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Oh Noes! The dreaded #REF error!

In the world of conversation killers, talking about Excel to the average person ranks up there with the best. At the same time, there is always a chance that you wish you could have that conversation at work when it gets down to the wire. Even as a pro, you might need that brush up on Array Functions, calculation tricks, VBA examples or some examples from one of the well known authors on Excel. There is also no shortage of people who dedicate their working lives to this arcane program and are more than willing to assist others for free by posting solved issues on their websites. People like David McRitchie, OzGrid, Rob Bovey, Ron de Bruin, John Walkenbach, Dick Kusleika, Joseph Rubin and Chip Pearson.

Or if you just want to be a Debbie Downer at the next party, just take page from any of the following, memorize it. and recite it when faced with that nudge you don't want to talk to: Excel Support, Jon Peltier, Colo's Junk Room, Scriptorium, Andrew's Excel Tips, Andy Pope, Anthony's VBA Page, Rodney Powell, Array Formulas, Erlandsen Data Consulting, Excel-it, ExcelUser, JKP's Excel Page, John Lacher, McGimpsey, Bill Jelen, Stephen Bullen, Tushar Mehta, VBusers.com, The Excel Nexus, The Excel Logic Page, and Anthoney Does Excel. It’s a fast and easy way to ward off lounge lizards.
posted by lampshade at 2:13 PM Aug 18 2007 - 42 comments [220 favorites]

Roger Ebert on Anime, with a focus on Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli

"In Japan, animation is not seen as the exclusive realm of children's and family films, but is often used for adult, science fiction and action stories, where it allows a kind of freedom impossible in real life. Some Hollywood films strain so desperately against the constraints of the possible that you wish they'd just caved in and gone with animation." -- Roger Ebert on anime, with this excerpt being related to Tokyo Godfathers. Ebert has been a fan of anime for a while, especially the works of Hayao Miyazaki. Ebert has reviewed 6 of the 18 Studio Ghibli films released to date, and even interviewed Miyazaki with a bit of fanboy glee. More reviews and videos inside. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 7:46 AM Aug 30 2010 - 92 comments [219 favorites]

Enough

America's gun problem is completely unique: Why is it that for all the outrage and mourning with every mass shooting, nothing seems to change? To understand that, it's important to grasp not just the stunning statistics about gun ownership and gun violence in the United States, but America's very unique relationship with guns — unlike that of any other developed country — and how it plays out in our politics to ensure, seemingly against all odds, that our culture and laws continue to drive the routine gun violence that marks American life. [more inside]
posted by triggerfinger at 8:19 PM Dec 2 2015 - 909 comments [219 favorites]

How the Daddy of Jesse Helms Gave Birth to Black Power

In 1936 in the Jim Crow South, Robert F. Williams was an 11-year-old black boy in Monroe, North Carolina, who watched helplessly as Jesse Helms Sr. (father and namesake of the former senator) beat an African-American woman to the ground and "dragged her off to the nearby jailhouse, her dress up over her head, the same way that a cave man would club and drag his sexual prey." Years later, after a stint in the segregated military, Williams returned home to Monroe and worked as an NAACP organizer, where he brought international attention to the Kissing Case, a 1958 incident in which two black boys under the age of 10 were sentenced to a reformatory for kissing a white girl. By then, Williams had also attracted controversy for his advocacy of armed self-defense, a position he outlined in the book Negroes with Guns. But it would all change overnight in 1961, when Williams landed on FBI's Most Wanted list, after being charged with kidnapping a white couple that Williams claimed he was trying to save from an angry black crowd. [more inside]
posted by jonp72 at 6:03 PM Jun 8 2010 - 36 comments [218 favorites]

The rain in Spain smells mainly of dimethyl-9-decalol

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 by mrgrimm at 9:48 AM Nov 28 2012 - 91 comments [218 favorites]

"The desert snail at once awoke and found himself famous"

In the mid-1800s, a snail spent years glued to a specimen card in the British Museum (now the Natural History Museum) before scientists realized it was still alive. What became of this snail? Ask Metafilter found out! [more inside]
posted by nicebookrack at 6:40 PM Jul 14 2015 - 55 comments [218 favorites]

We're just taking baby steps in the right direction.

