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For years, MDI has been developing a car that runs on compressed air. Last month, they signed an agreement with Tata Motors to produce the MiniCat - a zero-emissions vehicle that will travel up to 180 miles on $3 worth of fuel. See it in action here. (youtube)
posted by Afroblanco at 9:57 PM PST - 45 comments

Ampd customer support responds to Michael Pusateri's complaint over their advertising on Ann Coulter's site. They are a-political [sic] and try to reach "as many segments of the market as possible" - Homo, bisexual, and Republican.
posted by stevil at 9:39 PM PST - 21 comments

The Criterion Contraption: Matthew Dessem is going to watch every last DVD in the Criterion Collection and blog about it. Illuminating and knowledgable film writing. You can start, if you wish, with the entry on my favorite film, The Passion of Joan of Arc, or pick from the complete index.
posted by Falconetti at 9:24 PM PST - 55 comments

United States attorneys can be fired whenever a president wants, but not, as § 1512 (c) puts it, to corruptly obstruct, influence, or impede an official proceeding. "The day the news broke that Ms. Lam, who had already put one Republican congressman in jail, was investigating a second one, Mr. Sampson wrote an e-mail message referring to the “real problem we have right now with Carol Lam.” Bush, Gonzales and Rove are trying to cover their tracks.
posted by meddeviceengineer at 8:55 PM PST - 144 comments

John W. Backus, creator of Fortran, RIP
posted by alms at 8:49 PM PST - 30 comments

Discover Magazine has opened its back-issue archives (1992-present) to the public, you no longer need to be a subscriber.
posted by stbalbach at 8:01 PM PST - 6 comments

Billy Tipton (1914-1989) was a moderately popular jazz musician who happened to have been born a girl and lived as a man. In retrospect, some see Billy as a woman pragmatically trying to make it in a male dominated field, others see Billy as clearly transexual. If you like jazz of the 30's and 40's, forget Billy's gender for a moment and take a listen to Billy's playing! For more backstory, biographer Diane Middlebrook has posted a timeline of Tipton's life. More recently, Tipton has inspired jazz ensemble The Tiptons launches sound, a novel, a few plays and butch/punk/queer director Silas Howard is working on a film. Oh, and here's WP.
posted by serazin at 5:10 PM PST - 22 comments

Math Team Solves the Unsolvable E8
"If you thought writing calculations to describe 3-D objects in math class was hard, consider doing the same for one with 248 dimensions. Mathematicians call such an object E₈, a symmetrical structure whose mathematical calculation has long been considered an unsolvable problem. Yet an international team of math whizzes cracked E₈'s symmetrical code in a large-scale computing project, which produced about 60 gigabytes of data. If they were to show their handiwork on paper, the written equation would cover an area the size of Manhattan."
posted by ericb at 4:50 PM PST - 67 comments

The Norman B. Leventhal Map Center at the Boston Public Library has 200,000 historic maps and 5,000 atlases. A whole heap of them is online in very high resolution and you can explore the collection by location, subject, date, publisher, author and projection. They give virtual tours, select a map of the month and have a section called Maps in the News, where they profile Darfur and Iraq.
posted by Kattullus at 4:50 PM PST - 8 comments

The Cutting Edge - The Magic of Movie Editing BBC documentary on the technique and art of editing film. With commentary from Scorscese, Spielberg, and many more. Google vid.
posted by vronsky at 4:36 PM PST - 33 comments

Ever wondered where your laptop's parts come from, what it's made of, or what toxins are in it?
posted by aerotive at 2:47 PM PST - 22 comments

Old-style gopher servers are still working Apparently there are 86 hosts still serving the pre-Web gopher:// protocol. (MetaFilter's 2000-era gopher site is still down.)
posted by joeclark at 2:36 PM PST - 35 comments

Shorpy is an unusual photoblog; billed as "the 100-year-old photography blog," it focuses on found images from many, many decades gone by. Some favorites, so far.
posted by jonson at 2:35 PM PST - 26 comments

It's Hazzardgate! While Dukes Fest '07 is still set to go off without a hitch, John Schneider and Tom Wopat have apparently been blacklisted from their scheduled July 14th appearance at the Cincinatti Pops after the local NAACP branch complained about the original tv show's "racist overtones." But of course the big questions are... what does Cooter think about it all? How will the Hazzard fans cope? And what about the Ukes of Hazzard? Are they involved? Boss Hogg remains silent on the issue.
posted by miss lynnster at 2:12 PM PST - 66 comments

