Trials riding is a sport where someone takes a specialized motorcycle and make it do things that shouldn't be possible.
comment posted at 6:31 AM on Nov-27-09

Doug Rushkoff throws down the gauntlet in his “Radical Abundance” speech at the O’Reilly Web 2.0 conference. Some highlights of the speech: “The only real possible competition to Google and their economy of faux openness would be peer-to-peer exchange.” “As a result of all this freedom the abundance of genuine creative output is declining. We are actually getting the scarce market place demanded by our currency legacy system. The same way the early Renaissance got a scarcity by killing off half the people with the plague.” Some Alternatives: 1: The development of a digital culture that actually respects the labor of individuals. 2: The creation of new modes of currency based in abundance rather than scarcity.
comment posted at 11:07 AM on Nov-23-09
comment posted at 11:35 AM on Nov-25-09

In case you haven't, please meet Ricky Williams. He has had one of the most fascinating careers of any professional athlete: he was a high school phenom in Football, Baseball, Track, and Wrestling. He played FOUR YEARS of minor league baseball with the Philadelphia Phillies organization. He was a two time all American at Texas and winner of the Heisman Trophy. He translated that success into a great early start in the NFL. He also grew up in an abusive home. He has tested extremely high in both IQ and diagnostic tests. He is incredibly shy and has been diagnosed social anxiety disorder. Hating the effects of medications, he opted for Marijuana claiming that it had a much better effect.
comment posted at 8:19 AM on Nov-21-09

October 29, 2009 marked the 25th anniversary of the release of Welcome To The Pleasuredome, by Frankie Goes To Hollywood, kicking off the short rule of Frankie over reality. oh so much
comment posted at 6:32 AM on Nov-16-09

“I think sometimes that being overly type-sensitive is like an allergy,” : The New York Times on the perils of being a font nerd.
comment posted at 9:23 PM on Nov-15-09
comment posted at 10:42 AM on Nov-17-09

Alaska’s most famous hockey player, Levi Johnston, is set to pose nude for Playgirl (previously). But didn’t Playgirl – the magazine – close up shop last year, going online-only? And wasn’t it ultimately run by straight guys in the first place? Jessanne Collins, Playgirl’s former managing editor, debunks some myths about the magazine that was to the nude-male pictorial what Marky Mark was to hip-hop.
comment posted at 11:02 AM on Nov-11-09
comment posted at 11:19 AM on Nov-11-09
comment posted at 11:25 AM on Nov-11-09

Underground Signs is a company in Brooklyn creating customized NYC subway signs. Other products have horned in on the distinctive look of the MTA's designs, including the map, the train line logos, and the neighborhoods serviced. But this is the first I've seen of the option to create a replica from the NYC underground with one's own name, street, etc. (the site allows you to generate a"Create Your Own" image).
comment posted at 6:35 AM on Nov-12-09

Mefi's own Jason Scott (jscott) wants to raise $25,000 using waxy's Kickstarter to work full-time on computer history. He made BBS documentary (previously), founded the Archive Team, and owns textfiles.com (previously) and, yes, sockington. So far, 237 people have pledged $20,340. On Nov. 4, Jason did a 5-hours, non-stop Scottathon. Apparently, fundraising ain't easy.
comment posted at 2:53 PM on Nov-9-09
comment posted at 2:45 PM on Nov-10-09

"I funded the company myself but I did every horrible thing in the book to, just to get revenues right away." So said Mark Pincus, CEO and founder of Zynga, the company behind social games like Mafia Wars and Farmville. It's the latest revelation in a week-long bit of drama between TechCrunch and the companies running the shady virtual currency that makes the games profitable.
comment posted at 1:56 PM on Nov-8-09

Michael Surtees latest photo experiment is called #walkingtoworktoday. The rules are simple and open to anyone—while walking to work take a photo. From there the photo needs to be pushed to Twitter via Flickr while containing the hashtag #walkingtoworktoday somewhere in the tile. But there wasn’t one dedicated space outside of Flickr to see the photos, and even then it was only seeing it through one medium—you didn’t get to see the tweets. So that’s why he decided there needed to be a site. Surtees created #walkingtoworktoday using Daylife tools that contained Flickr and Twitter moduals. The main modual streams photos from Flickr while the right rail shows the tweets. It’s an interesting redundancy that works.
comment posted at 4:25 PM on Nov-4-09
comment posted at 7:28 AM on Nov-5-09
comment posted at 11:45 AM on Nov-9-09

