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The Urban Sketching Manifesto: 1. We draw on location, indoors or out, capturing what we see from direct observation. 2. Our drawings tell the story of our surroundings, the places we live and where we travel. 3. Our drawings are a record of time and place. 4. We are truthful to the scenes we witness. 5. We use any kind of media and cherish our individual styles. 6. We support each other and draw together. 7. We share our drawings online. 8. We show the world, one drawing at a time.
posted by MoonOrb at 9:44 PM PST - 6 comments

On Tsvetaeva, tragedy and the end of the tsarist era. There's a whole series of these articles about Russian poets told through their last days. A bit morbid, but quite appropriate tributes to the artists, as well as a good starting-point for those interested in Russian poetry.
posted by averysmallcat at 6:51 PM PST - 3 comments

Icthyologist, shark behaviorist, ocean explorer, and passionate conservationist, Dr. Eugenie Clark died on Wednesday from lung cancer. She was 92. [more inside]
posted by MissySedai at 6:46 PM PST - 21 comments

“I’m always surprised to see what I do,” Jean-Luc Godard admits at the beginning of a talk delivered, nearly four decades ago, at Concordia University in Montreal. Could the single most influential filmmaker of his generation, who is still a provocateur at age 84, possibly be as baffled as we? [more inside]
posted by standardasparagus at 3:36 PM PST - 7 comments

Once invited to party with their employers, today's long-haul bus drivers are taken for granted and under threat of extinction as the the music industry continues to slash costs. DAVID PEISN
posted by the man of twists and turns at 2:18 PM PST - 23 comments

Wings of Desire. "[There] stood the imposing figure of Tesla, wearing a crown of two pigeons on his head, his shoulders and arms festooned with a dozen more, their white or pale-blue bodies making strong contrast with his black suit and black hair, even in the dusk. On either of his outstretched hands was another bird, while seemingly hundreds more made a living carpet on the ground in front of him, hopping about and pecking at the bird seed he had been scattering. It was Behrend’s [the scout’s] impulse to rush in, shoo the birds away and, seizing the missing man, rush him back to the auditorium. Something caused him to halt. Such an abrupt action seemed almost sacrilegious. …" [Via]
posted by homunculus at 2:02 PM PST - 12 comments

David O'Reilly (previously), animator and creator of the indie game Mountain, and Kim Laughton, post-internet artist, have started the tumblr blog #HYPERREALCG. It's dedicated to "showcasing the world's most impressive & technical hyper-real 3d art." A number of tech outlets have picked up on the project, apparently (?) taking it at face value: Gizmodo, Huffington Post, Laughing Squid. A fun bit of trolling and perception for your Saturday afternoon.
posted by naju at 2:02 PM PST - 27 comments

HistoricPlacesLA is the first online information and management system specifically created to inventory, map, and help protect the City of Los Angeles' significant historic resources. It showcases the city's diversity of historic resources, including architecturally significant buildings and places of social importance as well as historic districts, bridges, parks, and streetscapes. You can search for specifics or try some popular seaches, and the map view let's you combine different overlays and base maps.
posted by Room 641-A at 2:00 PM PST - 6 comments

History Respawned is a show where historians consider historical video games - like Papers Please, Diablo III, Assassin's Creed Unity and Wolfenstein: The New Order - with host Bob Whitaker, a history PhD and professor from Dallas, Texas.
posted by Foci for Analysis at 12:26 PM PST - 11 comments

Urban tagging is urban right?
There is a difference between graffiti tagging and street art.
Is urban graffiti a force for good or evil?
But what happens when it moves to the country?
Andre Saraiva aka Mr. Andre seems to have overstepped the mark.
Is Mr Andre tagging in Joshua Tree?
posted by adamvasco at 12:03 PM PST - 97 comments

Europe's Solar Power Industry Braces For Solar Eclipse On the morning of March 20, 2015, a solar eclipse will pass over all of Europe, visible from Turkey to Greenland. A decade ago, that probably wouldn't have mattered to anyone except people who love astronomy... But now, 3 percent of Europe's electricity grid comes from solar power... [more inside]
posted by Michele in California at 10:47 AM PST - 53 comments

It's been 20 years since PJ Harvey emerged from a time of isolation and song writing that produced the album To Bring You My Love.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 9:35 AM PST - 22 comments

A Detailed Explanation of The Varieties of Chinese Dumplings plus a recipe for Vegan Steamed Or Pan-Fried Chinese Dumplings.
posted by purplesludge at 9:27 AM PST - 52 comments

