A Month In Music -
"There are 10,513 MP3s on my hard disk. According to iTunes, that’s nearly 30 days worth of music. It has taken half my life – 15 years – to build this collection but I decided to listen to them all in one go. One continuous concert, playing songs 24 hours a day, seven days a week. I wanted to revist all the songs I'd once loved, and the memories and places they called up. The only choice I made was the first track. After that, the computer randomly decided what was going to play. No stopping. No skipping. No changing the volume. Music, all the time, for a whole month. The Month In Music blog charts the progress of the playback project, updated once a day with original writing and photography."
[via
mefi projects]
posted by radioedit
on Nov 25, 2011 -
70 comments
Where Did All The Adderall Go? A mysterious American adderall shortage has paralyzed the cognition and emptied the pocketbooks of millions of legal tweakers this year. Try to pay attention: it's a fun history of amphetamine, shortages, grotesque corporate greed and the Holy Grail of Big Pharma business models that is the "addiction-proof" addictive drug. [via
mefi projects]
[more inside]
posted by DarlingBri
on Nov 19, 2011 -
183 comments
World War II in Photos "A retrospective of World War II in large-size photo stories. 900 photos in all, over 20 chapters, telling many of the countless millions of stories from the biggest conflict and biggest story of the 20th century."
[via
mefi projects]
[more inside]
posted by bru
on Nov 1, 2011 -
34 comments
Although
Apple's OS X operating system is making inroads with power users, providing Apple style and usability over a FreeBSD-derived UNIX-certified architecture, many find the built-in terminal emulator sadly lacking both UNIX feel and Apple polish. Fortunately, MeFi's own
jewzilla has picked up the ball on the most popular third-party Terminal replacement, iTerm, and rolled out something altogether new and wonderful:
iTerm2. [via
mefi projects]
posted by Mr. Anthropomorphism
on Jul 20, 2011 -
86 comments
In September of 1848, Charles Fontayne and William Porter took a series of 8 panoramic views of Cincinnati by the then still new
daguerreian process, capturing a little more than two miles of the riverfront. In skilled hands, daguerreotype can capture an amazing resolution, so much that modern technology is required to view the full image.
In 2007, the 1848 Cincinnati panorama was restored, utilizing a stereo microscope, finding so much detail that the eight 6 ½ inch by 8 ¼ inch plates could be enlarged up to 170 by 20 feet without losing clarity. In May of this year,
the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County put the daguerreotype plates on display with touch-screen computer displays to see the fine details. But if you can't make it to Cincinnati, the library has
a new website where you can navigate and zoom in for a glimpse of life along the riverfront. [via
mefi projects]
[more inside]
posted by filthy light thief
on Jul 19, 2011 -
29 comments
Stuck on a train for an hour every day and sick of sudoku? Hands love to knit but the brain gets bored? Riding out the recession as a streetcorner sign-twirler? Or maybe you've just got a burning desire for "cultural conversation of the depth you demand." If so, then Metafilter's own
Colin Marshall has got what you need at the
Marketplace of Ideas.
[more inside]
posted by villanelles at dawn
on Jun 30, 2011 -
9 comments
The Big Map Blog – Five-hundred enormous historical maps; all downloadable in their highest resolution. With a new map every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, and 1,700 to go!
[via mefi projects]
posted by carsonb
on Apr 4, 2011 -
43 comments
RetCon Artists: Improving the Future by Improving the Past ... A few days ago, MeFi's Own
waxpancake hosted a special session at SXSWInteractive where he invited
web-
savvy people to make pitches for
The Worst Website Ever II (
it was done once before), with concepts that are bad, worse than bad, so bad they're good, evil, just plain wrong or not even wrong. One of the presenters (
some guy from a
website) came up with "RetCon Artists: Improving the Future by Improving the Past" (
video) (
PDF), providing a Social Solution to a Seinfeldian (or actually Costanzan) Problem. He went on to build
a website that expanded the concept into useful services "whether you're polishing your personal brand or managing a multinational corporate image". Since this is the only one of the ideas that has ended up on the Web since the competition, it is obviously the one that won. Congratulations, Josh.
[via
mefi projects]
posted by oneswellfoop
on Mar 17, 2011 -
20 comments
"Completed in 1954, the 33 11-story buildings of the Pruitt-Igoe housing development was built as an attempt to address the housing crisis the poor faced in St Louis, Missouri. Only twenty years later, at 3pm on the 16th of March, 1972, the buildings were leveled, declared unfit for habitation because of unsafe and unsanitary conditions, coupled with rampant crime. The story of Pruitt-Igoe is a tragic urban fable, a complicated and loaded story of ambition, hubris and failure." (src)
"The Pruitt-Igoe Myth" is a documentary directed by Chad Freidrichs that dives into the complex history of the
famed housing project (YouTube or Vimeo trailer). RustWire has
an interesting interview with the documentary's creator. More information from
Architizer,
Homo Ludens, and
Magical Urbanism. Be sure to check out the collection of pictures from the area and from the documentary in the creators'
Flickr stream.
[via Archinect and Mefi Projects] [more inside]
posted by spiderskull
on Feb 28, 2011 -
29 comments
