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Relatives of the passengers, survivors, and crew of the RMS Titanic are planning a Centenary Cruise on April 8th, 2012, 100 years after the sailing of the ill-fated liner. (The actual centenary of the sailing is April 10th.) [more inside]
posted by pjern at 9:12 PM PST - 54 comments

Jetting through the Grand Canyon in a Lockheed T-33 in 1959. RAF pilot Ron Dick flies a Lockheed T-33 through the Grand Canyon in 1959. Video hosted by Air and Space magazine. Music by Joe Satriani. [more inside]
posted by smcameron at 7:44 PM PST - 101 comments

Kevin Warwick plugged his nervous system into his wife's. [more inside]
posted by mhjb at 7:33 PM PST - 56 comments

Sixth-grader Jackson C. Frank was horribly burned when the boiler at his Cheektowaga, New York, elementary school exploded March 31, 1954, killing fifteen of his classmates. While recovering from his injuries, Frank was introduced to the guitar, and the insurance settlement he received a decade later helped fund a trip to England, where he recorded his first and only album. [more inside]
posted by Knappster at 6:30 PM PST - 34 comments

Journey Through Canyons — a stunning HD time-lapse of the canyonlands in Arizona and Utah, featuring the Grand Canyon, Glen Canyon, Bryce Canyon, and Zion Canyon. A thorough way to explore these magnificent geologic marvels is to follow The Hayduke Trail, one of America's Best Adventures.
posted by netbros at 5:47 PM PST - 11 comments

In all my years of architecture school and practice, there seems to be a pervasive myth that my job is pretty and easy. Here, I reveal the painful, ugly truth about why it takes so long to build a building, what it is exactly that we do, and why that's not creamer you smell in my coffee.
posted by Joe Beese at 5:35 PM PST - 47 comments

Glass Candy is singer Ida No, whose vocal stylings have been compared to Nico and Debbie Harry, and producer Johnny Jewel, who cites as his influences Italo disco, freestyle, Krautrock, hip hop, new wave, and '80s cop show and John Carpenter soundtracks. "The group has also said that stores could appropriately file their music between Olivia Newton-John, Suicide and Schoolly D." Here for example, they mash up 'Mind Playing Tricks On Me' by the Geto Boys with 'Iko Iko'. And here is a cover of Kraftwerk's Computer Love. [more inside]
posted by puny human at 5:03 PM PST - 27 comments

Need something energetic and fun on a lazy sunday? Consider this amusing flash toy. [more inside]
posted by mccarty.tim at 3:38 PM PST - 27 comments

The Haenyo divers: Korea's women of the sea [more inside]
posted by grounded at 3:32 PM PST - 11 comments

Earlier this week, on August 11th, the street performer, musician, and actor Bruno Schleinstein passed away. After spending much of his youth in mental institutions, "Bruno S" became famous when German filmmaker Werner Herzog cast him as the lead character in two seminal German New Wave films, The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser and Stroszek.
posted by (Arsenio) Hall and (Warren) Oates at 3:17 PM PST - 17 comments

Marketing firm Flowtown has an Updated 2010 version of the Social Networking Map first created by xkcd.
posted by Phire at 3:05 PM PST - 36 comments

Welcome to Culturebot, a NYC-based website all about performing arts and culture locally, nationally and around the globe. Culturebot.org is a multidisciplinary, contemporary arts + culture blog, launched in December 2003. Based in NYC we cover contemporary cultural news, events and ideas from NYC and around the world. Culturebot was envisioned and created by founding editor Andy Horwitz. It was initially made possible from a grant to Performance Space 122 by the National Performance Network. [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 3:00 PM PST - 1 comments

StoryCorps is an independent nonprofit fostering and preserving meaningful conversations between two people who are important to each other. The vignettes are addictive little heart-grabbers, some unearthing long-held secrets. Here's a sampling: I don't know anything about white people; A son's premonition; Bathtub gin; Adoption; Two canoes; Where's the colored section?; Good hugger; Court every day; A schmear; Stonewall memories; and one video animation - a charming talk between a 12 year old with Asperger's and his Mom. There are hundreds more. [more inside]
posted by madamjujujive at 1:57 PM PST - 28 comments

