A gigantic list of browser-based emulators and classic game ports covers everything from the Amiga to the ZX-Spectrum. Some things not to miss for either the nostalgic or the lover of classic games: Play Dune 2 (the original RTS) in HTML 5; Command and Conquer; an authorized version of many Sierra adventures (works on iPads too); beautiful versions of the Nintendo Game and Watch games; a nice Apple //e emulator (Bard's Tale! Neuromancer! Karateka!); and, of course, every NES game [a few of these mentioned before]. All in your browser!
posted by blahblahblah at 7:42 PM May 15 2013 - 32 comments [242 favorites]

"'If you can't do the time, don't do the crime.' So goes the old saying. Yet conditions in some American facilities are so obscene that they amount to a form of extrajudicial punishment." Mother Jones is profiling "America's 10 Worst Prisons." Facilities were chosen for the list based on "...three years of research, correspondence with prisoners, and interviews with reform advocates." [more inside]
posted by zarq at 9:15 AM May 14 2013 - 87 comments [86 favorites]

For the first time in Kitchen Nightmares history, British chef Gordon Ramsay walks off his own show. In the segment that aired this week, the difficult owners of Amy's Baking Company in Scottsdale, AZ - Samy and Amy Bouzaglo - are shown stealing tips from their waitstaff, admitting to firing more than 100 employees over a one year period, firing a waitress for asking a question, telling a customer who had been waiting over an hour for his food to go fuck himself (yes, the police were called during filming), and passing off frozen, pre-made raviolis and desserts as if they were homemade. The couple was so resistant to criticism that even the typically steadfast Ramsay decided he couldn’t help them and shut the show down before beginning the rehab phase. [more inside]
posted by phaedon at 3:20 AM May 15 2013 - 438 comments [77 favorites]

A female data scientist working on HAWKEN (a videogame) takes issue with the poster of a scantily clad comic character her CEO displays on his wall, and while he is away, replaces it with something else... [more inside]
posted by xdvesper at 4:39 AM May 15 2013 - 164 comments [75 favorites]

Behavioral Economics for Kids [pdf] is a free ebook from the Ivey School of Business that illustrates (to adults, really) the basic principles of behavioral economics, including the Endowment Effect (we value what we have more than what it is worth), Hyperbolic Discounting (the time we wait for rewards influences value in non-linear ways), the dishonesty of honest people, and Base Rate Neglect (why we make bad assumptions based on inherent biases). Though the findings are well-established, the labeling is subject to change, as many social psychologists argue, this is not behavioral economics, it is well-established psychology.
posted by blahblahblah at 9:13 PM May 16 2013 - 29 comments [75 favorites]

In 2011, Raquel Nelson was convicted of vehicular homicide in the death of her four-year-old son, A.J., because he was hit by a car and killed while he, his mother, and his siblings crossed the street without using a crosswalk. Nelson and her three children were crossing the street to get from a bus stop to their apartment complex. In order to use a crosswalk, she would have had to walk a third of a mile in each direction. Streets with marked crosswalks are significantly more common in high income areas than in middle income or low income communities. (.pdf) A 2012 New Jersey study found that poor pedestrians are more likely to be struck by cars. [more inside]
posted by southern_sky at 7:37 PM May 15 2013 - 133 comments [59 favorites]

I will die alone, like a dog, and my cats will eat my face.
posted by ereshkigal45 at 8:10 PM May 16 2013 - 71 comments [58 favorites]

Daniel Dennett's seven rules for thinking. "A deepity (a term coined by the daughter of my late friend, computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum) is a proposition that seems both important and true – and profound – but that achieves this effect by being ambiguous. On one reading, it is manifestly false, but it would be earth-shaking if it were true; on the other reading, it is true but trivial. The unwary listener picks up the glimmer of truth from the second reading, and the devastating importance from the first reading, and thinks, Wow! That's a deepity."
posted by Sebmojo at 5:56 PM May 19 2013 - 90 comments [57 favorites]

Since February of this year, Autostraddle ("News, Entertainment, Opinion and Girl-On-Girl Culture") has been running a very interesting series of articles about trans experience (primarily focused on trans women) called Trans*Scribe. [more inside]
posted by jiawen at 10:43 PM May 19 2013 - 34 comments [55 favorites]

Slate's Matthew Yglesias 'Boldly Went Where Every Star Trek Movie and TV Show Has Gone Before,' by watching every Star Trek movie and television series,* and offers his position on why Star Trek is great. [more inside]
posted by Atreides at 11:31 AM May 15 2013 - 553 comments [53 favorites]

