"Exactly one hundred years ago a Russian photographer, began a remarkable project. With the blessing - and funding - of the Tsar, Nicholas II, he embarked on an extraordinary journey to capture the essence of Russia in full color photographs."
posted to MetaFilter by mudpuppie at 2:53 PM on June 18, 2009 (47 comments)

Dying of vascular cancer, all this girl wanted to do was to see Up!
posted to MetaFilter by Heliochrome85 at 6:10 PM on June 18, 2009 (130 comments)

Asian Poses - The Definitive Guide You may already know about the victory sign's popularity amongst Asians, but how about Nyan Nyan, Giant Heart, or Pigtails? Warning: cute overload.
posted to MetaFilter by so much modern time at 6:45 AM on June 11, 2009 (106 comments)

Ed Whelan, a lawyer and conservative law pundit at National Review has been making the rounds criticizing Sopreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor, largely for her statements regarding judges making policy. publius, a pseudonymous legal blogger, wrote a harshly critical post of Whelan's behavior, accusing him of being a willing stooge of the right-wing - a "legal hitman"

In response Whelan outed publius, publishing his identity on the National Review website. publius added his side of the story. It's also worth reading Volokh's take on the original policy debate, which publius and Whelan each use in defense of their position
posted to MetaFilter by crayz at 8:16 AM on June 7, 2009 (115 comments)

I'm trying to MeFize my life, but I need some help. I've found color codes for the backgrounds of each subsite, but I cannot find the color code for the lovely gold-esque color that denotes a link. Help?
posted to MetaTalk by Night_owl at 11:21 AM on June 3, 2009 (53 comments)

Isaac Asimov on how to be a dirty old man.
posted to MetaFilter by Artw at 10:12 AM on June 3, 2009 (67 comments)

We declare the man Paul of Tarsus [non-ebonite link], the false teacher against the mark of Covenant and God's Torah, to be outside of the Way taught by Yeshua, the anointed, son of Maria and Yosef.
posted to MetaFilter by bigmusic at 12:42 AM on June 2, 2009 (178 comments)

Alan Vega live... It's not Billy Idol, Elvis, or Springsteen, its just Alan Vega and "Its called Wipeout...why don't you shut up"
posted to MetaFilter by celerystick at 10:22 PM on June 1, 2009 (25 comments)

Damien Walters combines fantastic gymnastic ability with innovative parkour techniques. His ShowReel 2009 impressed me. He and the Derby City Gym Lads just "messing around" amazed me. But he and his incredibly talented kids horsing around made me a fan and made my day.
posted to MetaFilter by lazaruslong at 1:03 PM on May 25, 2009 (47 comments)

Why Thought Suppression is Counter-Productive: How pushing a thought out of consciousness can bring it back with a vengeance. [Via]
posted to MetaFilter by homunculus at 8:21 PM on May 22, 2009 (37 comments)

Jeff Macke Jeff Macke clears up any confusion you may have had about the markets.
posted to MetaFilter by kingzog at 11:41 PM on May 21, 2009 (42 comments)

Man saves ducklings from ledge (video begins after short ad)
posted to MetaFilter by Anything at 2:58 PM on May 19, 2009 (55 comments)

Wolfram Alpha is about to go live. Wolfram Alpha is an answer engine which may just change the way we think about search results.
posted to MetaFilter by rollbiz at 5:49 PM on May 15, 2009 (130 comments)

Last night, BBC Radio 3 broadcast a semi-staged production of Shakespere's A Midsummer Night's Dream with Mendelsohn's incidental music. Now they've put a video of the performance up on their website.
posted to MetaFilter by feelinglistless at 2:42 PM on May 11, 2009 (17 comments)

Headbanging while making fire. SLYT
posted to MetaFilter by mr.marx at 7:43 AM on May 10, 2009 (57 comments)

Mia Farrow has been vlogging her 11 day (and counting) hunger strike.
posted to MetaFilter by hermitosis at 9:41 AM on May 7, 2009 (95 comments)

Pakistan is complicated as Nicholas Schmidle explains. (His take on Zadari). Fatima Bhutto describes her late Aunt's widower as Obama's murderous guest and has previously called for the West to Stop Funding My Failing State. Of course one aim of the US-Afghan-Pakistani summit is a parade for aid. Another Pakistani politician, Imran Khan gives his views on how to clear the mess. The author Ahmed Rashid states Pakistan is on the brink of chaos. A note to foreign journalists.
posted to MetaFilter by adamvasco at 4:51 AM on May 7, 2009 (31 comments)

