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A decade on, the Coen brothers' woefully underrated O Brother, Where Art Thou? [alt] is remembered for a lot of things: its sun-drenched, sepia-rich cinematography (a pioneer of digital color grading), its whimsical humor, fluid vernacular, and many subtle references to Homer's Odyssey. But one part of its legacy truly stands out: the music. Assembled by T-Bone Burnett, the soundtrack is a cornucopia of American folk music, exhibiting everything from cheery ballads and angelic hymns to wistful blues and chain-gang anthems. Woven into the plot of the film through radio and live performances, the songs lent the story a heartfelt, homespun feel that echoed its cultural heritage, a paean and uchronia of the Old South. Though the multiplatinum album was recently reissued, the movie's medley is best heard via famed documentarian D. A. Pennebaker's Down from the Mountain, an extraordinary yet intimate concert film focused on a night of live music by the soundtrack's stars (among them Gillian Welch, Emmylou Harris, Chris Thomas King, bluegrass legend Dr. Ralph Stanley) and wryly hosted by John Hartford, an accomplished fiddler, riverboat captain, and raconteur whose struggle with terminal cancer made this his last major performance. The film is free in its entirety on Hulu and YouTube -- click inside for individual clips, song links, and breakdowns of the set list's fascinating history.
posted by Rhaomi at 11:35 AM Dec 22 2011 - 107 comments [411 favorites]

It's December so it must be time to list the best songs of the year. Pitchfork's Top 100 Songs and Top 50 Albums, MTV's Top 10 Songs of 2011, Billboard's 20 Best Singles, Spin's 20 Best Songs and Top 50 Albums, AARP's Top 10 Albums For Grown Ups, The A/V Club's Best Music of 2011, Rolling Stone's 50 Best Singles and 50 Best Albums, NPR Music's 100 Favorite Songs of 2011, BET's 100 Best Songs of 2011, NME's Best Albums of 2011, MixMag's Tunes of The Year, Metacritic's Top 10 Albums of 2011, Pop Matters 75 Best Albums, Songs and more.
posted by empath at 9:23 PM Dec 17 2011 - 155 comments [187 favorites]

The Browser has been mentioned before on Metafilter as a website that collects the best writing around the web. Over the past 3 days they've been posting their year end list of the best essays from 2011. The full annotated list is after the jump.
posted by codacorolla at 12:56 PM Dec 26 2011 - 20 comments [180 favorites]

Designed as "an expeditionary force for a geologic assault¹" on the Moon’s Hadley Rille, Apollo 15 was a groundbreaking lunar mission. Designed to be devoted entirely to scientific exploration, it included a number of notable firsts: first to land outside of the lunar mare; first 3 day stay on the moon; first use of the Lunar Rover by Commander David Scott and Lunar Module Pilot Jim Irwin; first use of the Scientific Instrument Module, used by Command Module Pilot Al Worden to study the moon from lunar orbit; and first launch of a subsatellite, used to map the plasma, particle and magnetic fields of the moon. On top of that, Scott gave a visual proof of Galileo's theory of objects in gravity fields in a vacuum, showing gravity acts equally on all objects regardless of their mass. Scott and Irwin also discovered of the Genesis Rock, a piece the moon's primordial crust, formed only 100 million years after the solar system itself.

The mission was a spectacular success, publicly called "One of the most brilliant missions in space science ever flown". The crew was lauded and their future with NASA seemed assured.

Then the stamps hit the fan and Apollo 15 became the first US space crew that was ever fired.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 5:28 AM Dec 2 2011 - 61 comments [173 favorites]

What is it like to have an understanding of very advanced mathematics? A naive Quora question gets a remarkably long, thorough answer from an anonymous respondent. The answer cites, among many other things, Tim Gowers's influential essay "The Two Cultures of Mathematics," about the tension between problem-solving and theory-building. Related: Terry Tao asks "Does one have to be a genius to do maths?" (Spoiler: he says no.)
posted by escabeche at 1:07 PM Dec 24 2011 - 56 comments [173 favorites]

Over the past several years, Mozilla's collection of developer documentation for its own web browsers has turned into a wiki-editable reference of web standards for developers working with all browsers, hosting a comprehensive, no-nonsense reference of HTML, HTML5, CSS, JavaScript, the DOM, and more. If you find yourself turning to this reference frequently, dochub provides instant access to Mozilla's documentation for any HTML, CSS, JavaScript, or DOM-related topic. If you're worried that a fancy new standard might not work in an older browser, canIuse will tell you exactly how many browsers will support that new standard. Still want to use that shiny new standard? Modernizr and yepnope will let you detect missing features, and load tiny bits of code to make old browsers support the latest HTML5 hotness.
[via the carefully-curated selections of JavaScript and HTML5 Weekly, run by MetaFilter's own wackybrit]
posted by schmod at 12:11 PM Dec 7 2011 - 25 comments [157 favorites]

The Best Pole Dance Ever. SLYT. Banish your preconceived notions and prepare to be amazed.
posted by Devika at 4:09 PM Dec 7 2011 - 152 comments [152 favorites]