You Feel Like Shit: An Interactive Self-Care Guide "This is meant to be an interactive flow chart for people who struggle with self care, executive dysfunction, and/or who have trouble reading internal signals. It's designed to take as much of the weight off of you as possible, so each decision is very easy and doesn't require much judgment."
posted by desjardins at 4:34 PM Sep 28 2015 - 97 comments [218 favorites]

Cities of ladies

In 1999, officials in Vienna, Austria, asked residents of the city's ninth district how often and why they used public transportation. "Most of the men filled out the questionnaire in less than five minutes," says Ursula Bauer, one of the city administrators tasked with carrying out the survey. "But the women couldn't stop writing." - How to Design a City for Women [more inside]
posted by supercrayon at 3:20 AM Jul 9 2018 - 27 comments [218 favorites]

The sublime science fiction of Ted Chiang

Twelve years on, Ted Chiang remains perhaps the finest author in contemporary science fiction -- and the most rarefied. A technical writer by trade and a graduate of the distinguished Clarion Writers Workshop, Chiang has published only eighteen short stories in the last thirty years, one and a half dozen masterpieces of the genre whose insightful, precise, often poetic language confronts fundamental ideas -- intelligence, consciousness, the nature of God -- and thrusts them into a dazzling new light. His collected works, mostly available in the anthologies Stories of Your Life and Others (2010) and Exhalation: Stories (2019), have cemented his reputation as one of the greatest SF storytellers of all time (and inspired one of the best SF movies of all time). Click inside for a complete listing of Chiang's work, with links to online reprints or audio versions where available, as well as a collection of one-on-one interviews, links to his other writings, video essays, movie clips, and lots more. [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi at 2:42 PM Feb 21 2022 - 34 comments [218 favorites]

The ability to recreate an entire movie is insignificant next to the potential of the Force.

Back in 09', Star Wars Uncut (previously) asked people to recreate 15 second chunks of Star Wars: A New Hope however they wanted, using live action, animation, text adventure screens, SCUMM interfaces, costumed pets, and more. Now they've been edited together to recreate the entire movie as a homemade, constantly shifting media experiment. (Vimeo link)
posted by The Whelk at 2:08 PM Jan 20 2012 - 128 comments [217 favorites]

What's That?

What's That? Sadly, the education of the youth of amerika is declining in more than one way. The other day I was at the grocery store and the checker was unable to identify a portabello mushroom. And no, she wasn't new...and to make matters worse the checker next to her didn't know either. (more inside)
posted by MiHail at 9:25 AM Nov 12 2005 - 1011 comments [215 favorites]

Underrated Movies

Notes on 124 underappreciated films. [more inside]
posted by Iridic at 9:32 AM Jul 18 2011 - 127 comments [215 favorites]

Drew Caricature

Can't get enough Whose Line is it Anyway? 71 Scenes From a Hat, 16 Party Quirks, 52 Props, 5 Film Dubs, 84 Hoedowns, 37 Sound Effects, 45 Questions Only, 11 Hats/Dating Service Videos, 52 World's Worst, 13 News Flashes, 35 Let's Make a Date, 9 Press Conferences, 60 Superheroes, 6 Foreign Film Dubs, 29 Irish Drinking Songs, 4 Animals, 9 If You Know What I Mean, 2 Backwards Scene, 54 Greatest Hits, 58 Song Styles, 2 All in One Voice, 21 Scenes to Rap, 3 90-Second Alphabets, 11 Questionable Impressions, 4 Two-Line Vocabulary, 3 Number of Words, 17 Weird Newscasters and (probably the most telling of how much they had to hold back due to censorship standards) 6 Blooper Reels. Prefer the UK version? Every episode of Seasons 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10.
posted by Christ, what an asshole at 10:56 AM Jun 3 2009 - 70 comments [213 favorites]