Readernaut. Share your reading experience by writing notes, tracking progress, and engaging in meaningful discussions with friends.
posted to MetaFilter by chunking express at 11:58 AM on May 6, 2009 (23 comments)

Friday Flash Fun*: Конструктор: Engineer of the People, in which you are an engineer working in a top-secret semiconductor facility called H3, designing top-secret integrated circuits based on specifications provided to you. *For certain values of 'fun'
posted to MetaFilter by daniel_charms at 1:35 PM on March 27, 2009 (36 comments)

Friday Flash JavaScript Fun! Balldroppings (ha.) is a gravity-based game where balls drop at regular intervals from a particular point in the screen and you draw lines to make them bounce. The excellent part: every time the balls bounce off a line, they sing.
posted to MetaFilter by LMGM at 5:54 AM on March 20, 2009 (19 comments)

Theory versus Statistics, Financial Economics Edition. "You can almost here the lament of this quant that the real math theory has been dead since 1980, and that it has all been applied and statistics ever since. It’s like Fischer Black was Kool Herc and Myron Scholes was Afrika Bambaataa, and they’d all go plug in their computers into lamp posts and do martingale representations in the streets and at house parties. And, of course, it was all ruined in 1979 when it went commercial." A response to The Last Temptation of Risk by Barry Eichengreen.
posted to MetaFilter by chunking express at 7:14 AM on May 4, 2009 (8 comments)

James Corbett, a California high-school educator of twenty years, has been found guilty of violating the establishment clause of the first amendment. The lawsuit (PDF) was brought to a U.S. District Court on December 12th, 2007 by student Chad Farnan and his parents with the aid of the legal group 'Advocates for Faith and Freedom' against Corbett and the Capistrano Unified School District as a result of comments made which were critical of Christianity. During the sixteen month legal battle, hundreds of students in support of the teacher demonstrated outside the school while the Farnan family appealed to opinion outlets like 'The O'Reilly Factor'.
posted to MetaFilter by cgomez at 8:17 PM on May 1, 2009 (122 comments)

After his ninth heart surgery, Mackie's doctors had him on 15 different medicines. But the side effects made life miserable. So one day he quit taking all 15 and decided to spend his final days doing something he always wanted to do. He used the money he would have spent on the prescriptions to give away 300 harmonicas, with lessons included. "I really thought it was the last thing I could ever do," he says.
posted to MetaFilter by 445supermag at 6:34 PM on May 1, 2009 (26 comments)

Charlie plays. Charlie explores. Charlie bites. Charlie relaxes. Charlie sleeps. Charlie loves.
posted to MetaFilter by Joe Beese at 10:47 AM on May 1, 2009 (41 comments)

The World Health Organization, which had recently warned of the danger of swine flu, has now raised the pandemic threat level to 5, indicating a pandemic is "imminent". The WHO chief was quoted as saying "all of humanity" is threatened by the virus
posted to MetaFilter by crayz at 1:55 PM on April 29, 2009 (333 comments)

Once dismissed as "the Anna Kournikova of chess" for marketing her glamour, Alexandra Kosteniuk is now the Women's World Champion. (previously)
posted to MetaFilter by Joe Beese at 9:42 AM on April 29, 2009 (103 comments)

Nine days ago, an Air France flight en route from Paris to Mexico City, and not due to stop in the US, was refused entry into American air space, and had to be temporarily re-routed to Martinique. The reason? A Colombian journalist (exiled in Paris) named Hernando Calvo Ospina was on board. His crime? As a left-wing book author and contributor to Le Monde Diplomatique, Ospina has written critically of US policies, and of the CIA's covert role in Latin America.
posted to MetaFilter by ornate insect at 5:29 PM on April 27, 2009 (23 comments)

If you're in the mood for some of that juicy, satisfying, blues-inflected and soulful-as-hell organ jazz served up Jimmy Smith-style, check out these 1964 BBC TV appearances from Smith and his trio: The Sermon, Wagon Wheels, Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf, Uptempo Blues and Theme from Mondo Cane.
posted to MetaFilter by flapjax at midnite at 6:02 AM on April 29, 2009 (16 comments)