What is “Try Not to Breathe” about? The Studio 360 podcast interviews a listener who, remembering how her father died of a sudden illness, has a touching eureka moment about the message of the song on R.E.M.’s Automatic for the People: “I think it’s about somebody who has reached the end of their life. They have a level of acceptance that maybe the people around them don’t have. I felt like that was my dad talking to me.... It’s about facing the truth and accepting that life is ugly sometimes.” (Contains download link and embedded player of radio segment.)
comment posted at 2:08 PM on Nov-3-09

Would it be inherently evil if there were not 6,000 spoken languages but one?
comment posted at 10:21 AM on Oct-30-09

Asymmetrical friendship: Tired of the relentless positivity of social-networking sites, where, as on Facebook, all you can be is a “friend” of someone? Greg Smith responds to a journal article that addressed the topic, among others; Smith calls for “asymmetrical friendship – this is cynicism put to good use.” Because there are times when somebody “friends” you on Facebook when what you think of them is more along the lines of “enemy combatant.”
comment posted at 11:34 AM on Oct-27-09
comment posted at 11:41 AM on Oct-27-09

The Canadian Government’s Translation Bureau recently made its French/English/Spanish technical terminology database, Termium, free to access after over a decade as a subscription-based service. While off-the-cuff translations are often available from free services like BabelFish, Termium focuses on technical terminology such as scientific, medical and legal terms.
comment posted at 2:36 PM on Oct-22-09
comment posted at 5:24 PM on Oct-22-09

Back in 2004, the Chicago Tribune published an investigative series about the state of Islam after 9/11.
comment posted at 12:40 PM on Oct-20-09

Photography of Corey Arnold: Human Animals ll Arcticness ll Fish-Work Bering Sea ll Fish-Work Norway
comment posted at 10:05 PM on Oct-18-09
comment posted at 12:47 PM on Oct-20-09

Geert Wilders is now making a splash in London drawing a protest from the hardline Islamic members of the British public. The protests featured such memorable slogans as "Freedom Can Go to Hell" and "Islam will dominate the world" and eventually forced Geers to change the location of his press conference. On the ground interviews conducted by Press TV show the attitude of some of the crowd. British nationalists are naturally responding in kind.
comment posted at 6:39 AM on Oct-18-09
comment posted at 12:43 PM on Oct-20-09
comment posted at 12:46 PM on Oct-20-09

Who are the hottest fighters in mixed martial arts? Ask a straight guy.
comment posted at 7:52 AM on Oct-16-09

Living Colour, the pioneering African-American funk rock band, released a new album last month. Perhaps the band's most poignant moment was at their comeback show in 2001 when they played American Skin (41 Shots) to protest the shooting of Amadou Diallo, a black man shot by the NYPD. In addition, they are responsible for one of the most seriously shredding guitar solos of all time.
comment posted at 3:04 PM on Oct-14-09

Paul Giamatti and Matt Damon star in Resident Hunting: Shoot ’Em Up by the Dozen 2. For decades, Toronto has been a cheap, versatile city in which to shoot movies. Most of the time, Toronto pretends to be some other place – mostly New York. Using DVD screencaps, city blog Torontoist takes a sightseeing tour through over 50 films shot in Toronto that mostly pretend to be set somewhere else, from (yes) Good Will Hunting to the HBO version of Grey Gardens.
comment posted at 12:26 PM on Oct-13-09
comment posted at 12:33 PM on Oct-13-09
comment posted at 12:50 PM on Oct-13-09
comment posted at 1:13 PM on Oct-13-09

Juan Cabral, the commercial maker behind the Sony Bravia bouncing ball ad has completed a new piece: this time, he and collaborators, including Múm, Richard Fearless (of Death In Vegas) and the people behind Sigur Rós' live concerts, transformed the Icelandic town of Sey∂isfjör∂ur into an ambient sound installation, placing speakers throughout the town, playing music (from folk to electronica to ambient orchestral) and filming the reactions of the locals as they went about their lives.
comment posted at 11:03 AM on Oct-12-09

