I'd like to heat up a rock or piece of metal to drop in my chicken's water source to warm it up. What should I use?
posted to Ask MetaFilter by cda at 7:16 AM on November 29, 2012 (36 comments)

Arc’teryx, a high-end Vancouver outdoor clothing manufacturer, is working with the VPD's Homeless Outreach Program on the Birds Nest Project in an attempt to provide the city's homeless population with stylish waterproof capes.
posted to MetaFilter by mannequito at 12:35 AM on November 29, 2012 (29 comments)

Rock 'N' Roll High School, staring the Ramones, is one of the five greatest American films of all time. Well, five best movie musicals? At the very least, the scene of the band rolling down the high school halls and blaring "Do Ya Wanna Dance" with the teen archetypes (cheerleaders, jocks, geeks, etc.) following, clapping and dancing while brewing up the eventual explosion of the school, could be the most transcendent two minutes of any rock movie. - Eric Davidson, introducing his interview of director Allan Arkush
posted to MetaFilter by Egg Shen at 3:17 PM on November 28, 2012 (59 comments)

The smell of earth after rain is called Petrichor, and it is caused by Geosmin, a sesquiterpenoid metabolite with the chemical formula C₁₂H₂₂O. Human sensitivity to geosmin is about 10 parts per trillion. (via)
posted to MetaFilter by mrgrimm at 9:48 AM on November 28, 2012 (91 comments)

Us: 13 participants in a multi-year group fiction/worldbuilding project with hundreds of named characters, places, and items to keep track of. Our current system (YahooGroups databases, GDocs, and some other resources) works, but I keep thinking there's a better solution out there. More details within, but we're looking for something that does all of what we're currently doing, plus internal linkage, effective relevance-based searching, internal sorting, tagging or some other method of grouping data in multiple ways, and that is web-based, lightly password protected, accessible on a wide variety of devices, and easy for our other participants to use. (We'd also take a pony, if you had one.)
posted to Ask MetaFilter by modernhypatia at 12:41 PM on November 27, 2012 (10 comments)

I am seeking blogs of people who have made health changes in their lives involving diet, exercise and reducing vices. I am particularly interested in blogs that have daily or very regular posts where the personal aspects and challenges of the health goal are explored at length.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Kerasia at 1:19 PM on November 27, 2012 (9 comments)

Oscar Dominguez is probably best known for the Electro Sexual Sewing Machine.
He was a surrealist (Fr) and a forger (pdf).
When a fight broke out between Oscar Dominguez and Esteban Frances, it was Victor Brauner who stepped in to separate them, Dominguez accidentally struck him in the face with a bottle. The injury cost Brauner his left eye, an event that Brauner had forseen.
Dominguez updated the technique known as Decalmania.
His last lover was the heiress Marie-Laure de Noailles and during this time he replaced some of her Picasso´s with forgeries painted by himself, selling the originals. He is also suspected of forging Klee, Ledger and Laurens.
He slit his wrists one New years Eve and Janet Flanner churlishly conjectured that he “lay down on the floor, being a dirty, untidy man…and bled all over everything”.
posted to MetaFilter by adamvasco at 12:33 PM on November 27, 2012 (7 comments)

Kim Jong-un named Sexiest Man Alive for 2012. Link goes to Korea times.
posted to MetaFilter by blue_beetle at 3:33 PM on November 26, 2012 (33 comments)

The Canto Ostinato is a minimalist classical composition written in 1976-1979 consisting of "small, entirely tonal cells which are repeated - how many times is left to the performer". Usually performed by two or four pianos, it's also been adapted to other instruments like the harp. The Canto Ostinato ("stubborn song") was written by Dutch composer Simeon ten Holt, who passed away yesterday.
posted to MetaFilter by MartinWisse at 1:28 PM on November 26, 2012 (6 comments)

All the 245 pdf-format, public domain Loebs conveniently arranged in one place, ready to be downloaded for your classics reading pleasure. (via time's flow stemmed)
posted to MetaFilter by Marauding Ennui at 8:13 AM on November 26, 2012 (47 comments)

YANMD: I recently started Wellbutrin (150 mg) for SAD. So far, no side effects. I haven't noticed an increase in anxiety, faster heart rate, etc. I also take around 5-10 mg of propranolol as needed (beta blocker) for performance anxiety. It works really well. My question: has anyone else had this combo of meds and noticed that the beta blocker worked differently? My shrink says it should be fine, but I'm interested in hearing any stories. This is probably my anxiety talking, but I'm just worried I'll take my beta blocker before a performance situation and it won't work, or won't feel the same. Thanks in advance.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by namemeansgazelle at 1:48 PM on November 25, 2012 (5 comments)

