Ken Knabb's Bureau of Public Secrets, a huge online archive of copyright-free Situationist and other radical texts, turns 10 years old today. (pre vio usly)
posted by nasreddin on Aug 22, 2008 - 15 comments

Redefining Avogadro's Number. A mole is the number of molecules in a gram of water: ~6.022 x 10²³. Unfortunately "a gram" is defined by a chunk of metal in a vault in France, the last of the seven SI units still defined by a physical artifact. Since the reference mass (known as "Le Gran K") is actually changing over time (due to cleaning, handling, etc), the definition of a gram is currently temporally unstable. Now a new proposal has been put forward to explicitly define the number to be a known integer: 602,214,141,070,409,084,099,072, which would fundamentally change the way we define a gram. Le Gran K could become a historical curiosity like the original platinum meter stick.
posted by dkg on Mar 2, 2007 - 39 comments

Picking Up Butch at Middlebury (Vt.) College - Rick Reilly pulls on the heart strings with a story about a dedicated sports fan.
posted by ajr on Mar 12, 2003 - 3 comments

"We are male and female. We are artists, athletes, students, and business owners. We have depression, DID, PTSD, eating disorders, borderline personalities, bipolar disorder, or maybe no diagnosis at all. Some of us were abused, some were not. We are straight, bi, and gay. We come from all walks of life and can be any age. We are every single race or religion that you can possibly think of. Our common link is this: We are in pain. We self-injure. And we are not freaks". 29 days until March 1 - National Self-Injury Awareness Day.
posted by nthdegx on Jan 30, 2003 - 42 comments

Even as the fans chanted "Let Them Play" MLB's powers-that-be decided to call the All-Star game after 11 innings. It's only the second time the game has ended in a tie (the other time it was called for rain). Given the game's current environment, could there have been a more symbolic ending to this game? Between the steroid questions, contraction,and the threat of a work stoppage, can baseball fix itself, or is (North) America's national pastime rounding third and heading towards self-inflicted obscurity?
posted by herc on Jul 9, 2002 - 40 comments