One of the most amazing user-led projects out there, CHDK firmware turns cheap Canon cameras into photography powerhouses. You can take take time-lapse movies as in this stunning sunset example; automatically photograph lightening; easily make pretty HDR images and stereograms; have unlimited depth-of-field; and, perhaps most impressively, take photographs with shutter speeds of 1/60,000 of a second!
posted to MetaFilter by blahblahblah at 8:18 AM on March 13, 2008 (69 comments)

Can you recommend some books about spirituality/religion that a take a fairly rational/skeptical approach to the subject?
posted to Ask Metafilter by HighTechUnderpants at 11:12 PM on February 26, 2008 (30 comments)

What single book is the best introduction to your field (or specialization within your field) for laypeople?
posted to Ask Metafilter by limon at 5:40 PM on September 8, 2007 (238 comments)

The Mechanical Universe...and Beyond is a critically-acclaimed series of 52 thirty-minute videotape programs covering the basic topics of an introductory university physics course. This well produced and highly informative 52 episode series, hosted by David Goodstein of Caltech, is available as Video on Demand (Note: simple registration required to view videos).
posted to MetaFilter by FuturisticDragon at 8:52 AM on February 6, 2008 (28 comments)

Kiuchi Nobuo - a Japanese airman in World War II, was captured and sent to a prison camp in the Ukraine. He tells his story with drawings.
posted to MetaFilter by tellurian at 7:54 PM on February 5, 2008 (23 comments)

"The "American Intervention in Northern Russia, 1918-1919," nicknamed the "Polar Bear Expedition," (wikipedia) was a U.S. military intervention in northern Russia at the end of World War I." The ostensible purpose was to open an Eastern Front following the Russian withdrawal from World War I, but in practice the unit stayed to fight Bolshevism. An archive of the expedition, which gives wonderful insight into early Bolshevik Russia as well as war-weary United States, is online.
posted to MetaFilter by Rumple at 1:19 AM on January 25, 2008 (23 comments)

THE church elder’s reaction was one of utter disbelief. Shaking his head emphatically, he couldn’t take in what the distinguished professor from Yale University was telling him. "No," insisted Jim McRae, an elder of the small congregation of Clearwater in Florida. "This way of worshipping comes from our slave past. It grew out of the slave experience, when we came from Africa." But Willie Ruff, an Afro-American professor of music at Yale, was adamant - he had traced the origins of gospel music to Scotland.
posted to MetaFilter by brautigan at 6:08 AM on January 11, 2008 (96 comments)

Language log has uncovered the reason for the inappropriately common appearance of the word fuck in English translations on Chinese signs. One more Chinglish phenomenon explained.
posted to MetaFilter by hindmost at 12:47 PM on December 9, 2007 (72 comments)

Charlotte Observer photographer Patrick Schneider has been fired. After a 2003 incident in which the North Carolina Press Association stripped him of his awards for three pictures (before and after can be seen here) the Observer has fired Schneider over the alteration of this image. The question remains among photojournalists: is it unethical to alter a photo in such a way that it more closely resembles what the eye saw and the camera is unable to capture, or is this a deceptive practice that damages the public's trust?
posted to MetaFilter by TheGoldenOne at 4:02 PM on July 28, 2006 (78 comments)