Monkey Fluids --20th century book and magazine illustrations with new text. ; >
posted by amberglow at 2:11 PM PST - 10 comments

Elementymology. An fascinating look at the origins of the names of 117 elements, which also includes the names of the elements in many languages and a discussion of the origin of chemical symbols. If the real elements bore you, you may be interested in the fictional elements and particles in Star Trek and the Legion of Super Heroes (as well as some real ones as used in comics, prev.).
posted by blahblahblah at 1:23 PM PST - 7 comments

Are you in college and dreading the coming of finals? Is that first weekend in May filling you with silent dread? Need to unwind but aren't really into seeing another movie or getting loco with your mexican breathern? Do you miss those carefree days of summer camp? Wicked! May 5th is New England Intercollegiate Nudist Day! (nsfw) via
posted by Stynxno at 11:07 AM PST - 46 comments

“No dogs bark” by Juan Rulfo is the story of a father carrying his son, a mortally wounded bandit, through the mountains to find a doctor. In Spanish and in English translation.
posted by jason's_planet at 9:32 AM PST - 18 comments

The Caravan Project: "Imagine you're a customer looking for a book you don't find on the shelf. As you would now, you'll likely ask a bookseller to check the store computer for it. As is not yet possible, the bookseller will say: "We can order you a print copy or we can sell it to you in other formats, some of which could be ready for downloading by the time you get home. How would you like it?"
posted by mattbucher at 9:30 AM PST - 60 comments

Civilization ends in 3... 2... 1.... Search the internet the Kevin Federline way.
posted by boo_radley at 9:27 AM PST - 53 comments

Can't sleep, Turkish Star Wars will eat me [IMDb, previously]
posted by thirteenkiller at 9:24 AM PST - 49 comments

Fifty years ago today, the bodies of Jean Vincendon and François Henry were finally being brought back to Chamonix. The two young mountaineers had set-off for the ascent of Mont-Blanc and found themselves blocked in an ice storm on their way down. A rescue team found them several days later, sitting on the glacier by temperatures of -30°C at 4000 meters of altitude. They were alive, photographed even, but could not be brought down and died later on, abandoned in the wreckage of the old Sikorsky rescue helicopter which had crashed beside them. The operation fiasco caused a total reorganization of the mountain rescue service in France.
posted by rom1 at 8:10 AM PST - 7 comments

WTFCNN?
posted by chunking express at 7:10 AM PST - 73 comments

I am a robot. Interstellar Scrotum arrived on everything2 mysteriously in the year 2000. Fifteen months later he was gone forever. In between he produced writing, quirky, strange, and sad.
posted by nasreddin at 6:50 AM PST - 23 comments

40 years ago, the Vicious Cycles motorcycle club assaulted a construction worker before taking to the road. Fortunately, filmmakers Chuck Menville (father of voice artist Scott Menville) and Len Janson were on hand to film the gang's misdeeds. Menville and Janson's picture would ultimately become part of a trilogy, with Blaze Glory and Sargent Swell of the Mounties produced wit similar eye-catching style. Decades later, the filmmakers' work would be echoed in another tale of conflict, in addition to a product-themed homage to more recent hipster subculture.
posted by Smart Dalek at 6:13 AM PST - 10 comments

Beware of the panty ninja! He certainly was dedicated.
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 5:53 AM PST - 29 comments

Spend a blissful 59 minutes and 7 seconds traversing the continent of Africa through her traditional music. This excellent stream (featuring just the right amount of background info) from the folks at Afropop Worldwide [previously] features plenty of the kind of effortlessly rolling, lilting rhythmic vibes that make African traditional music some of the most sublime in the world. "So don't expect over-the-top ethnography, just relax and enjoy acoustic Africa."
posted by flapjax at midnite at 5:05 AM PST - 11 comments

It is spring here in India, and Ugadi (the Spring Festival) is being celebrated with much pomp and ceremony throughout the southern part of the country. In Maharashtra, the same festival is referred to as Gudi Padwa.
posted by hadjiboy at 1:43 AM PST - 15 comments

Bruce Sterling's talk at SXSW is described on the landing page as a 'rant'. It isn't. What it is is a survey from 10,000 feet at what's happening in culture and technology and on the web, and I reckon it's worth spending the hour of your life it'll take to listen to it. I hope you agree. [mp3, 59 minutes]
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 1:06 AM PST - 52 comments