MetaFilter

""Each bathtub was carved in Italy from a single block of Carrara Marble. Three bathtubs were shipped from Genoa, Italy in July, 1859 and reached Baltimore in November of that year. The other three were shipped from Leghorn, Italy in September of 1859, and arrived in New York in January of 1860. The precise dates of the bathtubs' arrival and installation at the Capitol are uncertain, but the Senate Bathing Room is known to have been in operation as of February 23rd, 1860."

Roman Mars's 99% Invisible design podcast [previously] explores the once-luxurious Senate bathtubs hidden among the boiler rooms in the basement of the U.S. Capitol. [more inside]
posted by Mchelly at 8:57 PM PST - 36 comments

"Our goals are to train and maintain a network of highly efficient avalanche search and rescue cat teams across Canada." The Canadian Avalanche Rescue Cat Association seeks to add adorable kitties (CARCA) to the teams of animals that currently play a role in search-and-rescue missions for avalanche survivors. Only a few years old, they're the subject of a soon-to-be-available documentary (trailer), and offer training videos to demonstrate the serious business of training cats for search-and-rescue. And they are definitely not fake, please do not believe that canine propaganda.
posted by Anonymous at 8:41 PM PST - 32 comments

David Lowery, of Cracker and Camper Van Beethoven has an interesting argument for why the new Internet-based music-publishing industry may actually not be great for the artists: Meet The New Boss [more inside]
posted by jferg at 8:27 PM PST - 105 comments

A Charlie Rose discussion about the life and work of author Christopher Hitchens with his friends and fellow authors: Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis, James Fenton & Ian McEwan. Also featuring past Hitchens appearances on the show. (1 hr SLVideo)
posted by beisny at 7:51 PM PST - 39 comments

Vice President Joe Biden get the all-time bad Lip-Reading treatment. Hiyukak!Hiyuka! Pigsfeet! Pigsfeet!
posted by Seekerofsplendor at 7:36 PM PST - 24 comments

Thanks to a record-breaking £9 million fundraising effort, the British Library has acquired (and fully digitized) the St. Cuthbert Gospel. The manuscript, buried with the eponymous saint in 698 AD, is the oldest European book to survive fully intact. [more inside]
posted by Horace Rumpole at 7:33 PM PST - 25 comments

Those Americans who are familiar with the name Claude Lanzmann most likely know him as the director of “Shoah,” his monumental 1985 documentary about the extermination of the European Jews in the Nazi gas chambers. As it turns out, though, the story of Lanzmann’s eventful life would have been well worth telling even if he had never come to direct “Shoah.” In addition to film director, Lanzmann’s roles have included those of journalist, editor, public intellectual, member of the French Resistance, long-term lover of Simone de Beauvoir and close friend of Jean-Paul Sartre, world traveler, political activist, ghostwriter for Jacques Cousteau — I could go on, but it’s a good deal more entertaining to hear Lanzmann himself go on, and thanks to the publication in English of his memoir, “The Patagonian Hare,” we now have the opportunity to do so. (previously)
posted by Trurl at 7:28 PM PST - 6 comments

Are Tilda Swinton and David Bowie the same person? [more inside]
posted by k8lin at 7:01 PM PST - 56 comments

Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal has signed legislation that would require thousands of people applying for welfare to pass a drug test before they could receive benefits. [more inside]
posted by goHermGO at 6:19 PM PST - 167 comments

How do you get 80 ft of mast under a 65 ft bridge?
posted by unSane at 5:40 PM PST - 51 comments

50 things to do before you are eleven and three quarters. Convinced that kids spend to much time on the couch, the UK's National Trust has launched a programme to encourage children to be given the opportunity to try fifty new experiences in the great outdoors. [more inside]
posted by biffa at 5:19 PM PST - 71 comments

The Art of Pho by award-winning British illustrator and animator Julian Hanshaw is a moving and surreal story in interactive animation about a creature named Little Blue and his relationship with Ho Chi Minh City. In Vietnam's bustling capital Little Blue learns to master the art of making Pho - Vietnam's ubiquitous national noodle dish. [more inside]
posted by netbros at 4:58 PM PST - 11 comments

The Shaggs' Things I Wonder - a guitar lesson for strummers of all levels. OK! Now that you've got the melody under your belt, here's the melody plus second guitar part. And though some might think nobody would really want (or be able) to faithfully recreate the Shaggs' music onstage, those people would be wrong.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 4:51 PM PST - 16 comments

