Displaying post 1 to 50 of 115
I first encountered the concept of
forest gardening in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's
Herland (1915)
[relevant part pages 79-80]; the fictional race of women in her book have completely remade the forests to contain only beneficial and food-bearing plants, which live harmoniously together and replenish the soil naturally. This is
actually being done, less than a hundred years later.
More;
similar,
similar.
posted to MetaFilter by fiercecupcake
at 9:32 AM on July 7, 2008
(25 comments)
Wordchamp lets you view foreign-language web pages with definitions in your language as mouseovers (registration-only).
posted to MetaFilter by goodnewsfortheinsane
at 6:42 PM on July 5, 2008
(10 comments)
Open Culture's "10 Signs of Intelligent Life at YouTube"
features "intellectually redeemable" channels from
UC Berkeley, @GoogleTalks, TheNobelPrize, TED Talks, FORA.tv, the European Graduate School, the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, BBC Worldwide, National Geographic, PBS, UChannel, MIT, Vanderbilt, and
USC.
posted to MetaFilter by Soup
at 5:40 PM on December 27, 2007
(21 comments)
RestoftheMovie.com
will probably be taken offline pretty soon, since it seems like they show full (screener) versions of current movies (like
Kung Fu Panda and
Ironman) in streaming format, so you'll probably want to check it out sooner rather than later.
posted to MetaFilter by Dave Faris
at 4:02 PM on June 12, 2008
(34 comments)
Randy Pausch,
Barbara Kingsolver,
Barack Obama, and
J.K. Rowling inspired the hell out of Carnegie Mellon, Duke, Wesleyan, and Harvard graduates this year.
If you're a big fan of pomp and circumstance, you'll also want to check out these:
Chuck Norris at Liberty University,
Samantha Power at Pitzer College, and
Michelle Nijhuis at Reed College.
posted to MetaFilter by anotherpanacea
at 7:21 PM on June 8, 2008
(36 comments)
page2rss is a simple, effective RSS scraper. For instance, here's an
RSS feed for
Astronomy Picture of the Day. A powerful feature: "You can add a button to your browser's bookmarks toolbar that will create Page2RSS feed for the page you are currently viewing."
posted to MetaFilter by nthdegx
at 2:18 AM on June 2, 2008
(12 comments)
DjVu is a sort of alternate to PDF. What (free) programs are available for editing DjVu documents? I need to: add pages, extract pages, delete pages and resize entire work for printing.
posted to Ask Metafilter by stbalbach
at 7:02 AM on June 1, 2008
(2 comments)
Start-up Junkies. An eight-part documentary on hulu about the genesis and growth of a multi-million dollar startup company.
posted to MetaFilter by norabarnacl3
at 1:04 PM on May 24, 2008
(16 comments)
They Chose China is a documentary about the
22 western POWs who chose to defect to China after the Korean War armistice.
posted to MetaFilter by bunnytricks
at 8:32 AM on May 18, 2008
(13 comments)
The Unofficial Guide to the DMV
― This web site was created to provide easy-to-access information and resources for all your Department of Motor Vehicles needs for all 50 states. Details about
driver’s licenses, driving records and ID cards, as well as
vehicle registrations, title transfers, bills of sale and smog checks are available here.
posted to MetaFilter by netbros
at 9:02 PM on May 11, 2008
(12 comments)
Look up any Zip Code
here, get lots of cool demographic data by entering it
here (make sure you enter a zip code, not just a town and keep scrolling down, down, down).
posted to MetaFilter by Rafaelloello
at 10:25 AM on May 10, 2008
(27 comments)
In honor of the 5-year anniversary of the Iraq War, PBS'
Frontline presented a fantastic 2- part special on the issue this past Monday and Tuesday. It is now available in it's entirety online along with interview transcripts from senior officials, a video timeline of the war, and battlefield stories from soldiers.
Bush's War
posted to MetaFilter by auralcoral
at 6:29 AM on March 26, 2008
(102 comments)
The 21 Steps - a spy thriller set in Google Maps
I've been working on a project called
We Tell Stories with Penguin (the book publisher), to design new ways of telling stories online. The idea was to get six accomplished authors and work with them to write and 'design' stories that are
native to the web.