"You're really smart!" Psychologist Carol Dweck says that praising a child for being smart only teaches the kid to avoid any effort that might fail. "When we praise children for their intelligence, we tell them that this is the name of the game: Look smart, don't risk making mistakes." Malcolm Gladwell chimes in with his thoughts on the importance of being a smart kid, "What a gifted child is, in many ways, is a gifted learner. And what a gifted adult is, is a gifted doer. And those are quite separate domains of achievement."
posted to MetaFilter by revgeorge at 7:15 AM on February 13, 2007 (216 comments)

Earlier this month, to mark the 150th anniversary of the birth of Edmund Husserl (born April 8, 1859; yesterday marks the anniversary of his death in 1938), the Husserl Archives in Leuven, Belgium, hosted a conference (audio files of the keynotes are available: here's Robert Sokolowski on "Husserl on First Philosophy") in his honor. Husserl's influence on philosophy is difficult to overstate, and continues to this day: as the founder of phenomenology, his contributions to logic, philosophy of mathematics, psychology, philosophy of mind, epistemology, existentialism, and many other areas of thought, has been immense.
posted to MetaFilter by ornate insect at 7:22 PM on April 28, 2009 (15 comments)

Police in Denmark target bike riders. SLYT Police in Denmark take drastic steps to change the habits of bike riders...
posted to MetaFilter by HuronBob at 5:34 PM on April 28, 2009 (49 comments)

Welcome to the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, located to the right side of India, where you can take a ride on an Elephant on the Beach, swim with the local Fauna, and snorkel or scuba dive to your merriment.
posted to MetaFilter by hadjiboy at 6:00 PM on April 26, 2009 (10 comments)

Legislation has been introduced in the U.S. Congress to repeal mandatory minimum sentences associated with drug offenses. If passed, the federal government would join eighteen other states in abandoning the "tough on crime" stance of the 1980's when it comes to drug offenders. State reforms include including New York's legislative repeal of the Rockefeller Drug Laws, Michigan's repeal of 650 lifer sentencing, North Dakota's repeal of one-year mandatory minimum sentences for first-time drug offenders, Arizona's Proposition 200, which required probation and treatment for nonviolent drug offenders, Louisiana's decision to restore eligibility for parole and probation to nonviolent offenders, and the Kansas Sentencing Commission's recommendation for mandatory treatment for nonviolent offenders.
posted to MetaFilter by Law Talkin' Guy at 1:03 PM on April 26, 2009 (46 comments)

Tour the AlloSphere, a stunning new way to see scientific data. In this TED talk, composer JoAnn Kuchera-Morin describes some visualizations available at the AlloSphere Research Facility, where researchers stand inside a 3-story sphere and are surrounded by visual and sonic representations of data. Some specific visualizations in the video: fly through a brain, biogenerative algorithms, lattice of atoms, Schrodinger equation, and electron spin.
posted to MetaFilter by twoleftfeet at 2:53 PM on April 25, 2009 (30 comments)

The Altmann Do-It-Yourself Turntable:

"After the success I had with my homebrew tonearm, I decided to build a turntable that is able to fathom the sonic delicacies that the tonearm is able to produce ... Depending on your local price for wood, and your ability to find some surplus parts, total cost can be as low as $50."
posted to MetaFilter by jim in austin at 5:20 AM on April 24, 2009 (28 comments)

Build a DIY non destructive book scanner for under $300. An open source OCR package. A gratis ebook creation tool. An open source ebook library management tool and reader. An open-source Linux distribution for eink-based devices. And many, many ebook readers.
posted to MetaFilter by bigmusic at 7:27 AM on April 23, 2009 (83 comments)

"At Stanford University two sales representatives from Nike were watching the athletics team practise. Part of their job was to gather feedback from the company's sponsored runners about which shoes they preferred. Unfortunately, it was proving difficult that day as the runners all seemed to prefer... nothing" - from Christopher McDougall's forthcoming book "Born to Run" which looks at the story the growth of the $20 billion running shoe industry. Starting form Bill Bowerman's Cortez in 1972 onwards runners have seen a steady flow of innovations to improve performance and reduce injury rates. Only it would appear they may not work. By way of contrast the book includes coverage of the Mexican Tarahumara tribe who run ultramarathons with shoes made from car tyres on their feet.
posted to MetaFilter by rongorongo at 7:44 AM on April 20, 2009 (38 comments)