Billy Woods is quietly making the best rap music around. [more inside]
posted by broadway bill at 4:38 PM PST - 20 comments

Baby Boomers facing bleak future - alone. 'Startling new statistics from Bowling Green State University’s National Center for Family and Marriage Research (NCFMR) paint a bleak future for the largest generation in history, the baby boomers, as they cross into old age.' [more inside]
posted by VikingSword at 4:25 PM PST - 75 comments

"We're bringing you a new Time Lord, an amazing world where Tolkien meets Star Wars, and a universally acclaimed standard of audiophonic experience." So say the people behind The Minister of Chance, an audio drama set in the world of Doctor Who. Julian Wadham plays The Minister, who is, "like The Doctor, a Time Lord," a role originally played by Stephen Fry. The series also stars former Doctors Sylvester McCoy and Paul McGann. It is two episodes in, and has accumulated some strong reviews.
posted by jbickers at 2:03 PM PST - 25 comments

Guess who won the 2012 Pulitzer for Fiction. Nobody. Finalists Nominated as finalists in this category were: "Train Dreams," by Denis Johnson (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), a novella about a day laborer in the old American West, bearing witness to terrors and glories with compassionate, heartbreaking calm; "Swamplandia!" by Karen Russell (Alfred A. Knopf), an adventure tale about an eccentric family adrift in its failing alligator-wrestling theme park, told by a 13-year-old heroine wise beyond her years; and "The Pale King," by the late David Foster Wallace (Little, Brown and Company), a posthumously completed novel, animated by grand ambition, that explores boredom and bureaucracy in the American workplace.
posted by kenaldo at 1:58 PM PST - 85 comments

Three thousand years ago, snow fell on Greenland, creating what would become an iceberg in this century. Centuries pass and snow piles up, until it is 60 to 70 meters thick and forms glacial ice. As glaciers slowly flow into the ocean, the end of the glaciers calve, or break off. In Greenland, some 40,000 medium to large sized icebergs calve each year, making their way south. Of the 10,000 to 15,000 icebergs annually calved from glaciers in the Arctic, on the average only 375 pass Newfoundland into the North Atlantic Ocean. On April 14, 1912, an iceberg was some 5,000 miles south of the Arctic Circle when a boat ran into it, leaving a smear of red paint along the base of the berg. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 12:47 PM PST - 34 comments

An Anna's hummingbird on a tiny nest, smaller than an ivy leaf, with two hatchlings therein. Watch it live. [more inside]
posted by mudpuppie at 11:54 AM PST - 58 comments

John Lennon's "Imagine" - a guitar lesson for strummers of all levels. Includes an F chord grip (Fmaj7 actually) far easier than the dreaded barre.
posted by Ardiril at 10:24 AM PST - 113 comments

True Adventures in Better Homes - Here is a collision of two worlds: men’s adventure magazines or “sweats” meets Better Homes and Gardens. These photocollages are set against the backdrop of the McCarthy era, advertising, sexual repression, WWII and the Korean War. The cool, insular world of mid-century modern living glossed over all danger and darkness, which the heroic male fought off in every corner.
posted by Artw at 9:37 AM PST - 44 comments

This February, Twitter released Bootstrap 2 a rewrite of their earlier Bootstrap code. It's basically a framework that offers barebones styles and functionality. What's of interest, though, is that it uses almost no semicolons (just 15 in over 1k lines of code), which are normally used to separate lines of code. Instead, the code relies on automatic semicolon insertion (ASI). Unfortunately this code breaks when minified using JSMin. This was reported as an issue on Bootstraps's github page which led to a heated discussion on the topic of ASI. [more inside]
posted by Deathalicious at 8:59 AM PST - 128 comments

It appears claims of a cybercrime wave have been greatly exaggerated. (pdf)
posted by jeffburdges at 7:46 AM PST - 30 comments

Tupac performs at Coachella 2012. (in hologram form)
posted by empath at 7:10 AM PST - 112 comments

People Too, masters of three-dimensional paper art (previously) imbue Russian sheet music with illustrations of various everyday activities.
posted by obscurator at 6:46 AM PST - 4 comments

Writer and Interactive Fiction author Adam Cadre (previously) runs the Lyttle Lytton contest. A variation on the Bulwer-Lytton contest, the current incarnation of Cadre's contest has a 200-character limit per entry. Here are this year's winners.
posted by griphus at 6:38 AM PST - 29 comments

Rage - An amusing little animated short showing a rage-fueled chain reaction and the impact it can have on the world.
posted by quin at 6:03 AM PST - 19 comments