Displaying post 1 to 50 of 118
Hellenica
is an encyclopedia of Greek culture, from classical Hellas, through the Byzantine Empire until the modern day, though its focus is on antiquity and especially the
science and technology of Ancient Greece. Featuring technical diagrams and explications, there's no better site if you seek information on
gigantic galleys,
now obscure great Greek mathematicians,
the last still working Ancient lighthouse and
gears and how they were used by Archimedes and other ancients. This is not to denigrate other sections of the site, such as the page on the
Olympics (including a
Google Map of the site of the games), biographies of
ancient,
Byzantine and
modern Greeks, the
warring and
healing of the Byzantines or the overview of Greek literature, taking in
antiquity,
the medieval era and
modern times. That said, Hellenica is at its finest when treating science and technology.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus
at 6:21 AM on July 18, 2008
(8 comments)
Eygption Police officer
use a cellphone to film a man being sodomized by police. Egyptian opposition media have claimed that in the police academy, recruits are trained to use torture to extract confessions. (NSFW)
video on youtube.
posted to MetaFilter by IronWolve
at 2:36 AM on January 22, 2007
(51 comments)
"Skin painted bright red, heads partially shaved, arrows drawn back in the longbows and aimed square at the aircraft buzzing overhead. The gesture is unmistakable: Stay Away. The apparent aggression shown by these people is quite understandable, for they are members of one of Earth's last uncontacted tribes."
posted to MetaFilter by Rhaomi
at 5:18 PM on May 29, 2008
(88 comments)
"Only Nixon could go to China," and only
ex-Republican ex-Senator Lincoln Chafee can explain how George W. Bush set out "to preempt the Congress... on every issue", "turned his back on (his) bedrock campaign pledges", and become simultaneously America's most powerful and least popular President (and why there could never be a "surely this..." moment). NOT just another OMGBUSH commentary, this should be required reading for anybody who
honestly wants to know what went wrong.
posted to MetaFilter by wendell
at 11:59 AM on May 2, 2008
(46 comments)
Monsanto’s Harvest of Fear.
"Monsanto already dominates America’s food chain with its genetically modified seeds. Now it has targeted milk production. Just as frightening as the corporation’s tactics–ruthless legal battles against small farmers–is its decades-long history of toxic contamination."
posted to MetaFilter by homunculus
at 1:00 PM on April 3, 2008
(78 comments)
SF Meetup for woebegone emigrating mefite duo's sousy sendoff? Needs to be April 19th!
posted to MetaTalk by Ambrosia Voyeur
at 4:18 PM on April 8, 2008
(85 comments)
Iwase Yoshiyuki
"In the late 1920s, young Yoshiyuki received an early Kodak camera as a gift. Since the main livelihood of the town came from the sea, he gravitated there, and soon found a passion for "the simple, even primitive beauty" of
ama – girls and women who harvested seaweed, turban shells and abalone from beneath the coastal waters." "By the late 1960s, they had disappeared. This body of work stands as the final, most comprehensive visual document of the life and work of these divers."
[NSFW]
posted to MetaFilter by tellurian
at 10:45 PM on March 27, 2008
(48 comments)
Sacred Destinations.
Nearly every culture in human history has sought to encounter and honor the divine, the mysterious, the supernatural or the extraordinary in some way. This most often occurs at sacred sites - special places where the physical world seems to meet the spiritual world. From
ancient wonders, to
Greek temples, to
Biblical sites, and everything in between, the website has a vast collection of
photo galleries and
maps. The website's founder also maintains a
travel blog and posts
recent pictures on Flickr.
posted to MetaFilter by amyms
at 11:45 PM on January 17, 2008
(5 comments)
Rush
Rush is a
Canadian rock band comprising bassist, keyboardist, and lead vocalist
Gary Lee Weinrib, guitarist
Alexander Zivojinovich, and drummer and lyricist
Neil Ellwood Peart.
Bewitched by
Ayn Rand, obsessed by nuclear war and enraptured by
cheap science fiction, Rush were role models to
geeks everywhere,
yearning to be cool, but
failing. Still,
they rocked, in their own way.
posted to MetaFilter by psmealey
at 9:34 PM on October 15, 2007
(135 comments)
There is time, and there is
"African time". The Ivory Coast is
fighting chronic lateness with a contest that offered a $60,000 villa as its grand prize. The winner, legal adviser Narcisse Aka, is known by his colleagues as "Mr. White Man's Time" and
said that his punctuality makes him feel like "an extra-terrestrial."
posted to MetaFilter by stbalbach
at 8:37 AM on October 9, 2007
(54 comments)
Last weekend's
PICNIC'07 conference in Amsterdam featured a
Green Challenge: to come up with the best marketable green idea that could be developed and sold to consumers within two years. Dutch decentralized renewable energy company
Qurrent took down the big €500,000 prize for the
Qbox: a device which creates optimizing energy algorithms for all devices in a home.
See also:
Green Thing.
posted to MetaFilter by chuckdarwin
at 1:42 PM on October 1, 2007
(10 comments)
Derinkuyu wasn't discovered until 1965, when a resident cleaning the back wall of his cave house broke through a wall and discovered behind it a room that he'd never seen, which led to still another, and another. Eventually, spelunking archeologists found a maze of connecting chambers that descended at least 18 stories and 280 feet beneath the surface, ample enough to hold 30,000 people. [flickr]. [wiki].
posted to MetaFilter by dersins
at 8:21 AM on August 31, 2007
(48 comments)
Vernor Vinge: Mathematician, computer scientist and science fiction visionary worthy of Arthur C Clarke's mantle, Vinge is most famous for popularising the idea of the
singularity, where technology advances so quickly that humans cannot participate, but he's also credited with writing one of the first stories about cyberspace,
True Names, back in 1981. More recently, he's been exploring how
augmented reality and belief circles will change the way we live in his latest novel
Rainbows End - which he put online,
completely for free.
posted to MetaFilter by adrianhon
at 8:01 AM on August 24, 2007
(43 comments)
A society without power relations can only be an abstraction. Which, be it said in passing, makes all the more politically necessary the analysis of power relations in a given society, their historical formation, the source of their strength or fragility, the conditions which are necessary to transform some or to abolish others. For to say that there cannot be a society without power relations is not to say either that those which are established are necessary or, in any case, that power constitutes a fatality at the heart of societies, such that it cannot be undermined. Instead, I would say that the analysis, elaboration, and bringing into question of power relations and the "agonism" between power relations and the intransitivity of freedom is a permanent political task inherent in all social existence.
"Saint" Michel Foucault (1926-1984) transformed Western thought. Institutions --
prisons,
asylums,
clinics -- define the rhythm of our daily existence; Foucault found that they also determine the way we think. The search for the political and philosophical implications of this insight led him to
biology and economics,
linguistics and
the study of sexuality. In Foucault's eyes, intellectual activity, however radical,
could never be divorced from the techniques of
power. This is why some have accused him of
political quietism. Other critics say he was simply
a bad scholar. Who was the real Foucault?
"Anarchist, leftist, ostentatious or disguised Marxist, nihilist, explicit or secret anti-Marxist, technocrat in the service of Gaullism, new liberal," gay saint, charlatan, or something else entirely? Perhaps we have
posed the question incorrectly...
posted to MetaFilter by nasreddin
at 8:01 AM on August 17, 2007
(93 comments)
The Green Leap Forward
"Environmentalism is China’s fastest-growing citizen movement. Beijing isn’t cracking down on these new activists—it’s empowering them."
posted to MetaFilter by delmoi
at 3:51 PM on July 19, 2007
(22 comments)
