December 27, 2010

Live Forever or Die Trying

If you're a man, get married and stay married, because married men outlive bachelors (but only if they talk as much as their wives). If you're a woman, have a baby after 40, but don't put anything on your face that you wouldn't put in your stomach. [more inside]
posted by Knappster at 11:43 PM PST - 29 comments

A Real Science of Mind

A Real Science of Mind Neurobabble piques interest in science, but obscures how science works. Individuals see, know, and want to make love. Brains don’t. Those things are psychological — not, in any evident way, neural.
posted by shivohum at 10:50 PM PST - 21 comments

Video of the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake and rescue work

Video produced by the California Highway Patrol of the 7.1 1989 San Francisco Bay Area earthquake and the rescue attempts that followed. It focuses on the Bay Bridge and the Cypress collapse. This video has some intense footage, including much that I'd never seen of the rescue efforts. [more inside]
posted by gingerbeer at 10:08 PM PST - 23 comments

you cut me deep shrek you cut me real deep

From the opening frames of this mesmerizing video: "A crazy idea was born. Early sunday on Swordfish 2010 we got a crazy idea of duck-tape our GoPro Hero camera on the tip of a sword and do some swings to see how it looked. We started slow just to see if the camera was holding together, then stepping it up. All recording are done in real speed." The music really makes the video. (via)
posted by SpacemanStix at 9:17 PM PST - 54 comments

Mama Cass...two generations later

Mama Cass Elliott's granddaughter singing "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" Sometimes a bit of nostalgia combined with a sweet child is just worth sharing.
posted by HuronBob at 9:16 PM PST - 22 comments

Unusual Off-road Locomotion

Unusual Off-road Locomotion documents vehicles that are often "too eccentric, too expensive compared to the improvements or too far ahead of their time."
posted by brundlefly at 8:48 PM PST - 6 comments

"the paper could not have been refereed: its correctness is self-evident"

The Line Between Science and Journalism is Getting Blurry….Again by Bora Zivkovic is an excellent, James Burke-ish, essay on science, journalism, and a hopeful future for science journalism. [more inside]
posted by ardgedee at 8:01 PM PST - 4 comments

Los Angeles Times - Sotomayor, Kagan - David G. Savage

Sotomayor, Kagan shift Supreme Court debates to the left. The liberal wing is no longer drowned out by Scalia and his fellow conservatives during oral arguments.
posted by East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabaddi Champion '94 at 6:26 PM PST - 35 comments

Paul Fierlinger's Still Life with Animated Dogs

Still Life with Animated Dogs is a witty and candid cartoon by Paul Fierlinger, animator of Sesame Street's Teeny Little Super Guy, recounting his life from being a dissident artist in 1960s Czechoslovakia to being a successful animator in the US. He tells his lifestory by talking about the dogs he's owned over the years, Roosevelt, Ike, Johnson and Spinnaker. Warning: Something may get stuck in your eye.
posted by Kattullus at 4:40 PM PST - 8 comments

European 14th Century Cookbooks

Take oysters, parboile hem in her owne broth, make a lyour of crustes of brede & drawe it up wiþ the broth and vynegur mynce oynouns & do þerto with erbes. & cast the oysters þerinne. boile it. & do þerto powdour fort & salt. & messe it forth.

Three European 14th Century cookbooks: [more inside]
posted by thirteenkiller at 3:33 PM PST - 46 comments

Learn aboot North American English dialects

A quite ugly but intriguing map of English dialects in North America.
posted by nickheer at 3:22 PM PST - 114 comments

A Model for the Rest of Us

The AP reports that the drug policy in Portugal is paying off.
posted by gman at 1:50 PM PST - 39 comments

Al Jazeera's year in review

Al Jazeera's top 10 stories of 2010.
Including top 10 news, features, and opinion stories by reader hits.
posted by Taft at 1:45 PM PST - 18 comments

India's law to promote access to political information has sad downside.

India's freedom of information act martyrs.
posted by maiamaia at 12:13 PM PST - 10 comments

If the past is a foreign country, this is your passport

Retronaut: someone who makes the conscious effort to experience life outside of time and modernity. Artist David McDermott. Chris Wild, keeper of the How To A Retronaut Site, full of arcane anachronisms: WWII in modern Amsterdam, Map of abandoned London tube stations, 50 years of Japanese concept cars, 1940's London in high resolution color images and much more.
posted by Bora Horza Gobuchul at 12:09 PM PST - 8 comments

This isn't your grandfather's science fiction

Ted Chiang is perhaps the finest author in contemporary science fiction -- and the most rarefied. A technical writer by trade and a graduate of the distinguished Clarion Writers Workshop, Chiang has published only twelve short stories in the last twenty years, one dozen masterpieces of the genre whose insightful, precise, often poetic language confronts fundamental ideas -- intelligence, consciousness, the nature of God -- and thrusts them into a dazzling new light. Click inside for a complete listing of Chiang's work, with links to online reprints or audio recordings where available, as well as a collection of one-on-one interviews, links to his nonfiction essays, and a few other related sites and articles. [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi at 11:11 AM PST - 116 comments

The Fastest Transcribing by the Greatest Number

“Box 73 and Box 96 contain interesting manuscripts on drunkenness, swearing, adultery and much more...”. The Bentham Transcription Project is using crowdsourcing to transcribe 40,000 unpublished manuscripts of utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham, who died in 1832 but still sits and watches. (prev) In four months, they've knocked off 435 already. [more inside]
posted by msalt at 11:11 AM PST - 11 comments

The paper training video is slightly less heartwarming

Puppies for Christmas. slyt
posted by biddeford at 10:46 AM PST - 46 comments

The weather outside is frightful...

Thirty inches of snow in thirty seconds. (via Reddit)
posted by Rory Marinich at 9:59 AM PST - 53 comments

A flock of sheep

The perfect gift for the dog who has everything.
posted by scalefree at 9:48 AM PST - 42 comments

The German Model & Works Councils

Wondering at the route US vs. German unemployment has taken, I found some clues here and there, but the overriding factor seems to be the German model[1] and works councils.[2] [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 9:41 AM PST - 34 comments

The Place Where You Live

Your contribution can take the form of a short essay or story of no more than 350 words, up to six photographs, a painting, drawing, or handmade map. Orion magazine reintroduces reader submitted stories about how we connect to where we live.
posted by greenskpr at 8:04 AM PST - 5 comments

Fire and Chaos at Sea

The final hours of the Deepwater Horizon.
But this was a disaster with two distinct parts — first a blowout, then the destruction of the Horizon. The second part, which killed 11 people and injured dozens, has escaped intense scrutiny, as if it were an inevitable casualty of the blowout.
It was not.
David Barstow, David Rohde and Stephanie Saul report for the New York Times on the Deepwater Horizon disaster. [more inside]
posted by spitbull at 6:14 AM PST - 72 comments

Brian Butterfield's Christmas.

Holiday season getting you down? Perhaps knowing how Brian Butterfield spent Christmas might cheer you up. Bonus feature: the full Peter Serafinowicz 2008 Christmas special, part 1, part 2, part 3. Previously, Brian Butterfield's netsight. Profoundly not safe for work.
posted by Ahab at 12:29 AM PST - 9 comments

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