge straight from the animal assembly line. The inbred, factory-farmed rodents in use today—raised by the millions in germ-free barrier rooms, overfed and understimulated and in some cases pumped through with antibiotics—may be placing unseen constraints on what we know and learn.

Slate has just finished a three part series on the pitfalls and promises of laboratory animals. (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) [more inside]
posted by tocts at 6:21 AM PST - 21 comments

Bert and Ernie recording their voices for TomTom. This is perhaps the funniest viral ad for a product that I've seen. TomTom in-car navigation systems offer custom voices to read out directions, and their latest additions are from Sesame Street. This is the promotional video, showing what the recording session was like... [SLYTPB]
posted by Slap*Happy at 6:19 AM PST - 34 comments

"When you make something as small and complex as a watch, you can't do a little and put it down and come back the next day and do a bit more. You work until you are exhausted, then pack it in for the night and start again the next day, always working to maximum capacity, or the watch wouldn't get done." [more inside]
posted by IndigoJones at 6:17 AM PST - 17 comments

An astonishing feat of archival reconstruction has turned up the original 1944 Lord of the Rings motion picture
posted by Sebmojo at 6:08 AM PST - 21 comments

"As I built what became the nation’s largest individual lobbying practice -- with 40 employees at its peak -- I remained the only lobbyist in the firm who had not previously worked on Capitol Hill. Former Congress members and staff are everywhere on K Street, the lair of the lobbying world. Why? Because they have access." [more inside]
posted by jadayne at 5:42 AM PST - 38 comments

It's easy to see how a watchmaker could take this device as a kind of challenge across the millennia ... and that's how we arrive at this: Hublot's own working replica of the Antikythera mechanism, scaled down from shoebox size to wristwatch size, and with a built in clock circuit so it can tell the time as well as make its astronomical predictions.
posted by veedubya at 5:27 AM PST - 20 comments

Meme Weaver In which "the author tries—and fails—to cash in on a big idea". Warning: skippable full-screen ad alert. Behind it is an article in the Atlantic (the magazine, not the ocean). Of possible interest to fans and critics of the popular science genre of books, Wikipedians, and underdog/failure sympathisers.
posted by nthdegx at 5:06 AM PST - 7 comments

Last year Minnesota Wild prospect Mikael Granlund turned heads with his Floorball-style (or 'lacross-style' for the uninitiated) goal during Finland's semifinal game against Russia in the World Championships. Mikael's younger brother Markus notched a similar goal today.
posted by mannequito at 1:27 AM PST - 23 comments