After a meteoric rise in popularity in the US as a health drink, Kombucha has been pulled from the shelves of many major retailers over concerns that the drink often contains significant amounts of alcohol due to bottle-fermentation. On the bright side, it isn't too hard to find a mother and brew your own. But fermentation fetishists everywhere are left to wonder: Is Kefir next? More generally, do the trade-offs necessary to conform to commercial food regulations destroy the benefits of fermentation?
posted by kaibutsu on Sep 28, 2010 - 67 comments

Common Rotation is a three-piece folk/indie band out of Los Angeles. They write you a song a day (ish), and they make documentary films. (first link autoplays music) [more inside]
posted by lholladay on Sep 28, 2009 - 3 comments

Cartoon-Off. XKCD's Randall Munroe v. New Yorker's Farley Katz. FIGHT.
posted by spec80 on Oct 16, 2008 - 59 comments

"This is the story of when I re-wrote the Lotus Notes Formula Engine.... So here was I was, offered this position that I clearly wasn't qualified for. I had no experience with language runtimes or compilers, I knew very little about C and didn't know anything about C++, I had never dealt with platform byte ordering and packing and all the other issues associated with writing something for eight different operating systems, I had never even used proper version control. But none of that mattered to me. It seemed to me like an amazing opportunity and I would be doing exactly the kind of stuff I enjoy most..."
posted by grumblebee on Nov 24, 2007 - 64 comments

'Hey, We're Back' is a new podcast by Jonathan Katz, of Dr. Katz. Recommended for those who like low-key humor and Katz's soothing voice.
posted by agropyron on Aug 28, 2007 - 14 comments