Displaying post 1 to 50 of 107
Anything but clear.
It is well known that panes of stained glass in old European churches are thicker at the bottom because glass is a slow-moving liquid that flows downward over centuries. Well known, yes, but long known to be
wrong. Scientists still disagree about the nature of glass, and researchers continue to try to understand its
dual personality .
posted to MetaFilter by amyms
at 3:57 PM on July 29, 2008
(15 comments)
What is your most ingenious hiding place for valuables?
posted to Ask Metafilter by DB Cooper
at 11:09 AM on July 21, 2008
(55 comments)
day trip from Saint Louis?
posted to Ask Metafilter by cloudscratcher
at 11:47 PM on July 10, 2008
(6 comments)
The Hole in the Wall
[via mefi projects] is our own
interrobang's surrealistic cat story now being serialized at
Top Shelf Comics as part of their new Webcomics section, and it's definitely something special - pen & ink & watercolor adventures of two cats exploring a mysterious and dangerous underground landscape. More comics like this will be posted there depending on the popularity of this one, so if you love art, great comics, or cats, you
will want to check it out. This was a part of interrobang's
Year in Comics project, so if you fall in love with the Hole in the Wall kittehs (you will!), go have look at his other stuff, as well.
posted to MetaFilter by taz
at 7:09 AM on May 23, 2008
(30 comments)
I would like to be the bright kid again, but I've just turned 30. What should I do?
posted to Ask Metafilter by dcrocha
at 8:18 PM on May 17, 2008
(34 comments)
Impressive monuments, lousy souvenir stands,
and lots and lots of vigilant soldiers. An American living in South Korea takes a once-in-a-lifetime trip to North Korea. 11 pages full of photos including a hundred thousand colored pieces of cardboard, and a sampling of the five billion pictures of Kim Il-sung.
posted to MetaFilter by CrunchyFrog
at 1:21 PM on May 7, 2003
(14 comments)
So...let's say that some freak nuclear accident (or, in our current political climate, perhaps a purposeful nuclear attack) wipes out most of the world's population. How many people would have to survive to successfully re-populate the world? (more inside)
posted to Ask Metafilter by AlliKat75
at 3:48 PM on November 13, 2006
(17 comments)
What podcasts will make me more intelligent just by listening to them? I enjoy the BBC's "In Our Time", which features serious discussion of historical events and people by academics working in the field, and also quirky, thought-provoking programs like WNYC's "Radio Lab" and "This American Life". I'm not so keen on some of the podcasts I typically get from newspapers that gloss over the surface of a subject with little analysis. What other highbrow podcasts are made by people who really know their shit?
posted to Ask Metafilter by nowonmai
at 9:01 AM on November 20, 2007
(63 comments)
During its run, Mystery Science Theater 3000 riffed on over 50 short films. Almost all of them are now on YouTube or Google Video. See the list (shamelessly cribbed from
here) inside for links.
posted to MetaFilter by cog_nate
at 12:38 PM on October 24, 2007
(148 comments)
Discussion of the beauty and consequences of urban decay pops up here from time to time. In 1992
Lambert-St. Louis International Airport began its
expansion program. The airport's website has a
timeline and lots of
photos. Since the planning began, there has been a fair amount of controversy of
one form or
another surrounding the expansion. Despite all the shininess of their press releases, things are progressing very slowly. The people who have been impacted most, however, are the people who lived in the communities on top of which the expansion is happening. They have all been displaced.
posted to MetaFilter by jeffamaphone
at 3:56 PM on November 21, 2007
(11 comments)
OpenCongress.org
is a site that aggregates data about the United States Senate and House. Keep track of your senators or representatives through rss feeds, read bills on topics that are important to you, and find out what industries are behind the scenes providing money to your politicians in Washington among many other uses of this new resource.
posted to MetaFilter by rfbjames
at 10:55 PM on February 27, 2007
(18 comments)
How do the guys here creatively and efficiently organize their pockets to carry the three essentials: cell phone, keys, and wallet?
posted to Ask Metafilter by comatose
at 6:58 AM on February 22, 2008
(78 comments)
Let's pause for a moment to view the best part of any gameshow -- the
stupid contestants.
