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A hundred social scientists and geneticists gathered this week in Alexandria to sort out the meaning of race, and didn't, quite.
posted by sudama at 8:39 PM PST - 40 comments

B'gawk! It may sound a bit like a joke, but forget about merely watching webcams, or playing with subservient facsimilies. Join the urban farming movement and do it for real. Martha Stewart does it, Hollywood producers make movies about it, and now even hipsters are doing it too: they're raising chickens in urban and suburban backyards. Coops range from the eggs-spensive but low-maintenance "HenSpa" to tricked-out Home Depot sheds to faux-gingerbread cottages to the very cool iMac-style "eglu". Surprisingly, it's usually legal to keep chickens in most areas as long as you only keep hens and no rooster (too noisy), but even in anti-chicken cities like NYC, it goes on in secret and remains legal on public property. And you can always buy your neighbors' silence with fresh eggs. Poultry Power to the People!
posted by Asparagirl at 6:12 PM PST - 27 comments

Why the Bear Market is Not Over. A PowerPoint presentation from the perpetually pessimistic people at The Prudent Bear.
posted by Kwantsar at 4:22 PM PST - 8 comments

Experts Study New Sign Language System A new system of sign language developed by deaf children in Nicaragua may hold clues about the evolution of languages. When the country's first school for the deaf was established in 1977, children were not taught sign language but developed a system of signs to communicate. Childhood learning may determine linguistic rules ...They found that older students used hand signals resembling the gestures employed by hearing people, mimicking the entire event physically. But younger pupils - who had interacted with other deaf children from an early age - used a more complex series of signs. They split the scene into component parts and arranged these sequentially to convey the incident. The constructions resemble the way words and sentences are built in verbal languages, using segments structured in a linear fashion. This indicates that way the younger children learnt the sign language helped reshape it according to these linguistic rules.
............... Fascinating... /Mr. Spock
posted by y2karl at 4:02 PM PST - 20 comments

Hurricane Ivan VS soy sprayed house that wouldn't look bad in Star Trek. Results of the match: house wins ! Proof proved that if you build to last, the building lasts ...but if you don't for whatever reason.... More info on the building here
posted by elpapacito at 3:43 PM PST - 19 comments

Just getting into the spirit of things ready for tomorrow. Again.
posted by ciderwoman at 12:50 PM PST - 24 comments

Great Small Hotels Stumbled on this while trying to figure out where to go on a vacation. [Thanks to antsushi]
posted by jaronson at 11:47 AM PST - 7 comments

The life and death of a supersized man. Walter Hudson was fat. Precisely how fat was impossible to determine, because the one time he agreed to be weighed on an industrial-strength scale, it broke. (Maybe it was something he ate?) But no one denies that Hudson was one of the most obese people of the modern era (note: pictures not safe before lunch). Former comic, erstwhile diet guru, civil rights activist and Michael Jackson proponent Dick Gregory was one of Hudson's many exploiters, but Hudson's agoraphobic existence sounds almost beatific.
posted by digaman at 9:32 AM PST - 24 comments

XXX: 30 P9RN STAR PORTRAITS (a bit NSFW, obviously) by photographer Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, is a book that features paired portraits (one clothed and one nude) of the top stars in p6rn, straight and gay, from legends like (best-selling memoirist) Jenna Jameson, Ron Jeremy and Nina Hartley to (ahem) rising stars like Sunrise Adams, Belladonna, Chad Hunt. The book includes short essays on the intersection of p6rnography and culture by a wide range of writers, from Salman Rushdie to AM Homes. XXX is, essentially, about the much-dreaded "p6rnification" of the culture at large, recently featured in the New York Times. As Gore Vidal writes in the book's introduction, “Doubtless, sex tales were told about the Neanderthal campfire and perhaps instructive positions drawn on cave walls. Meanwhile, the human race was busy establishing such exciting institutions as slavery and its first cousin, marriage.” (more inside, with totally NSFW Terry Richardson)
posted by matteo at 9:24 AM PST - 12 comments

Question for a gray Saturday. What is literature for ? Three litblogs -- Conversational Reading, The Reading Experience, and Leonard Bast -- discuss. Curl up and consider.
posted by dame at 9:14 AM PST - 5 comments

Threadless lets you submit your very own tee-shirt designs. The designs are voted on, and then the winning designs are printed up. They have some Very Cool Designs.
posted by hughbot at 8:24 AM PST - 13 comments

SHOW TUNES 1, FUNDAMENTALISTS 0 [thanks karmakaze]
posted by Pretty_Generic at 7:36 AM PST - 53 comments

Proof of the warming power of whiskey. A pilot project, which will see the first district heating scheme based in a distillery, is being set up at the home of the Old Pulteney in Wick. It will produce environmentally-friendly power and reduce heating and electricity bills for nearly 600 householders.
posted by psmealey at 6:36 AM PST - 5 comments