Inspired by the Natural Method of Georges Hébert and trained in Parkour, Frenchman Erwan Le Corre has developed his own curious brand of back-to-nature physical fitness training called MovNat. As this awesome/humorous video shows, MovNat basically consists of running around in the woods, climbing trees, jumping over and under obstacles, swimming, and moving heavy objects.
posted to MetaFilter by subpixel at 7:40 PM on April 20, 2009 (24 comments)

Blood Falls - The iron rich red liquid gushing from a buried Antarctica lake shows how life may have existed on a snowball Earth, or on Europa.
posted to MetaFilter by Artw at 9:15 AM on April 18, 2009 (52 comments)

Deepleap is a word game. Make words and fight against the clock. (via). There's another hit from 2000 about deepleap.org, but it has nothing to do with the word game.
posted to MetaFilter by boo_radley at 11:15 PM on April 3, 2009 (70 comments)

Frank Zappa was renown for his quality band members and even more for his legendary audition process. The Drum Channel has a 7 part video series which brings together Zappa's drummers from his previous bands (Ralph Humphrey. Chester Thompson, Terry Bozzio, Chad Wackerman and Ruth Underwood) to discuss the behind-the-scenes process of these auditions(Pt1, Pt2, Pt3, Pt4, Pt5, Pt6, Pt7). It also culminates in a drummer jam.
posted to MetaFilter by KevinSkomsvold at 12:03 AM on March 29, 2009 (30 comments)

Under The Volcano, a Hypertextual & Illustrated Companion to the 1947 semi-autobiographical novel by English writer Malcolm Lowry.
posted to MetaFilter by Devils Rancher at 8:01 PM on March 23, 2009 (16 comments)

A yacht crew witnessed the birth of a new island and other strange consequences of volcanic activity in Tonga, and here are pictures they took.
posted to MetaFilter by thirteenkiller at 9:52 PM on November 9, 2006 (44 comments)

WikiLeaks: every current Congressional Research Service report in a Torrent (2.2 GB). h/t Jessamyn's twitter. Americans spend $100 million a year on the Congressional Research Service, a private think tank for members of Congress and their staffs. While technically available to the public, their reports were never posted on the Internet by the government.
posted to MetaFilter by l33tpolicywonk at 3:18 PM on March 4, 2009 (18 comments)

You used to be able to ask Edward Tufte questions on his website. He disabled the new questions part a few years ago so only a topic or two a month comes out now. But the old topics form years long conversations running to tens of thousands of words, generally polite and insightful. Here are some excellent threads: recommendations for graphing software, Book design: advice and examples, Medical information exchange: The patient, doctor, computer triangle, Evidence and assumptions in tree diagrams, Airport maps, Lists, Advice for effective analytical reasoning, a celebration of Megan Jaegerman's news graphics, Design of causal diagrams, the merits of ISO paper sizes.
posted to MetaFilter by shothotbot at 6:34 PM on February 27, 2009 (9 comments)

Meet Frostie the dancing cockatoo. When I say he loves to dance, I mean he really loves to dance.
posted to MetaFilter by MaryDellamorte at 6:30 PM on February 23, 2009 (33 comments)

I live in Beijing. I want to take a 3-day solo trip to another Chinese city to get a feel for how the majority of urban Chinese live--outside of Beijing/Shanghai/Shenzhen. Where should I go?
posted to Ask MetaFilter by jbb7 at 3:02 AM on October 9, 2006 (16 comments)

Dancing Japanese Street Gangs - mov
posted to MetaFilter by You Should See the Other Guy at 9:10 PM on February 20, 2009 (12 comments)

BABIES’ skulls dashed against rocks; attempts to twist off the heads of toddlers. Girls, their mothers and grandmothers (and sometimes male relatives too) raped at knife- or gunpoint, the weapons then used to inflict mutilation. Women hauled off to camps or just tied to trees and gang-raped. Thousands of children, some as young as nine, snatched or recruited by armed gangs (or regular forces) and made into drug-crazed killers, the girls among them often serially abused or taken by commanders as “wives”. Such are the horrors reported from some recent conflict zones...
posted to MetaFilter by kliuless at 8:28 AM on February 21, 2009 (39 comments)

The Stuckists are a loosely affiliated group of artists - mainly painters - with some strong opinions, helpfully spelled out in a manifesto.
posted to MetaFilter by shothotbot at 9:35 PM on February 20, 2009 (46 comments)