134 MetaFilter comments by dand (displaying 1 through 50)



A while ago, Slate did an article on “The Race For The Thousand Pound Bench Press.” That milestone has been reached but not without controversy, mainly due to the use of the bench shirt, a super-tight supportive shirt without which those Herculean weights could not be lifted. The bench shirt has its defenders but many argue that it amounts to nothing more than cheating. By way of example, here is a video of the current unassisted (or “raw”) bench press record and here is a video of the current assisted bench press record.
comment posted at 10:17 PM on Apr-10-08

Modern contract law, which frames and defines our modern economy, is shaped by old and rather mundane disputes. Consider some of the seminal cases: Hadley v. Baxendale (1854); Hamer v. Sidway (1891); Carlill v. Carbolic Smoke Ball Co. (1892); Mills v. Wyman (1825). These cases, while minor in their actual factual footprint, still shape the world of contracts over a century later. (more about the cases inside)
comment posted at 12:38 PM on May-25-06

Cheap oil for the masses. "Officials from Venezuela and Massachusetts have signed a deal providing cheap heating oil to low-income homes in the US state. The fuel will be sold at some 40% below market prices to thousands of homes over the winter months. Local congressman William Delahunt described the deal as "an expression of humanitarianism at its very best". [Newsfilter] Why do you hate America, Hugo?
comment posted at 7:35 PM on Nov-22-05

Why Paris Is Burning Officially, the French state doesn't recognize minorities, only citizens of France, all of them equal under the law. But that republican ideal has seemed especially hollow over the past week as the children of impoverished, largely Muslim immigrants from the Maghreb and sub-Saharan Africa fought running battles with police throughout the banlieues, or suburbs, to the east and north of the French capital...
comment posted at 11:24 AM on Nov-5-05
comment posted at 11:51 AM on Nov-5-05
comment posted at 6:51 PM on Nov-6-05

By a 52-47 vote on S.1932 §401, the US Senate today directed the Department of the Interior to begin selling oil leases within four years in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), with the goal of raising $2.4 billion to lower the deficit and, tangentially, help pay for the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Oil would not be available for another ten years, and according to a 2003 DOE report, opening the Alaska refuge to drilling would only reduce U.S. dependence on imported crude oil in 2025 from 70 percent to 66 percent. The House of Representatives decides next week on whether to keep the drilling measure in the bill.
comment posted at 5:46 AM on Nov-4-05

You park, they pay NYC Port Authority found negligent by having parking under WTC. Jury finds terrorists 32% responsible for exploding van there in 1993. 400 plaintiffs seek $1.8 billion, NYCPA will have to pay 100% of the damages that might be awarded.
comment posted at 10:11 AM on Oct-27-05
comment posted at 10:42 AM on Oct-27-05

RFID+US Passport? By October 2006, the U.S. government will require nearly all of the passports it issues to include a computer chip containing the passport holder's personal information...
comment posted at 9:26 AM on Oct-27-05
comment posted at 1:30 PM on Oct-27-05

Wal-Mart urges Congress to raise minimum wage and "unveiled a series of initiatives designed to present a kinder, gentler face for the world's biggest retailer... exploring ways to use the company's heft and resources to have a more positive impact on society." In its bid to turn over a new leaf, Wal-Mart also announced it's going green and lowering health care costs for its workers. Is this a new sign of rethinking the social responsibility of business where the kind of growth matters as much as the amount? Or is it right to be skeptical of it as a ploy to help open more stores like its critics charge?
comment posted at 9:11 AM on Oct-26-05

No surprise: Warmest September (globally) since record keeping began, according to NOAA, 1.13 degrees above the 1880-2004 long term mean, with land temperatures more than 5 degrees F above normal across large parts of Asia and North America. Ocean temperatures were third highest on record.
comment posted at 11:48 AM on Oct-25-05

It just keeps unravelling ...Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to Mr Powell until last January, said: “What I saw was a cabal between the vice-president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made". I suppose now we have extra proof of the bumbling and fumbling of GWB, but now it's almost overkill.
comment posted at 9:42 PM on Oct-19-05

What would it take to revolt? There has been lots of debate, lots of outrage - both false and real, justified and not, over the various foibles of the current administration and President Bush (too numerous to list here). There has also been talk about revolution, uprising, impeachment, etc, and I wonder - theoretically - just would it take for a modern individual to engage in active revolution? This for me might be it. Fortunately at least one republican representative and perhaps 69% of U.S. households are with me.
comment posted at 6:13 PM on Oct-12-05
comment posted at 12:10 AM on Oct-15-05


This fall, Professor Tom Cruise will favor us with a four-part lecture series on The Modern Science of Mental Health. Personally, I'm looking forward to "Diagnosis and Treatment of So-Called Clinical Depression with the Hubbard Mark Super VII Quantum Electropsychometer", which may well be on its way to becoming the most downloaded video ever, after Triumph and that Star Wars kid. [via]
comment posted at 6:12 PM on Sep-28-05

