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Schrödinger’s Rapist: or a guy’s guide to approaching strange women without being maced.
posted by kimdog at 8:06 AM Oct 8 2009 - 845 comments [256 favorites (202 in the last 30 days)]

The best way to cook a steak. That is all.
posted by AceRock at 11:34 AM Oct 28 2009 - 140 comments [153 favorites]

A free computer-programming course on reddit. Click "prev" for more lessons. 113 lessons so far.
posted by grumblebee at 8:37 AM Oct 24 2009 - 89 comments [152 favorites]

Cool app lets you zoom in from a coffee bean to a carbon atom, so that you can compare sizes. Along the way, you see a grain of sand, a skin cell and many other tiny things. This is the first time I've ever had a sense of these objects' sizes. Cells are actually bigger than I thought they were. I wish the zoomer would keep going. I want to see some sub-atomic particles on the scale.
posted by grumblebee at 6:50 AM Oct 28 2009 - 43 comments [119 favorites]

A polymath and a mathemagician without a math degree, Martin Gardner turns 95 tomorrow, and he is celebrating by publishing a new book of essays, which joins over 100 he has written on math, philosophy, literature, magic, and skeptical thinking. A wonderful documentary covering the overlapping circles of math, magic, and science in which he travels is available from Encyclopedia Britannica [mp4 version here]. His thousands of puzzles and mathematical diversions included building a learning machine out of matchboxes that could beat you in a simple game, science fiction puzzle tales (can you solve the first couple?), many mathematical tricks, and the first general introduction to the Game of Life. A fascinating interview with the man is available from Cambridge University Press.
posted by blahblahblah at 9:26 AM Oct 20 2009 - 46 comments [117 favorites]

The woman at my polling place asked me, do I believe in equality for gay and lesbian people? I was pretty surprised to be asked a question like that. It made no sense to me. Finally I asked her, "What do you think I fought for on Omaha Beach?"
posted by pashdown at 10:31 PM Oct 21 2009 - 90 comments [113 favorites]


From October 1972 to October 1973 a controversy over Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory simmered in the pages of The Horn Book. It began with an article, "McLuhan, Youth, and Literature", by Eleanor Cameron, author of the Mushroom Planet series for children and of The Green and Burning Tree: On the Writing and Enjoyment of Children's Books. Spread out over the October, December, and February issues, it tied the ideas of Marshall McLuhan (The Medium is the Massage) to the confection of Charlie, calling it "one of the most tasteless books ever written for children":
"The more I think about Charlie and the character of Willy Wonka and his factory, the more I am reminded of McLuhan’s coolness, the basic nature of his observations, and the kinds of things that excite him. Certainly there are several interesting parallels between the point of view of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and McLuhan’s 'theatrical view of experience as a production or stunt,' as well as his enthusiastic conviction that every ill of mankind can easily be solved by subservience to the senses."
What followed was a knock-down, drag-out, letter-writing brouhaha, refereed by Horn Book editor Paul Heins, with librarians, parents, teachers, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Roald Dahl himself joining in, and it was one of the main causes of the book's revision that year.
posted by ocherdraco at 5:38 PM Oct 15 2009 - 68 comments [96 favorites]

"So, 'now'--ooh, what a wonderful first word, right in the beginning of the play. 'Now.' Not in the past. Not a history play. Now." Ian McKellen breaks down Richard III.
posted by kirkaracha at 7:32 AM Nov 5 2009 - 46 comments [90 favorites]

While evolution is one of the best-supported theories in science, one lay criticism is that it doesn't explain the creation of life from non-life, or abiogenesis. This is a different problem domain, of course, as survival of the fittest hardly applies if there's nothing alive yet. There have been many guesses over the years: the most commonly accepted is "the primordial soup". That's probably what you learned in school, the Frankenstein's Monster approach to cell creation. Start with a random chemical bath, throw enough lightning at it, and mysterious magic happens, somehow resulting in life.

