"Our research shows that people love two things: failed Microsoft technologies and obscure Javascript libraries. Naturally, we decided to combine the two." Thanks to
Smore, you can now
put Microsoft Clippy (or one of its friends) on your websites.
posted by barnacles at 8:25 AM May 19 2013 - 28 comments [26 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 - 48 comments [26 favorites]
On June 6th, 2013, Mel Brooks will be presented with the 41st AFI Life Achievement Award, but this post is about his Tomato and Onion Omelette.
Bon Appétit talks cooking, coffee, and career with
Mel Brooks, Omelette King.
posted by Room 641-A at 2:19 PM May 19 2013 - 19 comments [23 favorites]
As Hegel presumably remarks somewhere, all great Tory crises appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as farce, the second as farce. --
Chris Brooke presents a history of "swivel eyed loon" as an insult used against a certain kind of rightwing Tory.
[more inside]
posted by MartinWisse at 3:42 AM May 19 2013 - 41 comments [19 favorites]
Lee Buchheit, fairy godmother to finance ministers in distress Lee Buchheit, a lawyer at US firm Cleary Gottlieb, has been present at all the major debt crises of the past three decades. His reputation among investors is as a fearsome and aggressive litigator, but finance ministers in distress see him as something of a fairy godmother.
[more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 4:12 PM May 19 2013 - 2 comments [15 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 - 5 comments [14 favorites]
The thrill and rush of possibly winning started to wear off after about the twentieth losing ticket. Each card had a couple of “Life” symbols on them, and every time you got a second you just dreamed of seeing the third one under the remaining graphite. However it never appeared and never will and it just kind of turned depressing. How could people put themselves through this humiliation and teasing every day of their lives?
The classic criticism of the lottery is that the people who play are the ones who can least afford to lose; that the lottery is a sink of money, draining wealth from those who most need it. Some lottery advocates . . . have tried to defend lottery-ticket buying as a rational purchase of fantasy—paying a dollar for a day's worth of pleasant anticipation, imagining yourself as a millionaire. But consider exactly what this implies. It would mean that you're occupying your valuable brain with a fantasy whose real probability is nearly zero—a tiny line of likelihood which you, yourself, can do nothing to realize. . . . Which makes the lottery another kind of sink: a sink of emotional energy. [via]
posted by Jasper Friendly Bear at 8:33 PM May 18 2013 - 141 comments [18 favorites (13 in the past 24 hours)]
The Long Swath is a satellite image by NASA's
Landsat Data Continuity Mission that captures, in a single continuous image, a strip of land 120 by 6,000 miles stretching from South Africa to Russia. The image can be explored in
Gigapan,
Google Earth, and fly-over videos and high resolution images.
posted by carter at 7:35 PM May 19 2013 - 5 comments [12 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 - 39 comments [41 favorites (11 in the past 24 hours)]
Animated
Aliens in 60 Seconds.
(with some barely intelligible NSFW language) [more inside]
posted by fuse theorem at 12:00 AM May 19 2013 - 14 comments [14 favorites (11 in the past 24 hours)]
Web2.Hell collected the names and taglines of real web2.0 start-ups that somehow were actually funded. "Remember Nothing! Zukmo Everything!" "Unlike on other sites, your posts must be one word long!" (The phenomena of baffling name choice lives on in current day successes like Snotr, LiveMocha, Magoosh, Squidoo etc., etc., etc.)
posted by blankdawn at 2:56 PM May 19 2013 - 46 comments [11 favorites]
Structural Archaeology Geoff Carter's radical view of building in the ancient world, especially the archaeology of the lost timber built environment of Southern England. It is new research into of prehistory of architecture
With the ultimate conclusion that Stonehenge is the remains of a roofed shelter.
[more inside]
posted by Mitheral at 10:14 PM May 19 2013 - 15 comments [11 favorites]
"On a beautiful sunny day last week, the
Turning Over a New Leaf project team decided to take a day off from the office to visit
a spectacular chained library in the small town of Zutphen (located in the eastern part of the Netherlands). Built in 1564 as part of the church of St Walburga, it is one of only five chained libraries in the world that survive ‘intact’—that is,
complete with the original books, chains, rods, and furniture."
posted by brundlefly at 3:01 PM May 18 2013 - 18 comments [37 favorites (9 in the past 24 hours)]
Improv Everywhere: for our
latest mission we posed as city workers providing a ridiculous solution to the “texting and walking” epidemic in New York.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 6:14 AM May 19 2013 - 38 comments [9 favorites]
Somtimes a guy just wants a curiously asexual sprite to whimsicaly break the chains of his workaday world for an hour or so -
cue the Manic Pixie Prostitute!
posted by The Whelk at 2:57 PM May 18 2013 - 60 comments [35 favorites (8 in the past 24 hours)]
Rome2Rio is a handy travel search engine site where you put in the place you want to start and where you want to go. It shows you the map, the cost of the ticket (air, rail, coach, ferry and mass transit routes), duration of the journey, etc.
posted by nickyskye at 1:00 PM May 18 2013 - 16 comments [30 favorites (8 in the past 24 hours)]
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