Each year Bladeforums members vote for the best bowie knife. The result is a gallery of absolutely beautiful and innovative custom bowies by master craftsmen.
posted to MetaFilter by Foci for Analysis at 1:44 PM on November 24, 2012 (47 comments)

Boxer Héctor "Macho" Camacho has died, four days after being shot in the face while sitting in a parked car. Popular for his flamboyant and reckless style both in the ring and out, Camacho racked up an astounding career record of 79-6-3. In a famous 1997 bout, he knocked out Sugar Ray Leonard, scotching Leonard's final attempt at a comeback.
posted to MetaFilter by MissySedai at 9:37 AM on November 24, 2012 (18 comments)

Minutemen's Mike Watt interviewed about Double Nickels on the Dime.
posted to MetaFilter by Egg Shen at 4:58 PM on November 23, 2012 (36 comments)

Casey Legler is 6'2" has a neck tattoo, dark partially shaved hair, and a successful career as a male model. Which makes her fairly unique.
posted to MetaFilter by bitdamaged at 1:35 PM on November 21, 2012 (32 comments)

World's Most Dangerous Ride (SLYT) One mistake and it's a free fall to your death. Motology's Adam Riemann rides one of the scariest Himalayan trails you'll ever see.
posted to MetaFilter by JujuB at 8:10 AM on November 21, 2012 (61 comments)

17 euphemisms for doing it taken from the Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue. And previously on the blue.
posted to MetaFilter by Isadorady at 6:51 PM on November 20, 2012 (38 comments)

Help me navigate buying and upgrading a new Macbook Pro. Can I upgrade the HDD or RAM myself without voiding the warranties, or am I stuck paying the Apple tax for more HDD and RAM?
posted to Ask MetaFilter by grobstein at 3:34 PM on November 20, 2012 (10 comments)

Looking for advice on a computer to buy or build that will have a ridiculous amount of RAM and many processor cores.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by tomwheeler at 12:19 PM on November 20, 2012 (15 comments)

What piece of (to my ear, impressionist) music is Douglas Hofstadter playing on the piano midway through this video here? What is the intro piece?
posted to Ask MetaFilter by phrontist at 9:06 AM on November 20, 2012 (3 comments)

3 month old baby red panda surprised while eating.
posted to MetaFilter by elizardbits at 1:53 PM on November 19, 2012 (61 comments)

Jean Bethke Elshtain asks, 'Is there such a thing as the female conscience?'
posted to MetaFilter by talitha_kumi at 9:56 AM on November 19, 2012 (29 comments)

Reflections in Water Droplets
posted to MetaFilter by still_wears_a_hat at 6:30 AM on November 19, 2012 (17 comments)

Bees and a species of bird can solve the traveling salesman problem "It’s Saturday; you’ve got errands to run. Your spouse wants bread from the bakery, you need to pick up the dry cleaning, your kids need new shoes, and you’ve got a dentist appointment. None of this is any fun, so you might as well do it as quickly as possible by calculating the fastest and most efficient route that takes you to each stop... Menger and Whitney both discovered that the number of possible routes between stops increases exponentially with each additional destination. In a typical model, for instance, three stops yield six routes, while eight stops yield 40,320... By setting up five artificial flowers in a pentagon shape and tracking each bee’s path, researchers discovered that every bee optimized its route, visiting the highest-reward flowers in the shortest possible amount of time."
posted to MetaFilter by bookman117 at 3:11 AM on November 19, 2012 (33 comments)

"American mapmaking’s most prestigious honor is the “Best of Show” award at the annual competition of the Cartography and Geographic Information Society. The five most recent winners were all maps designed by large, well-known institutions: National Geographic (three times), the Central Intelligence Agency Cartography Center, and the U.S. Census Bureau. But earlier this year, the 38th annual Best of Show award went to a map created by Imus Geographics—which is basically one dude named David Imus working in a farmhouse outside Eugene, Ore." Slate profile on the map and award. Interview with David Imus on OregonLive.com. Book about the map (43MB PDF) YouTube interview with David Imus.
posted to MetaFilter by NotMyselfRightNow at 7:49 AM on January 3, 2012 (26 comments)

"I wish to dispel the notion that women are “more emotional.” I don’t think we are. I think that the emotions women stereotypically express are what men call “emotions,” and the emotions that men typically express are somehow considered by men to be something else." Jen Dziura in The Gloss: "When men are too emotional to have a rational argument."
posted to MetaFilter by escabeche at 1:54 PM on November 18, 2012 (84 comments)

Your Saturday dose of interspecies lovin: cat adopts squirrel, squirrel learns to purr (slytb). Warning: seeing this might lead to hours of watching related videos as you fall down a rabbit hole of interspecies fostering.
posted to MetaFilter by MartinWisse at 10:49 AM on November 17, 2012 (18 comments)

Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman appeared in 1976... and it exists as a sort of island of experimentation, its ripples of influence not fully engaged with until several decades later... . Predictably rejected by the networks, this Norman Lear production ran in first-run syndication, five nights a week, usually after the late-night news. ... Louise Lasser (once Woody Allen’s muse) stars as a put-upon pre-feminist housewife who repeats the secular liturgy of American consumerism in an attempt to stave off a nervous breakdown.*
posted to MetaFilter by Egg Shen at 5:46 PM on November 16, 2012 (60 comments)

Mike Sui and the new laowai: "...speaking Chinese is still just rare enough that Sui's instant fame has scratched a blister of resentment than never really heals in China's Chinese language-learner community, and his success has highlighted how Chinese demands on laowai [foreign] entertainers have drastically changed in just a decade."
posted to MetaFilter by ocherdraco at 12:27 PM on November 16, 2012 (14 comments)

October 2012 is the 332nd consecutive month with an above-average temperature. If you were born in or after April 1985, if you are right now 27 years old or younger, you have never lived through a month that was colder than average. State of the Climate: Global Analysis October 2012 (NOAA). While $50 billion Sandy has had the spotlight, the biggest natural disaster of 2012 (in the US) has been the Great Drought still ongoing which is expected to cut America's GDP by 0.5 to 1% for the year. The death toll from the heat waves that accompanied this year's drought will exceed that of Sandy. This Sunday and Monday, Ken Burns premiers his new documentary "The Dust Bowl", on PBS. (via)
posted to MetaFilter by stbalbach at 10:55 AM on November 16, 2012 (41 comments)

"I don't want my girls to be children who are perfect and then, when they start to feel like women, they remember how I thought of myself as ugly and so they will be ugly too. They will get older and their breasts will lose their shape and they will hate their bodies, because that's what women do. That's what mommy did." Some lovely Friday-morning encouragement for all the moms.
posted to MetaFilter by jbickers at 8:54 AM on November 16, 2012 (65 comments)

Arika Okrent (previously here on sign language interpreters and her 352-page book about 'Invented Languages') is currently kicking ass and taking etymologies at the Mental Floss site with a flurry of listicles* on the 'invention' of today's English/American language:
The solidly informational "11 Weirdly Spelled Words—And How They Got That Way"**
The entertainingly snarky "11 Creative Suffixes That Inspire New Words"
The just plain fun "From Y’all To Youse, 8 English Ways to Make “You” Plural"
plus one non-linguistic piece of pure pedantry: "11 Movie Chess Scenes Where The Board Is Set Up Wrong"***
posted to MetaFilter by oneswellfoop at 5:45 AM on November 16, 2012 (52 comments)

"The Ideology of Hatred": An interview with Niza Yanay - "Once we understand how hatred operates as an apparatus of power relations, and particularly how the discourse of hatred is motivated and mobilised in national conflicts, serious questions about misrecognition, veiled desires and symptomatic expressions arise. These questions have, to a large extent, been left unaddressed in studies of hatred between groups in conflict."
posted to MetaFilter by flex at 4:08 PM on November 15, 2012 (13 comments)

I feel very ambivalent, like I lack perspective (but hope is abundant!), but I am not sure; this state of not knowing and being unsure of myself and what I do is tough
posted to Ask MetaFilter by ahtlast93 at 2:47 PM on November 15, 2012 (4 comments)

"The "Tugboat" 7" single, Galaxie 500's very first release, cost us $980.22 for 1,000 copies-- including shipping! (Naomi kept the receipts)-- or 98 cents each. I no longer remember what we sold them for, but obviously it was easy to turn at least a couple bucks' profit on each. Which means we earned more from every one of those 7"s we sold than from the song's recent 13,760 plays on Pandora and Spotify. Here's yet another way to look at it: Pressing 1,000 singles in 1988 gave us the earning potential of more than 13 million streams in 2012."

Making Cents: Damon Krukowski of Galaxie 500 and Damon & Naomi breaks down the meager royalties currently being paid out to bands by streaming services and explains what the music business' headlong quest for capital means for artists today.
posted to MetaFilter by anazgnos at 1:42 PM on November 15, 2012 (85 comments)

Armstrong Baillie is unemployed and lives in Dundee. Twice a week, funded by his busking, he dresses up as a giraffe and performs good deeds.
posted to MetaFilter by liquidindian at 3:31 AM on November 14, 2012 (21 comments)

In 2006, aspiring inventor Marc Griffin appeared on the show American Inventor with a table game he had invented called Bulletball. Convinced he had created the next Olympic sport, he had spent 26 years of his life on the idea. He'd quit his job, sold all his possessions including his wife's wedding ring, and was sleeping in his car. The judges hated the idea – and his gut-wrenching experience on the show went viral.
posted to MetaFilter by dontjumplarry at 2:22 PM on November 14, 2012 (59 comments)

COLBERT: I suppose fear is like a drug. A little bit isn’t that bad, but you can get addicted to the consumption and distribution of it. What’s evil is the purposeful distribution of fear. As Paul said when he was faced with the gom jabbar, “Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration.”
PLAYBOY: Did you just make a Dune reference?
COLBERT: I did! [laughs] If you’re injecting fear into other people, then you’re trying to kill their minds. You’re trying to get them to stop thinking.