Oniongate

Undoubtedly, at some point in your life, a recipe has told you to brown or caramelize some onions for 5-10 minutes. As many frustrated cooks have found through experience, this step of the recipe is a damned lie. In fact, the now-ubiquitous suggestion of 5-10 minutes isn't even a remote approximation of the amount of time it takes to brown an onion; Alton Brown and Julia Child weigh in on the matter, suggesting that the task can take anywhere from 45 minute to an hour. [more inside]
posted by schmod at 7:51 AM May 7 2012 - 196 comments [213 favorites]

One sandwich to rule them all

Hello. Building on the domestication of fire, stable agriculture, invention of cheese and the slicing of bread, the greatest innovation of humanity is without question the cheese sandwich. These can be uncooked, or open, or toasted or grilled. Offering popular versions and other variations, sandwiches can also be tiny, substantive, or earrings or Christmas tree decorations. Other ingredients could include balsamic blueberry, fried egg, apple, olives, mac and ham, spinach, bacon and avocado, pickle, haggis, cucumber, clementines or smoked reindeer. Or twenty slices of American cheese. Makers can be competitive or award winning, speak in Welsh, or serve you from a truck; just respect the dish and its history, even if you were expecting something else. [more inside]
posted by Wordshore at 2:31 PM Feb 6 2018 - 103 comments [213 favorites]

DeathSucks.pdf (also known as SayingGoodbye.pdf)

A free "workbook on the kind of bullshit you need to do when someone you love dies", available as a "version with lots of swearing at the useless, shitty situation you're in" or a "version with a fair amount of black humor but no cursewords". Including "Prepare to spend a long and miserable time on the phone," "Depressing Mad Libs" (obituary templates), "So You Suddenly Have To Become Some Kind of Hacker," and "How to plan a non-religious death party". Published 2019.
posted by brainwane at 9:37 AM Jul 1 2022 - 27 comments [213 favorites]

Procrastination and Useful Websites

29 Semi-Productive Things I Do Online When I'm Trying to Avoid Real Work
posted by MechEng at 11:45 AM Apr 11 2010 - 42 comments [212 favorites]

Barack Obama is the next President of the United States

Attention world: We're back baby! USA! USA! USA! USA! [more inside]
posted by plexi at 8:00 PM Nov 4 2008 - 1268 comments [211 favorites]

the new frontier of sharing useful tips might well be Pinterest

35 Lifechanging Ways To Use Everyday Objects - such as using a banana to get the scratches out of a CD or DVD, the very popular "make a hair bun with a sock" trick, and the ever-useful how to open a wine bottle without a corkscrew. "These handy little things are all things you probably own already. I know this is a topic usually reserved for moms on Pinterest..." It's true, the denizens of Pinterest are an excellent source of useful tips: how to peel a potato in 10 seconds, how to get rid of a sunburn, making emergency ingredient substitutions when you're baking, or 20 new ways to use magic erasers; why not iron your kitchen floor to get out ground-in dirt? (previously: how to fold a fitted sheet - a big list of sites that teach you how to do stuff)
posted by flex at 3:46 PM Jun 2 2012 - 63 comments [210 favorites]

"Fitness is a journey and we all start somewhere"

If you can't do full push-ups, "just like with everything else in the world, you can build up!" Hampton from Hybrid Calisthenics shows you why and how you can progress from wall pushups to inclined push-ups to kneeling push-ups and then to full push-ups in an encouraging one-minute video. (Three-minute video with more detail, still photos.) "When we're doing these exercises, we're actually building strength. When we move on to a harder exercise, all we're doing is demonstrating and using our new strength." (found via Twitter)
posted by brainwane at 4:33 AM May 13 2021 - 48 comments [210 favorites]

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