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Tom Lehrer's full performance in Copenhagen, 1967 [slyt]
posted by cthuljew at 11:03 PM PST - 39 comments

Mademoiselle Brigitte Bardot is a delightful mashup of a scene from Come Dance With Me! and a cover of Boris Potemkin's 1968 song Our Neighbor (scroll down, first song).
posted by Confess, Fletch at 10:25 PM PST - 3 comments

"The experience of being struck down by cancer is very interesting. Assuming it doesn’t kill you very quickly (and it does sometimes kill speedily and without mercy) the cancer sufferer can find himself or herself launched on an heroic journey. By that I don’t mean that I’m a hero because I have cancer; I mean ‘heroic’ in the mythical sense, in that your life is suddenly propelled along a remorseless narrative that has the structure of all great mythical journeys." -- Graham Joyce, himself recovering from cancer, looking at recovery as a quest story.
posted by MartinWisse at 10:16 PM PST - 10 comments

“I wanted to take each dancer and make them into a very defined character, so people could choose their favorite and stick with them.” Eight voguers, three rounds. This is Ballroom Battle. [warning: autoplay]
posted by oinopaponton at 8:28 PM PST - 27 comments

Meet "Joe", the hardest working man in show business, as he pulls out all the stops in his virtuoso performance of 12th Street Rag, on what *may* be the world's last surviving Cremona Photo-player [PDF]. On the other hand, it might be just a run-of-the-mill player piano with some extra bells, whistles and car horns tacked on. At any rate, "Joe" is absolutely killing it. Go, "Joe", go!
posted by flapjax at midnite at 7:20 PM PST - 17 comments

Summing up years of work in one sentence "Moby Dick is the hero of 'Moby Dick'." - English, Northwestern. "Really, really thin semiconductors look different and act differently than really thin semiconductors because quantum mechanics." - Materials Science and Engineering, Northwestern University. "such pulsating stars. very cosmic distance scale. mid-infrared wow." - Astrophysics, Pomona College.
posted by goofyfoot at 6:37 PM PST - 91 comments

In 2010, Judea Pearl was honored with a symposium on his work. He gave a talk on how to use causal models to evaluate counterfactuals. (He takes the first 14 minutes to thank people and reflect on his intellectual debts. Skip it if you really want to get to the meat of the talk, but it is well worth watching.) [more inside]
posted by Jonathan Livengood at 4:59 PM PST - 8 comments

Welcome to Cardboard Box Office. "The project began after finding that we had accumulated both a lot of cardboard boxes (due to moving to a new country) and a baby (due to giving birth)."
posted by Mezentian at 4:28 PM PST - 24 comments

"ON DARK evenings in late 1916, a frail 76-year-old man could often be seen shuffling furtively between The Dove, a pub in west London, and the green and gold turrets of Hammersmith Bridge. Passers-by paid no attention, for there was nothing about Thomas Cobden-Sanderson’s nightly walks to suggest that he was undertaking a peculiar and criminal act of destruction." The Economist's Christmas Edition tells the story of "the Fight Over the Doves": “No more graceful Roman letter has ever been cut and cast,” [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 4:24 PM PST - 23 comments

About the only place this book hasn't been is in my hands, open and upright, with my eyes pointed at it. But that's about to change. Because I'm going to read this book in 20-minute bursts over the next eight hours. Why 20-minute bursts? Because that's how long it takes for a batch of my mother's Slog-famous Christmas Snowball cookies to bake. I'm going to put a tray in the oven, read, swap trays out, read some more. And I think it's fair to say that by the end of the day today—after all my Christmas cookies are baked—I will have read more of this book than Sarah Palin wrote. - Dan Savage reviews Good Tidings and Great Joy: Protecting the Heart of Christmas.
posted by Artw at 4:16 PM PST - 91 comments

It's that time of year when Korean entertainment companies / music labels release Christmas songs, typically featuring all the acts from the label. Christmas 2013 saw songs from the smaller labels, Cube, Starship, Jellyfish, MYSTIC89, Bighit. Of the big 3 (SM, YG, and JYP), SM and JYP released all-company Christmas songs in the past, although they seem to be skipping them of late in favor of individual releases. SM's 12-member boy band EXO had the melancholy "Miracles in December", YG's Park Bom (from 2NE1) and Lee Hi covered "All I Want for Christmas Is You", and JYP avoided Christmas songs altogether. Crayon Pop had a Lonely Christmas, being Chrome Entertainment's only signed act until late this year. [more inside]
posted by needled at 4:11 PM PST - 12 comments