The first story is by Charles Cumming and it's called 'The 21 Steps'. Like 'The 39 Steps', it's a thriller that involves a case of mistaken identity and a chase across the country. We've had some really great feedback on it so far, so I think it's safe to recommend it here!
posted to Projects by adrianhon
at 3:05 PM on March 19, 2008
Polyglot
Michel Thomas came to prominence through his work for the French resistance and the
successful interrogation of Nazis (who had formerly imprisoned him). After the war he started to develop (and eventually
patent) a method for teaching languages that eschewed notes, books, writing, memorisation and homework. Instead, words and phrases would be built up in lego-like constructions to provide “confidence in hours not years”. He gave private lessons to
a long list of A-list celebrities including Woody Allen, Natasha Kinsky, Tony Curtis and Grace Kelly. A BBC documentary from 1997 told his story and tested him out with the less exalted audience of 16 year old London school kids pre-selected to be “incapable of learning a foreign language” by their teachers [YT pt
1,
2,
3,
4]. He was secretive about how his methods worked until the end of his life when he finally made his
courses available as audiobooks.
posted to MetaFilter by rongorongo
at 7:00 AM on March 20, 2008
(24 comments)
Blosxom is an ultra-lightweight piece of blogging software that uses the existing structure of a file system to index and date your posts. The program itself weighs in at a scale-tipping 16.4 kilobytes, and does everything you need to tell the world about your navel. And for those things it doesn't do, there are
plugins. At the other end of the weight scale is the >160 page
annotated source code.
posted to MetaFilter by kaibutsu
at 1:37 PM on March 6, 2008
(33 comments)
The Times Machine allows easy browsing of every edition from 70 years (1851-1922) worth of New York Times in the original format. Very cool.
posted to MetaFilter by peacay
at 6:01 AM on February 25, 2008
(44 comments)
Here are the
essays and
short stories originally published in
The New Yorker that were later collected in Houghton Mifflin’s annual
“Best American” anthology series (1915-present).
posted to MetaFilter by stbalbach
at 8:40 AM on February 20, 2008
(7 comments)
Tired of video sites that are 99% cats running into walls? Check out
Big Think (
"YouTube for Smarty Pants") and
FORA.tv (
"A hipper, Web-based version of C-SPAN"). Give your brain a workout! (
Via, and
earlier)
posted to MetaFilter by NotMyselfRightNow
at 5:01 AM on January 23, 2008
(28 comments)
Ubuntu has quickly become the number one
Linux distro for the desktop. Not only is it free, but it has also made Linux easier to use than ever. Now,
Wubi enables
Windows users to install Ubuntu just like any other application, so you no longer have to mess around with partitions, burning CDs, etc.
posted to MetaFilter by Foci for Analysis
at 8:09 AM on January 21, 2008
(82 comments)
Kin-Dza-Dza! is a Soviet sci-fi cult classic that has managed to go largely unnoticed outside of Russia. Bizarre, funny, and at times surprisingly deep. Truly one of the unknown sci-fi greats.
Part One. Part Two. [Google Video, with embedded English subtitles]
posted to MetaFilter by pravit
at 11:43 PM on January 20, 2008
(14 comments)
Part 1 of 6
It is 1969...I'm watching TV and here's this guy on a Harley. Darn...this was new...major characters on TV shows did NOT ride motorcycles! He pulls up at a light and a fellow in a station wagon (remember station wagons???) says.. "taking a trip?", Bronson says "yeah"..the guy says "where to?" Bronson says "I don't know, where ever I end up, I guess"...
That was the beginning of 26 episodes of "Then Came Bronson", I've wanted to take that trip ever since!
posted to MetaFilter by HuronBob
at 10:01 PM on December 16, 2007
(17 comments)
Open Yale Courses provides free and open access to seven introductory courses taught by distinguished teachers and scholars at Yale University:Astronomy, English, Philosophy, Physics, Political Science, Psychology, Religious Studies: a full set of class lectures produced in high-quality video, syllabi, suggested readings, and problem sets.
posted to MetaFilter by nickyskye
at 7:43 AM on December 14, 2007
(30 comments)
American Icons from Public Radio International's
Studio 360 is host/author
Kurt Andersen's "...survey into the books, movies, art, and architecture that have come to represent American culture and character."
* For example, in the episode on '
Moby-Dick,' listen to Ray Bradbury, Tony Kushner and Frank Stella talk about Melville and his literary masterpiece. Listen to Laurie Anderson compare 'Moby Dick' to 'Star Trek.' In a segment on '
The Great Gatsby,' listen to the only known recording of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Then witness Salman Rushdie as he credits '
The Wizard of Oz' as his first literary influence while Bobby McFerrin performs snippets from his eight-minute medley condensing the entire movie.
*
posted to MetaFilter by ericb
at 3:48 PM on December 10, 2007
(10 comments)
