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Can pathogens effect culture? Possibly.
posted by delmoi at 11:05 PM PST - 35 comments

Yes, it's another Snakes on a Plane promo but this one is different: it's fucking awesome. Drop in your friends name (hopefully it's semi-normal and they have it in the db), then fill out some info about your friend, then have it place a call to them. Watch friend freak out when Samuel L. Jackson calls them up and knows all sorts of shit about them. Trust me, it totally freaked me out when someone did it to me today.
posted by mathowie at 8:53 PM PST - 114 comments

Devoter... "like Metafilter, only much more political." From our own jca.
posted by dobbs at 6:57 PM PST - 53 comments

It’s unfortunate that telegraphy is no longer with us. The telegram, however, lives on in one of the media that sealed its fate. And if you prefer to roll your own, there’s a site for that too (link to fonts at "telegram" at lower right).
posted by jason's_planet at 6:28 PM PST - 19 comments

Missed Opportunities...Lawrence Wright tells, for the first time, the story of the F.B.I. agent who had the best chance of foiling the 9/11 plot. Here, with Amy Davidson, Wright talks about how turf wars with the C.I.A. got in the way. Wright’s book “The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11” will be published by Knopf in August.
posted by Postroad at 6:11 PM PST - 13 comments

Dice Wars is a flash game, similar to Risk. The goal is to conquer the entire board. Start easy, with just the two player version (play goes up to 7 players max). In order to "win" a square, the randomized total of your die roll must be higher than your opponent's total. Tie/Lose, and all your dice (but one) are removed from your square. After each turn, the number of dice you earned is randomly distributed among your conquered squares. Strategically, it's good to build a solid base of contiguous squares, and staff your front lines with more dice than your edge squares.
posted by jonson at 5:50 PM PST - 32 comments

Design Lab 2006 (flash and sound) Are you a college student with an eye toward design? Design a cool appliance and win 5,000 Euros. For the rest of us there are previous winners, such as this airwash waterless washing machine.
posted by caddis at 4:34 PM PST - 13 comments

Ahmad Nadalian's work can be found all over the world. He is an artist that carves symbols on rocks and then leaves them at the site where they were created (sometimes burying them).
posted by tellurian at 4:15 PM PST - 7 comments

The web moves in wonderful ways. Case in point, must see mashups WeatherBonk.com and SkiBonk.com . If you are ski freak or weather geek, you will really find these pages useful. There's even a golfbonk in beta, if you are into it!
posted by BrodieShadeTree at 3:40 PM PST - 5 comments

Saul Williams on camera: Black Stacey [.ram, .asx, or YouTube], List of Demands [.ram, .asx, or original version at YouTube], Coded Language with DJ Krust [.asx or YouTube], and a formidable 16-minute spoken word clinic [Google video]. [NSFW language.]
posted by milquetoast at 3:36 PM PST - 21 comments

Australia is well known for having more than it's share of dangerous wildlife. However only a few examples are well known outside of the continent. The funnelweb spider might be Australia's most infamous horror. But the redback (a relative of the American black widow) and mouse spider both deserve your respect as well. Long hyped as causing severe ulceration, the reputation of the white-tailed spider might not be as deserved but is still a spider of concern. (more inside...)
posted by weretable and the undead chairs at 1:28 PM PST - 86 comments

Dance Dance Dance! Called Dance Dance Dance (DDD), demoed at SIGGRAPH 2006, is a lot like DDR, but judges how well the dancer can match a silhouette against a white screen. Watch a video demonstration (wmv format). Other possible uses for this sort of technology, once it's sufficiently advanced: sign-language translator, or practicing martial-arts or other activities requiring precise physical motions.
posted by canine epigram at 12:46 PM PST - 11 comments

YouTubular: Dance Machines (via) [more inside]
posted by c:\awesome at 12:18 PM PST - 33 comments

Brooks Stevens, the man who once said, "there is nothing more aerodynamic than a wiener," created the iconic Wienermobile , but was also responsible for many other innovations in industrial design. He put the first window in a clothes dryer, built a land-yacht and streamlined train, developed an important precursor to the SUV, and designed the wide-mouth peanut butter jar and an aerodynamic vacuum cleaner. More lastingly, he also created the idea of planned obsolescence, the "desire to own something a little newer, a little better, a little sooner than is necessary."
posted by blahblahblah at 11:59 AM PST - 31 comments

Work Friendly is the greatest website ever for people trying to get away with web browsing at work. You enter a URL, it launches a new window styled to resemble a Word Document window. It even includes a "Boss" key to convert the page to regular text. Check out MeFi in it. [via waxy]
posted by mathowie at 11:43 AM PST - 39 comments

