HELLO KITTY HELL
posted to MetaFilter by loquacious at 8:37 PM on June 23, 2007 (35 comments)

How do I learn to keep notes and records on the things I'm studying for looking back on later
posted to Ask Metafilter by sully75 at 8:33 PM on June 21, 2007 (11 comments)

A salute to my Dad and all the good Daddies out there for all the sacrifices you made for us; for making us laugh; for letting us come to work with you to help drive the bus; for looking after us and teaching us things; for never being a phony; for all the awesome things you were and for all the awful things you weren't, well for all that, we have a few words we'd like to say to you.
posted to MetaFilter by madamjujujive at 11:43 PM on June 15, 2007 (50 comments)

How does one mingle effectively?
posted to Ask Metafilter by Effigy2000 at 9:32 PM on June 7, 2007 (25 comments)

A while ago, there was a useful website that would provide online/offline statistics for all your AIM buddies, so you could see when they were on most frequently. It had interesting graphs it could make as well. Does anyone know if this or another similar web app is still around?
posted to Ask Metafilter by nervestaple at 4:17 PM on June 5, 2007 (7 comments)

I'm trying to find a note-taking program for OSX that allows a pseudo-Cornell-style of note taking, and some other features.
posted to Ask Metafilter by synecdoche at 7:28 AM on June 6, 2007 (5 comments)

What the World Eats A photo slide show of images taken of families around the world, and the food they consume in one week. The commentary also provides the amount of money they have to spend, and what their favorite meals are.
posted to MetaFilter by Dave Faris at 11:03 AM on June 5, 2007 (117 comments)

Best way to clean/restore good-quality copper/stainless sauce pans that have been burned on the stove-top, have heavy, rock-hard encrustations of charcoal-ized food inside and blackened bottoms? Several heavy soaking/scrubbing sessions haven’t done it.
posted to Ask Metafilter by dpcoffin at 12:50 PM on September 8, 2005 (25 comments)

Somewhat of a budding programing looking for programing exercises. I'm kind of middle ground between not knowing anything and what you might call a novice. So really I know just enough to be dangerous and have ideas too big for my skills. What are some good exercises (mostly thinking C# [mono] here) that will help me develop into at least a novice? More after the break.
posted to Ask Metafilter by blackout at 6:20 PM on May 22, 2007 (11 comments)

"I looked into the faces of my executioners and saw that many of them had tears in their eyes." In 1961, Bruce Olson, a brilliant 19-year-old linguistics student, tells his parents he wants to be a Christian missionary. In disgust, his dad buys him a one-way ticket to Caracas. Without sponsors, he walks alone into the jungle looking for the Motilone natives. A Motilone arrow pierces his thigh, and he is taken back to the village where his fate will be decided. He is eventually accepted into the tribe and begins to evangelize without disrupting the culture. In 1988, Olson is captured and condemned to die by guerrillas. Investigating the story, journalist Maria Caballero ventures into the jungles to interview indigenous leaders, who testify to Olson's 30-year history of service to them and in some cases volunteer to die in his place. The president of Colombia says, “This is the first white man to be defended by the indigenous communities in our country, in Latin America.”
posted to MetaFilter by No Robots at 8:53 AM on May 11, 2007 (74 comments)

Comedy duo, Ramenz (ラーメンズ), aka Kobayashi Kentaro and Katagiri Jin, also known as the Japanese versions of Mac and PC, have recently done a number of shorts collectively called "The Japanese Tradition." Apparently, these tongue-in-cheek pseudo-instructional vids about famous aspects of Japanese culture (Tea, Chopsticks, Sushi, Origami, Apology, Onigiri, and Relationships) have been fooling a lot of non-natives into thinking they are actual guides. (YouTube, each approx 4-6 min).
posted to MetaFilter by ikahime at 9:30 AM on March 29, 2007 (35 comments)

Re-imagining Los Angeles public transit: The ambitious vision of these transit advocates and amateur cartographers for an East-Coast style rail network in Los Angeles may seem too idealistic, but the map is still fun to look at. More on the history of LA public transport from the Dorothy Peyton Gray Transportation Library.
posted to MetaFilter by bcveen at 12:48 AM on May 1, 2007 (34 comments)

Where can I find comprehensive ratings information for The Simpsons?
posted to Ask Metafilter by aftermarketradio at 1:55 PM on April 30, 2007 (5 comments)

Brass Eye is a hilarious & much missed British parody of "issue" news programs such as 60 Minutes in the U.S. It ran for one year, in 1997 (minus the 2001 special), and only six episodes were produced. Thanks to the miracle of the internets, all six (Animals, Drugs, Science, Sex, Crime & Moral Decline) are available in their entirety via Google Video. If you're unfamiliar with the series, trust me, it's not to be missed. Previous mentions on Metafilter. Discovered Via the good mr hodgman's blog.
posted to MetaFilter by jonson at 2:57 PM on April 29, 2007 (48 comments)