"Darwin Fest" videos of talks given at the 50th anniversary of the Darwin Conference at the University of Chicago in 2009. [more inside]
posted by AceRock at 1:32 PM PST - 16 comments

Your Lucky Day. A short film involving a lottery situation in a convenience store that gradually escalates out of control. Rather grim, but very well made.
posted by BlackLeotardFront at 12:54 PM PST - 29 comments

"We pray to God that this will not happen to the Jewish people or to any people anymore." -- a group of American imams visits Dauchau and Auschwitz.
posted by empath at 12:35 PM PST - 43 comments

WAFF-TV reported the story of how Antoine Dodson saved his sister Kelly from a rapist intruder in her bed. Antoine's passionate sound-bite becomes an internet sensation as the "Bed Intruder" meme. Things go to the next level when the Gregory Brothers auto-tune it and turn it into a surprisingly good hit song. [more inside]
posted by w0mbat at 12:23 PM PST - 63 comments

The Culture, in its history and its on-going form, is an expression of the idea that the nature of space itself determines the type of civilisations which will thrive there ... The thought processes of a tribe, a clan, a country or a nation-state are essentially two-dimensional, and the nature of their power depends on the same flatness ... The contention is that our currently dominant power systems cannot long survive in space; beyond a certain technological level a degree of anarchy is arguably inevitable and anyway preferable. [more inside]
posted by memebake at 11:57 AM PST - 78 comments

How are heatwaves in Russia and flooding in Pakistan related? Both result from a kink in the jet stream that has frozen in place. (Previous coverage of the disasters in Russia and Pakistan on the blue.)
posted by Bora Horza Gobuchul at 11:42 AM PST - 19 comments

Scott Horton writes at harpers.org on most weekends posts about music and literature. Typically he'll post poems or philosophy (and often translate same from one of the many languages he's, apparently, fluent in) and link to youtube clips of music to complement the passages he writes about, along with images of classical paintings. Pretty neat. This weekend the clips are Glenn Gould playing Beethoven's Sonata No. 17, op. 31, no. 2 (1802)(the “Tempest”) tied to a passage by Hegel. And Beethoven's Choral Fantasy and its lyrics which were written by someone named Kuffner. Check it out.
posted by fartknocker at 10:18 AM PST - 15 comments

In Praise of Fast Food: A historian takes on the "Culinary Luddism" the fresh/local/natural food movement. Originally published in the journal Gastronomica and featured as part of a series on food culture from the Utne Reader. [more inside]
posted by donovan at 9:19 AM PST - 117 comments

The Linguistic Diversity of Aboriginal Europe (and what happened to it) [more inside]
posted by nangar at 8:04 AM PST - 35 comments

For the more visually-directed chef: CookBlast - a search engine for cooking and recipe videos. [via mefi projects]
posted by The Whelk at 8:00 AM PST - 2 comments

The website for LA 36 Public Access [WMA plugin required to view shows] is where you should be when you want incredibly diverse programming to come at you right this second. And by "incredibly diverse programming," I mean "what the hell is this." Absorbing niche programming is offered together with some of TV's greatest inexplicabilities.

Particularly recommended is The Roots of the Earthman, a full-length movie produced by the Unarius Academy of Science of El Cajon (previously) without a script, starring cult members who "relived past lives" in order to bring you this historical reenactment. [Youtube clip of intro, 3:44] [more inside]
posted by Countess Elena at 7:58 AM PST - 4 comments

What's China up to in Africa? What books should I read on the world's most populous nation? How's their environment doing? This, and much more from the weekly updated Sinica podcast. Hosted by Popup Chinese.
posted by klue at 6:53 AM PST - 5 comments

Solar physicists may have discovered why the Sun recently experienced a prolonged period of weak activity. Apparently it was just a faulty conveyor belt. The solar minimum of 2008 is gone but not forgotten.
posted by twoleftfeet at 3:53 AM PST - 7 comments