Against Transparency. "How could anyone be against transparency? Its virtues and its utilities seem so crushingly obvious. But I have increasingly come to worry that there is an error at the core of this unquestioned goodness. We are not thinking critically enough about where and when transparency works, and where and when it may lead to confusion, or to worse. And I fear that the inevitable success of this movement--if pursued alone, without any sensitivity to the full complexity of the idea of perfect openness--will inspire not reform, but disgust. The 'naked transparency movement,' as I will call it here, is not going to inspire change. It will simply push any faith in our political system over the cliff." [Via]
comment posted at 11:06 AM on Oct-12-09

VeganMoFo 2009! Started as a riff on NaNoWriMo, Veganmofo challenges food blogs to go vegan for October. Kitteekake is hosting the index. If you've ever been curious about vegan cooking, it's a damn fine place to start. via.
comment posted at 1:05 PM on Oct-2-09
comment posted at 10:29 AM on Oct-7-09

So you think you can tell Arial from Helvetica? Take 20 logos that were originally designed in Helvetica, and redo them in Arial. Some people would call that blasphemy. Instead, call it a challenge: can you tell which is the original and which is the remake?
comment posted at 1:28 PM on Sep-30-09

The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety recently had their 50th anniversary, and to taut the progress of car safety design, they've set a 1959 Chevrolet Bel Air versus a 2009 Chevrolet Malibu, and shared the crash test videos on YouTube.
comment posted at 1:56 PM on Sep-28-09

About 8% of the male population has some sort of color vision deficiency. The color blind are unable to clearly distinguish different colors of the spectrum, they tend to see colors in a limited range of hues. Because of this, the color blind have trouble with a lot of websites. The patterns and examples on We Are Color Blind help developers create websites the color deficient can use with minimal problems. Take a color vision test to see where you stand. 50 facts about color blindness.
comment posted at 2:04 PM on Sep-28-09

Three short films from avant-garde director Shūji Terayama -- The Cage ll Emperor Tomato Ketchup (NSFW) ll Labyrinth Tale + this 6 min. clip from Pastoral: To Die in the Country
comment posted at 9:56 AM on Sep-27-09

A talented Slovenian typographer creates the first handmade subpixel type family, ever.
comment posted at 1:09 PM on Sep-17-09

John Siracusa's review of Snow Leopard is an instant classic, as James Fallows sez: "an impressive piece of technical writing." Altho, "apparently OS X doesn't support huge pages." Apple's example, btw, may have wider industry implications/applications.
comment posted at 2:23 PM on Sep-6-09
comment posted at 2:29 PM on Sep-6-09

Senator Jake Knotts claims that embattled South Carolina governor Mark Sanford is the one spreading rumors that Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer is a closeted homosexual. Now blogactive journalist Mike Rogers (of Outrage fame) adds credibility to the rumors.
comment posted at 10:12 AM on Sep-7-09

Despite a reputation as an effective multi-cultural city, Toronto continues to have difficulties successfully integrating its communities of African heritage. In response to significantly higher than average high school drop-out rates in those communities, some academics suggested the creation of "black-focused public schools" [PDF] as means of re-engaging black youth with education. Needless to say, this caused debate, controversy, and even anger, but the first afro-centric public elementary school will open this month.
comment posted at 2:53 PM on Sep-3-09

email etiquette: ALL CAPS CAN GET YOU FIRED.
comment posted at 6:50 AM on Sep-3-09

⍾ LI'L MUSHROOM GUY
⎌ LEAP-FROGGIN' O's
☣☮ BIOHAZARDOUS HIPPIE WARNING
∰ THREE VIOLINS SHARING HULA HOOP
☃ Unicode table for you: with sliders to help you whiz through all those characters you didn't even know you had. ☃
⫷ All symbols in the table have links underneath them which lead to active Wikipedia Pages. ⫸
[ previously ① ⓑ ☠, via ]
␄
comment posted at 2:23 PM on Aug-31-09