Is there academic research that claims that viewing of advertising material a ritual of genderization?
posted to Ask Metafilter by bilabial at 8:47 PM on April 28, 2007 (25 comments)

How exactly does authentication work in a website like Basecamp, or more generally, a site built on Rails or LAMP. When I sign-up, I enter a username and password. I presume this is stored in a database table. But after that, how does the server know who I am during the course of my 'visits' and how does the SQL database know what I have access to ( only my projects ) and what I don't have access to ( Other peoples projects)? Where do cookies, if at all, come into play. If cookies do come into play, can they not simply be forged? I am completely clueless regarding the subtleties of authentication, user sessions, and security. Please enlighten me.
posted to Ask Metafilter by kaizen at 4:51 PM on April 27, 2007 (20 comments)

Is there a word or phrase for this type of racism?
posted to Ask Metafilter by matkline at 8:20 PM on April 25, 2007 (34 comments)

"The average person will eat over 10,000 bars of chocolate, shed 121 pints of tears and have sex more than 4,200 times". A documentary airing tonight in the UK is attempting a new method of visualizing statistics related to an individual's impact on the environment. Human Footprint is scheduled to air on Channel 4 at 9PM GMT. There is a "calculator" you can use to get the statistics adjusted for your age (and give you a little more data behind the statistics if you can sit through a page by page flash demo).
posted to MetaFilter by notmtwain at 7:44 AM on April 25, 2007 (29 comments)

Joseph Frank Keaton Jr. was born into vaudeville. He quickly became a popular and controversial part of his family's stage act; an act that had his father violently hurling the "disobedient" child across the stage into scenery, the orchestra pit, or even into the audience, only to see him emerge amazingly unharmed. After the boy took an unplanned and particularly clamorous fall down a hotel stairwell, an astonished Harry Houdini cried out to the parents, "What a buster your kid took!" And thus, as legend has it, did little Joseph Frank Keaton Jr. become Buster Keaton.

At 22, Keaton made his cinematic debut with mentor Fatty Arbuckle. Afterward, he immediately founded Buster Keaton Studios, releasing a series of brilliant short (and later longer) comedies. Dozens of these are freely available to stream or download at the Internet Archive, including Steamboat Bill Jr, Convict 13, The Electric House, and his seminal The General (alt), which, despite completely failing at the box office, would be later hailed by many as one of the greatest films of all time. [more inside]
posted to MetaFilter by churl at 7:54 PM on April 25, 2007 (58 comments)

Half-handed Cloud upends the common conception of what Christian music should sound like. Part of a constellation of artists that include Brother Danielson and Sufjan Stevens, John Ringhofer crafts quirky, ramshackle indie pop songs with explicit Christian themes. Interviews: 1, 2, 3, 4. Reviews: 1, 2, 3. Videos: 1, 2, 3, 4.
posted to MetaFilter by Falconetti at 10:59 PM on April 23, 2007 (65 comments)

“I wanted to try to capture the intelligence of the design, not just the outcome of the design.” “In 1977, [Donald] Knuth halted research on his books for what he expected to be a one-year hiatus. Instead, it took 10. Accompanied by [his wife] Jill, Knuth took design classes from Stanford art professor Matthew Kahn. Knuth, trying to train his programmer’s brain to think like an artist’s, wanted to create a program [TeX] that would understand why each stroke in a typeface would be pleasing to the eye.”—from a profile of Knuth in the Stanford Magazine (May '06). Salon calls him “computing’s philosopher king” (Sep '99). NPR’s Morning Edition interviews Knuth as “the founding artist of computer science” (Mar '05). Perhaps a MeFite somewhere has one of these? (Previously)
posted to MetaFilter by Ethereal Bligh at 4:34 AM on April 23, 2007 (40 comments)

Rails, Ruby, objects, models and the OO confusion of someone harmed by Goto as a child. Can ye help?
posted to Ask Metafilter by bonaldi at 12:46 PM on April 20, 2007 (9 comments)

How do you learn to write quickly? I have a good number of 5-15 page papers due in the next couple of days and they're killing me. I have no lack of ideas, I have no lack of outlines and notes I can create. But somewhere between holding the notes and writing the sentences down my brain sticks and I spend an hour writing and re-writing the first paragraph. What to do?
posted to Ask Metafilter by schroedinger at 5:07 PM on December 6, 2006 (40 comments)

I need to know which book-related web service/API is best (most complete archive, most up-to-date, most metadata) for looking up information about books given an ISBN-10 or ISBN-13.
posted to Ask Metafilter by basicchannel at 1:50 PM on April 17, 2007 (10 comments)