A thoughtful interview with Stephen Colbert in Playboy (NSFW ads)(Non-Playboy copy.)
posted to MetaFilter by rewil at 12:21 PM on November 14, 2012 (46 comments)

100,000 Stars [SLInteractive3DVisualization] (Seems to run best on Chrome or Safari and a decent graphics card)
posted to MetaFilter by gwint at 11:31 AM on November 14, 2012 (18 comments)

The History of Film in one convenient, zoomable graphic. 2000 "important" American, British, and a few other European films, grouped by genre and year.
posted to MetaFilter by Currer Belfry at 10:29 AM on November 14, 2012 (33 comments)

Royce White is a professional American basketball player who suffers from general anxiety disorder. Though he was considered one of the best talents in last year's NBA draft, he was not selected until the 16th pick, due to concerns over his mental health and his avowed reluctance to fly. Although the NBA season is only a couple of weeks old, White and his team, the Houston Rockets, are already having difficulty determining how to manage his health while meeting the professional demands of the NBA. LINKS: Documentary highlighting White's anxiety // Highlights of White while at Iowa State // White's Twitter account (where he is currently tweeting about his situation)
posted to MetaFilter by (Arsenio) Hall and (Warren) Oates at 10:02 AM on November 14, 2012 (46 comments)

I was of course already familiar with the general characteristics of Friedman’s writing—hubris, clichéd jingoism, Orientalism, favoritism of Israel, self-contradiction, a severe handicap in the realm of metaphor construction, reduction of complex phenomena to simplistic and baseless theories. However, reviewing three decades of his work made it clear just how frightening, as opposed to simply laughable, it was that such a character had accrued three Pulitzer Prizes and risen to the position of journalistic icon at the US newspaper of record.

- Interview in Jadaliyya with Belen Fernandez on her (new to me) book critiquing NYT columnist Thomas Friedman, The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work.
posted to MetaFilter by Panjandrum at 2:04 PM on November 13, 2012 (36 comments)

Teddy Bear(trailer) is a movie about a Danish bodybuilder in search of love. Kim Kold, actual bodybuilder, stars.
posted to MetaFilter by the man of twists and turns at 12:57 PM on November 13, 2012 (6 comments)

"You know it’s that time of the year again in Holland, when you are greeted by some Dutch person on the street, whose face is painted completely black and is sporting an afro wig, bright red lips and a ridiculous clown-like costume. What is possibly more strange than this very sight, is the fact that many Dutch person finds it a completely normal and acceptable occurrence. Yes, Dutch people love their Zwarte Pieten." (previously, previously) Now combine them with Gangnam parodies and you have the latest Sinterklaas trend.
posted to MetaFilter by MartinWisse at 12:35 PM on November 13, 2012 (156 comments)

"Murdering the Impossible" - a 2006 National Geographic profile of Reinhold Messner, "the greatest climber in history".
posted to MetaFilter by Egg Shen at 7:07 AM on November 13, 2012 (22 comments)

How do I take care of my aging parents long distance? I'm an only child with small children of my own and feel alone in this situation.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by percor at 6:43 PM on November 12, 2012 (18 comments)

Hey, water moccasins! [SLYT]
posted to MetaFilter by casarkos at 5:12 PM on November 12, 2012 (76 comments)

Video (1m4s): Cuttlefish Attacks Octopus
posted to MetaFilter by Scientist at 12:51 PM on November 12, 2012 (66 comments)

It was simplifying. Forget your civilian reflexes. The task does not require a purpose. Do not ask questions, do not make suggestions, do not even think of that. The Legion is our fatherland. We will accept you. We will shelter you.
posted to MetaFilter by The corpse in the library at 10:29 AM on November 12, 2012 (32 comments)

Dear Mr. President: “You're the President of the United States: a country with 5000 nuclear weapons, birthplace of the world's computing and telecommunications industry, home of the first atomic clock and creator of the global positioning system. But chances are, if you just took regular American high school physics, you don't know one iota about the science behind these things (no offense). That's because high school physics students across most of America are not required to learn about pretty much any physical phenomena discovered or explained more recently than 1865.” From Henry Reich of Minute Physics. (Can't watch video? Click the "interactive transcript" button under the video to read it instead.) Minute Physics previously, previouslier.
posted to MetaFilter by ocherdraco at 10:29 AM on November 12, 2012 (69 comments)