Vooza is synonymous with bold innovation. Vooza is making our world a better place. Vooza engineers run far ahead of the pack. Vooza lives and dies by its design. Vooza is uncompromising in its pursuit of integrity. Learn more about Vooza here.
posted by Nomyte at 3:15 PM PST - 22 comments

The Marvelverse seen as animals. (slWired)
posted by Kitteh at 2:59 PM PST - 27 comments

On Tuesday, December 17th, 2013, Dr. Janet Rowley passed away. The story of her research and life serves as inspiration to Women Scientists, Men Scientists, Drug Developers and Urban Cyclists. [more inside]
posted by Cold Lurkey at 2:38 PM PST - 9 comments

Reverse Engineering a Furby
posted by cjorgensen at 2:10 PM PST - 18 comments

There's case mods. Then there's this.
posted by not_that_epiphanius at 2:02 PM PST - 23 comments

Zaria Forman uses oil pastels to draw amazing ice and water from places like Greenland, the Maldives, Israel and Svarlbard.
posted by klangklangston at 1:39 PM PST - 7 comments

Hey! It looks like you're trying to write an original character for your fiction/fanfic/RPG, why not run it through The Universal Mary Sue Litmus Test and make sure you're not actually writing a self-insert wish-fulfillment fantasy.
posted by The Whelk at 1:33 PM PST - 71 comments

Fury, anarchy, martyrdom: Why the youth of Brazil are (forever) protesting, and how their anger may consume the World Cup. (hat tip).
posted by adamvasco at 10:43 AM PST - 13 comments

You'll never find, as long as you live / Someone who loves you tender like I do. / You'll never find, no matter where you search / Someone who cares about you the way I do / [more inside]
posted by growabrain at 10:11 AM PST - 9 comments

It's the holiday season! Time to relax in front of the TV and shop for some new gear. Sit back and enjoy some of Samsung Mobile's horrifically tone-deaf commercials from 2013. The latest How to pick up women with Samsung Galaxy Gear arguably being the most cringeworthy.

Then there's Samsung doesn't understand Lorde's 'Royals;' uses it to advertise the Galaxy Note 3 to street urchins. Baffled housewife, studious Asian gamer and corporate ladder-climber discover what an SSD is. Samsung Evolution Kits for burpy, farty boyfriends. 10-year old boy in a Bentley (driven by a butler named "Benson") unpacks a Galaxy S4. And here's some coverage of Samsung's "shockingly sexist" Galaxy S4 launch event. [more inside]
posted by phaedon at 10:10 AM PST - 84 comments

Brenda Schmitz wrote a letter to STAR 102.5′s Christmas Wish in August of 2011 – one month before she passed away from ovarian cancer at the age of 46. She asked her friend to send us her wish once her husband David had found someone else to love him and to help take care of their four boys. David has found someone and Brenda's Christmas wish has been granted.
posted by NoraCharles at 7:55 AM PST - 51 comments

YouTubeSlow is pretty straightforward to use: you can either enter a YouTube URL on the site, or add "slow" to the URL of any YouTube video (remove the "S" from HTTPS, too). Then you can watch speed painting at a slower speed, adjusting the playback speed with a slider. Sorry, the audio doesn't slow down. (Hat tip to Greg_Ace)
posted by filthy light thief at 7:28 AM PST - 4 comments

"Tell me what you eat, and I'll tell you what you are." -- Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin [more inside]
posted by zarq at 5:39 AM PST - 152 comments

Heroin: art and culture's last taboo
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 3:27 AM PST - 112 comments

There's a slight problem with Brighton's Christmas Lights. (SLV, Probably NSFW)
posted by PeterMcDermott at 3:13 AM PST - 27 comments

Try to defeat the hydra! (Java required.) More about hydra math.
posted by divabat at 1:42 AM PST - 27 comments