Here are some free tools for rescuing infected Windows systems: Windows Defender Offline Beta - Kaspersky Rescue Disk 10 - BitDefender Bootable CD - Avira Bootable CD - How To Geek provides instructions for scanning a system from an Ubuntu Live CD.  For more info, click through....
posted by JHarris at 8:22 PM Dec 21 2011 - 43 comments [141 favorites]

Now you can make the famous NYC halal style Chicken and Rice at home.
posted by AceRock at 9:12 PM Dec 5 2011 - 95 comments [133 favorites]

This month, Python won "Best Programming Language" in the Linux Journal's Reader's Choice Awards 2011. If you're not convinced, Python Facts explains little simple things that make Python great.
posted by Deathalicious at 6:09 AM Dec 12 2011 - 149 comments [127 favorites]

The Fat Trap (NYT pop review): Overweight individuals in Western nations (and, increasingly, beyond) face interpersonal and institutional stigma for their bodies*. Oftentimes, these stigmas are predicated on the belief that being overweight is a moral failure, that being overweight is usually a result of laziness, decadence, and/or characterlogical poor impulse control. However, an emerging consensus among obesity researchers points toward strong, common physiological and individual genetic factors as causative for heightened BMIs in the modern world and the general failure of dieting to produce BMI outcomes. A recent study in the New England Journal of Medicine (paywalled) adds to this body of evidence, suggesting that chemical messengers held to contribute to altered "efficient" metabolism and increased hunger in the wake of low-calorie dieting are (on average) significantly elevated up to a full year (if not longer) following a substantial drop in weight from dieting.
posted by Keter at 9:41 PM Dec 28 2011 - 180 comments [124 favorites]

How well do you really know old Arty? It all began with the Welsh: The The Annales Cabriae (inside) and parts of the Welsh oral tradition (later collected into the Mabinogion) give a very different picture of the popular King Arthur than contemporary readers are familiar with: no Lancelot, three or four different Guens, no love triangles or Holy Grails. A look at the vast scope of the Arthurian legend.
posted by kittenmarlowe at 6:27 PM Dec 19 2011 - 30 comments [123 favorites]

39 years ago today, Apollo 17 splashed down in the South Pacific, marking the end to manned exploration of the Moon. What we learned from those 10 years of discovery was amazing.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 1:09 PM Dec 19 2011 - 42 comments [122 favorites]

It’s not a frequent topic of discussion, but doctors die, too. And they don’t die like the rest of us. What’s unusual about them is not how much treatment they get compared to most Americans, but how little.

How Doctors Die.
posted by Foci for Analysis at 2:11 AM Dec 5 2011 - 54 comments [120 favorites]

Here is VASSAL, an open-source engine for playing board games online, by email, on forums or on a single machine. Which board games? These. (Requires Java.)
posted by JHarris at 1:31 AM Dec 7 2011 - 41 comments [119 favorites]

Fred Clark posts at a blog called "Slacktivist", so he is often referred to by that name. But this left-wing Christian is far from a slacker. His blog is a powerful voice against the usual conservative Christian presence in America, and the best distillation of his strength is his series of posts analyzing the Left Behind novels of Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins. Fred savages these books for their "bad writing and bad theology" but it's not the usual Internet snark; Fred has a larger mission here than just pointing and laughing. He just finished dissecting book two, Tribulation Force, so it's a great time to jump on if you already haven't. (He has promised that after a holiday break, he's going to do the Tribulation Force movie, and then on to book three.)
posted by Legomancer at 7:01 AM Dec 20 2011 - 183 comments [117 favorites]

Mobile Suit Gundam premiered on April 7th, 1979 in Nagoya, Japan, and with it came the now three-decade-old franchise that launched a thousand plastic model kits. WARNING: MAY CONTAIN spoilers for a thirty-year-old beloved cultural touchstone that you've likely never seen or possibly even heard of. WARNING: DEFINITELY CONTAINS many, many links to TV Tropes. 28.8k USERS: Upgrade to 56K already. You're going to need it.
posted by DoctorFedora at 12:01 AM Dec 15 2011 - 64 comments [113 favorites]

Free cabin porn! Inspiration for your quiet place somewhere.
posted by middleclasstool at 9:20 PM Dec 22 2011 - 57 comments [113 favorites]

How to Whistle Loudly
posted by troll at 11:56 PM Dec 24 2011 - 31 comments [108 favorites]

Twenty-Five Semi-Obscure Traditional Christmas Songs as Performed by Famous and Non-Famous People: 1. The Coventry Carol. Celebrate the end of Christmas with this cheerful song about infants being murdered by a paranoid monarch. Actually quite beautiful. As performed by Sting, Joan Baez, John Denver, Nox Arcana, Loreena McKennitt, Manheim Steamroller, Alison Moyet, Annie Lennox and the African Children's Choir, Sufjan Stevens, Hayley Westenra, The Mediaeval Baebes, Dinah Shore, and the Westminster Cathedral Choir.
posted by kittenmarlowe at 12:51 PM Dec 11 2011 - 29 comments [105 favorites]