posted to MetaFilter by flatluigi
at 8:44 PM on January 13, 2008
(36 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)
What is the single most valuable piece of advice you received when you were in the process of buying your first home?
posted to Ask Metafilter by hecho de la basura
at 7:20 AM on December 12, 2007
(67 comments)
On Nov 22, 1968, exactly 39 years ago, on a reasonably clear, uneventful day, a new
JAL DC-8 descended toward the SFO airport. The landing was so well executed that no one was hurt when the pilot landed the plane
into the San Francisco Bay, several miles from the airport. What explanation did 15 year veteran pilot Captain Kohei Asoh give for his botched landing? It was so unusual (especially in this day and age), so refreshingly honest, that it came to be known as the
Asoh Defense. Amazingly, the plane was
recovered, refurbished, and was in service for another 35 years.
posted to MetaFilter by eye of newt
at 12:04 AM on November 22, 2007
(51 comments)
I want to sell my stuff on eBay but don't quite understand how shipping charges work.
posted to Ask Metafilter by gtr
at 2:27 PM on November 11, 2007
(17 comments)
iPhone cases. Yes, they've been discussed many times, and in
lots of different places, but I have some special needs and specific questions.
posted to Ask Metafilter by mezzanayne
at 10:45 AM on September 22, 2007
(8 comments)
What's the best lightweight, unobtrusive and form-fitting iPhone case?
posted to Ask Metafilter by killdevil
at 6:07 PM on October 21, 2007
(21 comments)
If you like electronic music, you probably already know about some of the
blogs that
offer free live set downloads. You might even know about
mpiii. But, they all pale in comparison to the one and only
mixes db.
posted to MetaFilter by milarepa
at 7:37 AM on October 3, 2007
(26 comments)
The Face2face project.
JR, an
"undercover photographer", and Marco, a technology consultant, had 41 people - israelis and palestinians - mugging for the camera and plastered the
huge, unavoidable pictures on both sides of the Israeli West Bank barrier, pair by pair : one israeli, one palestinian, both having similar jobs and posing in a similar fashion (+an imam, a rabbi and a christian priest). See also the
trailer (YT, other videos available on the main site).
posted to MetaFilter by elgilito
at 8:56 AM on September 17, 2007
(15 comments)
The
Marquis de Condorcet and Admiral
Jean-Charles de Borda were two men of the French Enlightenment who struggled with how to design voting systems that accurately reflected voters' preferences. Condorcet favored a
method that required the winner in a multiparty election to win a series of head-to-head contests, but he also discovered that his method easily led to a
paradoxes that produced no clear winners. The
Borda method avoids the Condorcet paradox by requiring voters to rank choices numerically in order of preference, but this method is flawed because the withdrawal of a last-place candidate can reverse the
election results. Mathematicians in the 19th century attempted to design better voting systems, including
Lewis Carroll, who favored an early form of
proportional representation. Economist Kenneth Arrow argued that designing a perfect voting system was futile, because his
"impossibility theorem" proved that it's impossible to design a non-dictatorial voting system that fulfills
five basic criteria of fairness. (more inside)
posted to MetaFilter by jonp72
at 12:11 PM on August 27, 2007
(43 comments)
Excellent BBC
Brain Story series available online. One of the best TV series on psychology and neuroscience ever produced, the BBC's Brain Story, is available on public bittorrent servers for download. It is a six part series covering virtually every area of contemporary neuropsychology, including the major researchers, discoveries, techniques and even many of the patients who have been the subjects of classic case studies that have helped us understand the curious effects of brain injury.
posted to MetaFilter by nickyskye
at 11:01 AM on August 9, 2007
(21 comments)
Just a look-and-feel suggestion: if the (wonderful!) new tabs are squared-off only because you didn't want to add any more images to the page, you could easily round them off (in Firefox and Safari now, and IE eventually) with just a little CSS...
posted to MetaTalk by nicwolff
at 1:57 PM on August 2, 2007
(34 comments)
What are the chances of getting a random result on the green, for setting as my homepage?
posted to MetaTalk by arimathea
at 1:12 PM on July 26, 2007
(78 comments)