Dr. William Martin of the University of Düsseldorf, working with geochemist Mike Russell, has presented an actual theory of abiogenesis. It neatly explains both bacteria and archaea, describes fairly closely why they function the way they do, and shows why we don't see new life being created now. Their suggestion: our original ancestor wasn't lightning-zapped soup, but rather a proton-powered rock.
posted by Malor at 10:48 PM Oct 19 2009 - 75 comments [83 favorites]

A free website that helps you learn to diagnose and work through negative though patterns. Having seen so many posts on AskMeFi about depression, anxiety and related topics, it seemed almost a duty to share this. It's a free website (well, you have to register but it's anonymous and no cash changes hands) that's run by the health service here in the UK.
posted by KMH at 7:53 AM Oct 20 2009 - 27 comments [82 favorites]

At the dark end of disco and funk in the early 1980s a DJ and crew known as Afrika Bambaataa had wild, sweaty, drunken sex with the emotionless zombie robot corpse of school-of-Bauhaus German synthpop unit Kraftwerk and an unholy thousand-headed monster rose from the undead to groove across the land. Its name is Electro.
posted by loquacious at 1:40 AM Oct 26 2009 - 43 comments [78 favorites]

Sung in incoherent pseudo-English, Adriano Celentano's Prisencolinensinainciusol (1973) could be thought of as an early example of rap.
posted by dunkadunc at 2:25 PM Oct 22 2009 - 64 comments [77 favorites]

In the waning days of the Disco era, Larry Levan crafted a new style of dance music, which, like House music in Chicago, came to be named after the nightclub where it was most played, the Paradise Garage. Garage music may have started with disco, but over the decades, it's evolved in some surprising ways:
posted by empath at 10:06 PM Oct 27 2009 - 62 comments [77 favorites]

Enheduanna was a priestess and poet in the city of Ur in the 23rd century BC and supposedly the daughter of Sargon the Great of Akkad. She is the first author known by name. Here are a number of her poems in English translation, The Exaltation of Inana, Inana and Ebih, A Hymn to Inana, The Temple Hymns and A Balbale to Nanna. Here are two alternate translations of The Exaltation of Inana, one by James D. Pritchard and an English rendering of Dr. Annette Zgoll's German translation. If you want to learn more, go to The En-hedu-Ana Research Pages.
posted by Kattullus at 8:33 PM Nov 5 2009 - 27 comments [75 favorites]

Jeff Altman took some of his grandfather's 16mm Kodachrome home movies and made some really nice HD transfers out of them: San Francisco circa 1958, Disneyland in 1956 (part 2).
posted by mikesch at 5:57 PM Oct 23 2009 - 44 comments [72 favorites]

Having previously put together a post with links to stories from the 2009 edition of Best of American Crime Reporting, I decided to go to earlier editions to gather together what is available on the web. Starting in 2007 with The Tainted Kidney: Charles Graeber, New York. A serial killer who chooses to donate his kidney has his motives questioned.
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 10:39 AM Oct 17 2009 - 18 comments [64 favorites]

Lovecraft 101: Get To Know The Master of Scifi-Horror. For more detailed insights into each of Lovecraft's tales in publication order you might want to follow the H.P.Lovecraft Literary Podcast. For another story-by-story guide to Lovecraft you might want to check out Kenneth Hite's Tour De Lovecraft (also available in expanded form as a book). China Mieville on Lovecraft and racism and a lecture at Treadwells by Archaeologist James Holloway which delves deep into Lovecraft and identity. The making of the Call of Cthulhu RPG. The making of Cthulhu (Hipsters! Ego! Madness!). Happy Halloween with H.P. Lovecraft!
posted by Artw at 12:13 AM Oct 31 2009 - 53 comments [64 favorites]

Ignore Everybody: Reflections on living a creative life, via No Depression blogs.
posted by Miko at 8:38 AM Oct 23 2009 - 44 comments [62 favorites]

Few men can reach the notes, and few women have the lung capacity to manipulate them. Most of these arias have not been heard since the deaths of the castrati for whom they were written. Mezzosoprano Cecilia Bartoli has released an album entitled Sacrificium. The album is a compilation of 17th-century arias written for castrati--male singers who were castrated in order to sing in a higher register. Commentaries on the work are favorable; commentaries on the history of castrati and Bartoli herself are just as interesting.
posted by jefficator at 11:13 AM Nov 9 2009 - 44 comments [60 favorites]

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