While looking for ways to digitize old home movies, I came across the Home Movie Depot Video Archives, and was in awe of how much content they have available online. The vendor provides their clients with space to upload their converted movies, and many have done so... to the tune of 80+ pages of albums. You can browse through page by page, or search for specific keywords. [more inside]
posted to MetaFilter by avoision at 12:33 PM on April 17, 2007 (17 comments)

The Power of the Penis [YouTube],[NSFW]. I'm sorry for making my first post ever a single link YouTube post, but this Atlanta Public Access TV clip is the most educational video I have ever seen. Alexyss Tylor hosts a show on 'Vagina Power 'and 'Penis Power' with her mother. It's about 9 minutes of true insight - women, don't let men hit the bottom or use their penis as a weapon! Separate the love, the orgasm, and the penis, OK? Make sure he buys you the shrimp plate though!
posted to MetaFilter by waitingtoderail at 3:00 PM on April 17, 2007 (302 comments)

$78 Million worth of Red Tape. An amazing (and lengthy) LA Times article that provides an extremely rare glimpse into the finances of a major motion picture, with a line item dissection of the $160 Million disaster Sahara. The items include $230,000+ for bribes to local officials, $2 Million for a 45 second plane crash sequence cut from the final film, and 3.8 Million to a total of 10 different screenwriters for a movie that eventually went on to be one of the largest (in pure dollar terms - not adjusted for inflation) financial disasters in film making history.
posted to MetaFilter by jonson at 5:38 PM on April 16, 2007 (74 comments)

The Other Side of the Wind is the lost last film of Orson Welles, a reputed unseen masterpiece, that may finally see the light of day in late 2008. The film tells the story of Jake Hannaford (played by John Huston), an aging movie director who has to film a low budget sex-and-symbolism flick to avoid getting overtaken by the Movie Brats of the Spielberg/Coppola generation. After providing voiceovers to two documentaries on the Persepolis ceremonies of 1971 and an intimate portrait of the Shah of Iran, Welles obtained Iranian financing to finish The Other Side of the Wind. Unfortunately, after the Islamic Revolution of 1979, the bank accounts of his Iranian financier were seized, which led to the negatives for the film getting locked in a French vault. After Orson Welles died in 1985, his lover/collaborator Oja Kodar had to settle his estate with Orson's estranged (but never divorced) wife Paola Mori. There the matter might have rested, if not for an unfortunate coincidence. (More inside.)
posted to MetaFilter by jonp72 at 9:57 AM on April 15, 2007 (50 comments)

Cloned Disney cels: page 1 [Russian, bad English], page 2 [Russian, bad English]
posted to MetaFilter by thirteenkiller at 12:38 PM on April 10, 2007 (25 comments)

An amazing collection of classic American television commercials. Sorted by category: Eat, Drink, Smoke, Clean, Groom, Shop and Travel. Includes descriptions and historical background. The commercials can be viewed in either RealPlayer or MediaPlayer format, and newer ones will work in both IE and Firefox.
posted to MetaFilter by amyms at 9:01 PM on April 10, 2007 (7 comments)

What books, programs, sites are there out there to teach Python who has never programmed before? Ideally, I'm looking for a resource that teaches me both the language and general programming concepts.
posted to Ask Metafilter by dantekgeek at 1:06 AM on April 6, 2007 (15 comments)

I'm really interested in the concept of the buffet-style, "all you can eat" type restaurant experience. Is this a Western invention? Does it even exist in other parts of the world? Also, does anyone have anyone strategies as to how to maximize the buffet experience?
posted to Ask Metafilter by quietfish at 6:11 AM on April 6, 2007 (67 comments)

Twenty-two browned, hollowed-out loaves of Italian white bread. Twenty-two pounds of bacon. Twenty-two jars of peanut butter. Twenty-two jars of jelly. Forty-eight tablespoons of butter. A case of Perrier. A case of champagne. And the King.
posted to MetaFilter by WCityMike at 2:23 PM on April 5, 2007 (40 comments)

Waaaaaah! was an early 90's indie label of with an ever-changing number of a's in it's name. The owner of the label has put the entire catalog onto his site for download in mp3 format. He indicates which songs he likes the best by putting a very, very tiny picture of a kitten next to the songs. Artists include The Field Mice, White Town, They Go Boom, BMX Bandits, Dufflecoats, The Bedfloweres and Strawberry Story. You can see pictures of the bands on the site. If you spent your youth saying things like "this is pure, perfect pop music, why isn't this on the radio" then you've probably already clicked the link.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 4:46 PM on April 3, 2007 (38 comments)

Looking for examples of great statistics display interfaces. This is preferably on the web, but I'd also like to know anything you found particularly compelling.
posted to Ask Metafilter by arrhn at 8:46 AM on April 2, 2007 (7 comments)