Losing New Orleans: Four months before it happened, I described for a New York editor, in detail and with stunning accuracy, the tragedy that is now unfolding in New Orleans.
In April, I e-mailed the editor my proposal. Two weeks later, she sent her response. As much as I hate saying this,” she wrote, “the only way for this book to actually work is if New Orleans had already sunk.” I’d like to know what “transportation security” meant to Mr. Hutchinson, if it did not include the concept of evacuating a stricken city, or protecting its great port, or safeguarding the third of our nation’s fuel that enters by way of New Orleans?
If I, a reporter in Little Rock, with nothing more than Internet access, a car and a telephone, could predict, almost hour-by-hour, the horror that Katrina would unleash, what were Hutchinson and his cronies at Homeland Security doing with all the assets at their disposal and nearly $40 billion in funding?
comment posted at 9:50 AM on Sep-8-05

Nagin Knockin Noggins on Blanco Na-Na? "The mayor certainly has ordered [mandatory evacuation of New Orleans] but the governor, and that would be me, would have to enforce it or implement it. We are trying to determine whether there is an absolute justification for that," she told FOX News - Wed Sept 7 2005
comment posted at 6:38 PM on Sep-7-05

Bush Administration tried to Blackmail Louisiana Governor into handing New Orleans over to the Feds. A lot of people are wondering why troops arrived so late, why supplies were delayed, why rescuers were blocked, and why FEMA actively sabotaged the rescue effort. The answer is that the Bush Administration essentially delivered an ultimatum to Lousiana Governor Kathleen Blanco: before they released the emergency supplies, they wanted her to sign the city of New Orleans over to the Federal government. [source: The Washington Post]
comment posted at 7:24 PM on Sep-6-05
comment posted at 7:29 PM on Sep-6-05
comment posted at 7:38 PM on Sep-6-05
comment posted at 8:15 PM on Sep-6-05
comment posted at 9:58 PM on Sep-6-05
comment posted at 10:37 PM on Sep-6-05

Barbara Bush insults Katrina survivors. Said today while visiting relief efforts at the Houston Astrodome: "Almost everyone I've talked to said we're going to move to Houston. What I'm hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas. (Said with concern.) Everybody is so overwhelmed by all the hospitality. And so many of the peoples in the arena here, you know, they're underprivileged anyway, so this--this (she chuckles slightly) is working very well for them." I'd be curious what she'd think after after living there for just a week, much less for months on end, before being sent off to somewhere even further from their homes, friends, and relatives. Please note: This woman raised our president. Did the acorn fall far from the tree?
comment posted at 7:15 AM on Sep-6-05
comment posted at 7:59 AM on Sep-6-05

"The guy who runs this building I'm in, emergency management, he's responsible for everything. His mother was trapped in St. Bernard nursing home and every day she called him and said, "Are you coming, son? Is somebody coming?" And he said, "Yeah, Mama, somebody's coming to get you. Somebody's coming to get you on Tuesday. Somebody's coming to get you on Wednesday. Somebody's coming to get you on Thursday. Somebody's coming to get you on Friday." And she drowned Friday night. She drowned Friday night." Aaron Broussard, president of Jefferson Parish in New Orleans damns FEMA on Tim Russett this morning. (WMV clip)
comment posted at 10:19 AM on Sep-4-05
comment posted at 10:29 AM on Sep-4-05
comment posted at 11:18 AM on Sep-4-05
comment posted at 8:06 AM on Sep-5-05

The real disaster in New Orleans. David Aaronovitch of the London Times observes, "It isn’t the failure to act in New Orleans that is the story here, it’s the sheer, uninsured, uncared for, self-disenfranchised scale of the poverty that lies revealed. It looks like a scene from the Third World because that’s the truth. It’s a quiet disaster that ’s been going on for years." The truth is the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans has a poverty level of 36.4 percent. A quarter of households have an annual income of less than $10,000, while half live on less than $20,000. Over half of the population in the ward is categorized as “not in the labor force,” mainly because they have ceased looking for work. The truth is that even on a normal day, New Orleans is a sad city. "Sure, tourists think New Orleans is fun: you can drink and hop from strip club to strip club all night on Bourbon Street, and gamble all your money away at Harrah’s. But the city’s decline over the past three decades has left it impoverished and lacking the resources to build its economy from within. New Orleans can’t take care of itself even when it is not 80 percent underwater." The National Review is already blaming it - predictably - on the breakdown of the family. Conservatives in America are already dismissing the problem, as they have for years. But to those outside the United States, the scale of poverty in the world's richest country comes as a shock.
comment posted at 9:10 AM on Sep-4-05