Quality from the Himalayas. Amid continuing civil violence, Nepal has just made a big push to escape poverty through your local Starbucks. Working with Winrock International, Nepal's tea growers are finalizing a Code of Conduct that would eliminate pesticides banned by the EU and commit tea growers to replenishing the soil, using organic fertilizers whenever and wherever possible, and using fair labor and wage practices -- making Nepal Orthodox Tea more environmentally- and worker-friendly than its better-known rival Darjeeling. In the process, they hope to create a gourmet niche product (pdf; go to p. 8) that appeals to the taste and sensibilities of socially-conscious Westerners through a partnership with Tazo (Starbucks' main tea supplier), as well as to modernize the local industry to create greater international awareness of its products.
posted by occhiblu at 11:12 AM PST - 17 comments

Have you ever wanted to see an exploded view of a Formula One car? How about live and in person? via SpoFi
posted by mr_crash_davis at 10:30 AM PST - 20 comments

"The real story is actually better than the one we told." A Vanity Fair recounting of NORAD's response to the September 11 attacks, based on "30 hours of never-before-released tapes from the control room," isn't quite the same as what the Pentagon told the 9/11 Commission. Commission staffers "thought that e-mails and other evidence provided enough probable cause to believe that military and aviation officials violated the law by making false statements to Congress and to the commission."
posted by kirkaracha at 9:51 AM PST - 126 comments

During a 1987 radio broadcast, Dutch comedian and writer Wim de Bie decided to take Ry Cooder up on his offer and give him a call. Hilarity ensued (RealAudio). Note: the song is played until about 1'55", phone conversation follows.
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane at 9:37 AM PST - 27 comments

Looking for the Loch Ness monster, a new husband, Uranium, or bed sores? eBay can help (or so their adwords think).
posted by mattbucher at 9:34 AM PST - 14 comments

Men of Mortuaries: Because nothing is hotter than a man who handles corpses. See the local news story (wmv) and some promotion pics (both nsfw). Finally, I've found something to replace my Studmuffins of Science.
posted by Gamblor at 9:27 AM PST - 11 comments

Queen Ranavalona I, best known as a villainess in George Fraser's novel Flashman's Lady, ascended the throne of Madagascar in 1835. Known abroad as the Bloody Mary of Madagascar, the Queen's favourite methods of execution included half-boiling and tossing off of cliffs, and over a third of her population died under her reign. Although she and her court wore French dress, Ranavalona banned Christianity and drove Europeans off the island. Nevertheless, she united Madagascar and kept it free of French or British control at a time when other African nations were brought into the growing empires. [more inside]
posted by By The Grace of God at 7:46 AM PST - 22 comments

Angry German Kid We all have out bad days (YouTube video, NSFW German cursing, hysterical screaming, extreme keyboard abuse)
posted by persona non grata at 7:14 AM PST - 55 comments

Surviving Sudoku. Matt Gaffney, a crossword puzzle designer, examines the crossword community's ambivalent relationship with the phenomenally successful number puzzle. Meanwhile, it's high time to resurrect Done in Pen: The Poems of New York Times Puzzle Editor Will Shortz.
posted by staggernation at 6:53 AM PST - 39 comments

Manhattan Timeformations. Mapping Manhattan's skyscraper districts through time. [more]
posted by nickyskye at 4:05 AM PST - 10 comments

Sonic Postcards - winner of the New Statesman New Media Award. Explore sound. Via the Sonic Arts Network, UK exponents of Electroacoustic music.
posted by nthdegx at 4:02 AM PST - 1 comments

It's Firefox Day!
posted by reklaw at 3:36 AM PST - 40 comments

A Thousand Faces Photographer Hal Satterthwaite photographed a thousand people in Walthamstow, which is in north-east London. It's a multi-racial, multi-cultural area, and the photographs reflect this beautifully. Related article from The Times.

I had intended to link to various pictures, but for me the delight was finding the faces I liked best by browsing the site. I even found a friend in there.
posted by essexjan at 3:11 AM PST - 15 comments

Would-be citizens sue for U.S. citizenship. Ten Middle Eastern and Asian immigrants sued the government Tuesday for allegedly letting their U.S. citizenship applications linger indefinitely by delaying background checks. What is the world coming to when foreign nationals try to sue the government and force it to give them U.S. citizenship?
posted by ArunK at 2:28 AM PST - 75 comments

Found lists Read what you will into this collection of wishes, aspirations and plans - each more intriguing than the one before (if you line them up that way).
posted by bunglin jones at 2:04 AM PST - 6 comments