The goal of Red Letter Christians is simple: To take Jesus seriously by endeavoring to live out His radical, counter-cultural teachings as set forth in Scripture, and especially embracing the lifestyle prescribed in the Sermon on the Mount. [more inside]
posted by No Robots at 9:27 AM May 16 2013 - 272 comments [53 favorites]

For the past eighteen years, Gil Garduño has been chronicling his adventures in New Mexican cuisine on his NM Gastronome blog. With over seven hundred reviews of restaurants around New Mexico, Gil's got you covered, whether you like classic New Mexican food, green chile cheeseburgers, or even other types of food that happen to be well-represented in the state. Gil is fierce in his defense of homegrown eateries over chains, saying that "word of mouth is crucial to survival and through this bully pulpit, I’ll do my best to extol the great value and virtue of supporting local restaurants." A warning, however: if you like food, and particularly New Mexican food, Gil's excellent and evocative writing about (and photography of) great dishes is likely to make you more than a little bit hungry.
posted by koeselitz at 4:04 PM May 13 2013 - 51 comments [52 favorites]

This afternoon, Yitang Zhang of the University of New Hampshire gave a special seminar at Harvard, in which he announced that he had proved that there are infinitely many pairs of prime numbers separated by no more than 70,000,000, a result differing only by a constant factor from the venerable twin prime conjecture. Dan Goldston, who together with Yildirim and Pintz made the last major advance on prime gaps, said, ""I was doubtful I would ever live to see this result." Not enough excitement for one day? Harald Helfgott has just posted to the arXiv a proof of the ternary Goldbach conjecture: every odd number is the sum of three primes.
posted by escabeche at 8:26 PM May 13 2013 - 51 comments [50 favorites]

The Myth of Nazi Efficiency
posted by Miko at 7:21 AM May 18 2013 - 79 comments [47 favorites]

"Rob Ford, Toronto's conservative mayor, is a wild lunatic given to making bizarre racist pronouncements and randomly slapping refrigerator magnets on cars. One reason for this is that he smokes crack cocaine. I know this because I watched him do it, on a videotape. He was fucking hiiiiigh. It's for sale if you've got six figures." [single link Gawker]
posted by (Arsenio) Hall and (Warren) Oates at 5:39 PM May 16 2013 - 359 comments [46 favorites]

How do you solicit freelance scripts for a science fiction television series that breaks the mold? You create a comprehensive guide to writing an episode of Star Trek. [more inside]
posted by Sara C. at 1:38 PM May 14 2013 - 189 comments [45 favorites]

What's the point of teaching a man to fish, if someone else owns the river? Berkeley professor Ananya Roy narrates a hand-drawn video about who is profiting from poverty.
posted by spamandkimchi at 4:32 PM May 16 2013 - 40 comments [45 favorites]

The horrifying, little-known story of how hundreds of thousands of blacks worked in brutal bondage right up to the middle of the 20th century. It was a crime for for a black man to lack employment and a crime to change jobs without his previous employer's permission. It was a crime to sell the proceeds of his farm to anyone other than the man from whom he rented land. A crime for a black man to speak loudly in the company of a white woman, to walk beside a railroad line, to fail to yield a sidewalk to white people, to sit among whites on a train and, in practice, generally a crime for blacks to be accused of any crime by a white person.
posted by blankdawn at 11:27 AM May 18 2013 - 54 comments [45 favorites]

Literature and Form is a series of four lectures by Oxford literature academic Dr. Catherine Brown. The lectures are on the themes of unreliable narrators, chapters, multiple plotting and what comparative literature is. You can listen to it as a podcast or through iTunes U. In this lecture series Brown primarily looks at some central structures of the novel as well as examining what the study of literature entails. Brown weaves in examples from world literature, especially English and Russian literature of the 18th, 19th and 20th Centuries.
posted by Kattullus at 5:12 PM May 15 2013 - 6 comments [44 favorites]

Leonard Bernstein's Young People's Concerts: From 1958-1973, composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein (Previously on MeFi) played live, educational concerts with the New York Philharmonic that were televised nationwide on CBS. Tapes of the broadcasts were eventually syndicated to 40 countries, introducing an entire generation of children to a wide range musical concepts, styles and composers. The first concert to air was "What Does Music Mean." [more inside]
posted by zarq at 1:11 PM May 16 2013 - 5 comments [44 favorites]