You've heard of Greasemonkey (which allows you to remix web pages in firefox), you might also remember the Ruby Programming Language that all of the cool kids are talking about these days. Mix the two together, make it useable through any modern browser (using a proxy), and voila MouseHole!
comment posted at 11:09 AM on Sep-3-05

Kanye West gets twitchy on Red Cross Benefit Oh goodness. The young prankster in me loves this kind of thing. The boring matured realist version of me finds this divisive bumper-stickerism toxic to our modern political dialogue. And worse still I see the following scenario unfold: Kanye West: "George Bush doesn't care about black people". Cut to: My mother-in-law in front of the tv, slowly putting her checkbook back into her purse.
comment posted at 11:26 PM on Sep-2-05

``I don't treat my dog like that,' 47-year-old Daniel Edwards said as he pointed at the [dead] woman in the wheelchair. ``I buried my dog.' He added: ``You can do everything for other countries but you can't do nothing for your own people. You can go overseas with the military but you can't get them down here.' People dying and left in streets waiting for aid at a New Orleans Convention Center.
comment posted at 6:12 PM on Sep-1-05

You knew it was going to happen. God sent Hurricane Katrina to prevent the Labor Day celebration of homosexual sin known as "Southern Decadence". Apparently, he is also is not a big fan of the Girls Gone Wild video series.
comment posted at 6:20 PM on Aug-31-05

Sheehan Reality Nice video taken at the outset of the Sheehan protest -- makes you feel like you were right there before all the pundits and interpreters. See for yourself.
comment posted at 4:14 PM on Aug-17-05

e-Qaeda: A special report on how jihadists use the internet and technology to spread their message. (requires flash)
comment posted at 3:15 PM on Aug-15-05

Ringtones are a growing concern and not just when people don't shut them off. Jamster is a weekly ringtone subscription that advertises to kids on channels like Nick and MTV. Kids are attracted to crazy frogs like a magnet and are using the service without parental permission. Now Britain is launching a new inquiry into Jamster's business practices. And lawyers in California filed a class action lawsuit against the company. But Jamster isn't just some fly-by-night operation trying to milk as much money from kids as they can before regulators crack down. Jamster is owned by VeriSign.

It's also a fair question whether it's worth paying 3 bucks for a few seconds of a song that sounds like a player piano, when it costs less than a buck to get the whole thing on the web (especially now that that crazy frog is a single). Why can't you just pay the 99 cents or whatever to get the song on your phone?
comment posted at 9:55 AM on Jun-30-05

Rep. John Conyers has a petition on his congressional website urging constituents to sign on to a letter to President Bush requesting he answer the questions about the "Downing Street Memo" posed to him by 89 Members of Congress. Going even further, Ralph Nader, and former United States Attorney General Ramsey Clark among others, are calling for impeachment. Recently, Reps. Kucinich & Abercrombie wrote a USA Today Op-Ed calling For US withdrawal from Iraq. Meanwhile, approval ratings for President Bush and the war in Iraq continue to plummet. Does this represent a sea change in public opinion and a coming shift in the political landscape?
comment posted at 10:44 AM on Jun-3-05

How "Real ID" Act will affect you [CNET]
Starting three years from now, if you live or work in the United States, you'll need a federally approved ID card to travel on an airplane, open a bank account, collect Social Security payments, or take advantage of nearly any government service.
comment posted at 1:29 PM on May-6-05
comment posted at 1:54 PM on May-6-05
comment posted at 4:51 PM on May-6-05

Looking hate in the faceWashington Blade blogger Chris Crain describes a vicious beating he suffered while touring the Netherlands, "arguably the 'gay-friendliest' place on the planet. "By almost any measure, the equality movement in the Netherlands was won years ago. There are laws protecting against discrimination based on sexual orientation, there are hate crime laws, and Holland is one of only a handful of countries where gay couples can legally marry."
comment posted at 5:38 PM on May-5-05

Arafat is dead. I cannot help to think that the fact that he had an iron grip on the PLO for so long made this issue so hard to resolve...but maybe after all this time there CAN be a final resolution on the question of the Palestinian state? Will we see massive internal warfare amongst his followers after he gets put in the ground? Interesting times, indeed.
comment posted at 7:09 PM on Nov-11-04

How Bush Did It "A team of Newsweek reporters unveils the untold fears, secret battles and private emotions behind a historic election." An in-depth series of behind-the-scenes articles. [via Salon 's War Room, which also says Bush's bulge was a bulletproof vest.]
comment posted at 6:03 AM on Nov-5-04

Democrats have never learned from the second or third or fifth kick of a mule. Zell Miller sounds off about the elections. (reg. req.: ajc / ajcsucks@mailinator.com / ajc)
comment posted at 8:06 AM on Nov-4-04

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