France's Centre National d'Études Spatiales has unleashed its UFO archives on the internet. (And the internet has been unleashed on CNES' UFO archives). The CNES version of the now trendy UFO-archive-release stunt is a little flashier and a little more romantic than its brethren with a host of pictures, drawings, video and audio and a guaranteed 28% unexplained content. Even the explained phenomenon are interesting in their own way. The AP write-up cites a report where "Experts initially concluded that [a burning object dropping into a field] was part of the propulsion device of a recently launched satellite. Eventually they realized it was a piece of German World War II ordnance that spontaneously exploded four decades after the war." As the archives become more explorable, they promise to reveal strange things that may have visited us, or in the very least, the strange things we and our own habitat are capable of creating.
posted to MetaFilter by pokermonk at 7:44 PM on March 23, 2007 (4 comments)

"When people make us think we're thinking, we love them. When people make us actually think, we hate them." I love this quote, was reminded of it by this comment, and it's driving me nuts that I can't remember who said it (and neither can Google, in any of the configurations I've tried). Can anyone help?
posted to Ask Metafilter by Superfrankenstein at 2:40 AM on March 22, 2007 (3 comments)

Hey, on your way to work tomorrow, instead of sitting around with your finger up your a$$, look around. There's a union out there called AFSCME and they're busting their balls for you doing all the sh*t work you take for granted.
posted to MetaFilter by milarepa at 9:16 PM on March 18, 2007 (51 comments)

I'm a vegetarian looking to cut back on my cheese addiction. What are some vegan foods or ingredients with that lovely umami flavour?
posted to Ask Metafilter by lindsey.nicole at 11:10 AM on March 14, 2007 (37 comments)

IBM Research and Technical Journals. Complete recent issues of IBM Research and Development Journal and Systems Journal as well as searchable archives.
posted to MetaFilter by Burhanistan at 7:51 PM on March 6, 2007 (9 comments)

Based on research (from the Barna Group) that shows Christians act no better than non-Christians the Community Christian Church have made a series of Mac vs PC parodies (1,2,3,4) that criticize a certain type of Christian. The pastor of the CCC goes even further by saying the last thing the world needs is more Christians. Interesting discussion about the parody clips from Christian/Christ followers can be found here.
posted to MetaFilter by meech at 8:13 PM on March 6, 2007 (63 comments)

iTheory is a unique, free program designed by a music student that turns your iPod into a portable learning tool for ear training of music theory. Quiz yourself on intervals, chords, or scales, or train yourself to have perfect pitch.
posted to MetaFilter by hydropsyche at 1:23 PM on March 2, 2007 (17 comments)

How can I construct an effective Google search when I'm not looking for a specific object/person/thing, but rather something I only hope or suspect exists? Clarifying example inside.
posted to Ask Metafilter by not that girl at 11:38 PM on February 26, 2007 (16 comments)

The Complete Sherlock Holmes, featuring "the largest collection of Holmesian graphics online", a Scholars' Wing featuring essays and articles, pastiche and parodies. Arthur Conan Doyle's champion of logic and reason is the antithesis of the author's spiritualist beliefs. In his will (5.B), Doyle left sums of money to the Spiritualist Alliance of London and the Psychic College stating "...these institutions represent the most important religious movement that this world now holds". His belief in the occult and in particular fairies is surprising, yet somewhat understandable considering the era in which he lived.
posted to MetaFilter by sluglicker at 2:37 AM on February 27, 2007 (8 comments)

Rachmaninov's Piano Concerto No.3, in D minor, with Martha Argerich on piano. Many know the Rach 3 from the movie Shine. [Via C&L.]
posted to MetaFilter by homunculus at 8:38 PM on February 26, 2007 (27 comments)

A glossary of famous brands
posted to MetaFilter by deern the headlice at 8:29 AM on February 26, 2007 (24 comments)

WANTED: The Limping Lady. The Gestapo's poster read "She is one of the most valuable Allied agents in France and we must find and destroy her" but Virginia Hall, who used a prosthetic limb after losing a leg years before in a hunting accident, eluded them and saved countless Allied lives while working as a spy during WWII. Additional biographical information, as well as the biographies of other famous female spies, at WWII Female Spies (which has many outgoing links to other great informational resources about female spies in WWII).
posted to MetaFilter by amyms at 11:28 AM on February 21, 2007 (8 comments)

The Design Disease "People with the disease will always choose books by their covers."
posted to MetaFilter by dhruva at 8:30 PM on February 18, 2007 (91 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 (218 comments)

Detailed images of a complete miniature city
posted to MetaFilter by deern the headlice at 6:30 PM on February 11, 2007 (41 comments)