Beyond Josh Lyman Politics: How The West Wing Miseducated My Political Generation
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 8:51 AM PST - 63 comments

The most optimistic people often struggle the hardest. They can’t quite square what’s going on in the world with their beliefs, and the disparity is alarming. [slnyt]
posted by ellieBOA at 7:31 AM PST - 40 comments

Lorn has never been one to shy away from the darkness in his music. However, where as his previous release, Ask the Dust (Grooveshark) was bleak and mechanical in it's struggle with its demons, The Maze to Nowhere (Bandcamp) is melodic, fuzzy and at times even warm. If you've listened to Lorn's previous releases, 'warm' is generally not a word associated with his tunes. Whereas his previous effort worked with the bleakness of empty space, we find him filling in those cracks on this album with static, fuzz and ambient effects. The resulting product is a much more organic sounding beast, and man, does it sound great.

From the Sputnik Music review of Lorn's first of ? parts in The Maze to Nowhere series of pay-what-you-want EPs on Bandcamp, which now includes Part 2 and Part 3, still with no end in sight. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 7:19 AM PST - 5 comments

La Vieille Dame et les Pigeons (The Old Woman and the Pigeons) by Sylvain Chomet (SLYT)
posted by overeducated_alligator at 6:54 AM PST - 4 comments

“As deep as my words moved people, if I’d not had him onstage with me I can’t promise you that I would have been strong enough to make it through in the way I did. I wouldn’t have been strong enough to resist the urge to compel people to do something bad, or approve of something violent. But that night, on that stage, a white man, the more privileged in American society, stood in solidarity, silently, stoically, quietly, staunchly, with his friend, as his friend neared physical breakdown because of the pain, and let him know: ‘I’m there.’ That’s a shining example of what I as a man should do for a woman, what I as a straight man should do for gay people, it’s what the tough kid should do to the kid who’s getting bullied around by the fuckass tough kid, you know what I mean?”

In The Guardian, Alexis Petridis interviews Killer Mike and El-P talking about Run the Jewels, their friendship and especially the show they did in Ferguson the night the grand jury declined to indict Darren Wilson for the murder of Michael Brown.
posted by MartinWisse at 4:14 AM PST - 22 comments

The story of The Anarchist Cookbook and William Powell, regretful author.
posted by Artw at 6:42 PM PST - 71 comments

Iconic Photographers Pose With Their Most Famous Photographs. [more inside]
posted by Deoridhe at 5:58 PM PST - 14 comments

Japanese woman comes to America to search for buried treasure- but it's the fictional buried treasure in the movie "Fargo". She's come to North Dakota's "Siberia" to end her own life and the language barrier and our perceptions of Japanese 'normal' get in the way. [more inside]
posted by naight at 5:02 PM PST - 15 comments

Scott Budnick walked away from his position as head of the production company that made the Hangover movies to run a prison-reform advocacy group. Budnick volunteers as a writing teacher at various prisons, focusing on youthful offenders who went behind bars before the age of 18. He also uses his Hollywood connections and natural drive ("I’m ADD to the fullest. I like going and going and going and getting shit done.") to lobby for prison and justice reform, including Proposition 47, which reclassified many petty theft and drug crimes to misdemeanors.
posted by Etrigan at 4:21 PM PST - 18 comments

Building the First Slavery Museum in America - David Amsden, The New York Times

"From their weathered cypress frames, a dusty path, lined with hulking iron kettles that were used by slaves to boil sugar cane, leads to a grassy clearing dominated by a slave jail — an approach designed so that a visitor’s most memorable glimpse of the white shutters and stately columns of the property’s 220-year-old 'Big House' will come through the rusted bars of the squat, rectangular cell. A number of memorials also dot the grounds, including a series of angled granite walls engraved with the names of the 107,000 slaves who spent their lives in Louisiana before 1820. Inspired by Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, the memorial lists the names nonalphabetically to mirror the confusion and chaos that defined a slave’s life."

[more inside]
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 4:05 PM PST - 21 comments

Putin's Russia: Like a gangster running a crime syndicate, Putin muscles opponents and assassinates critics. Nonetheless, his bid in Ukraine may be reactionary to NATO edging closer to Russia's borders. As Dan Carlin notes, it's as if Russia began training Mexican soldiers. Meanwhile, everyone needs a hero.
posted by four panels at 3:46 PM PST - 155 comments

Kathy Sierra talks about the myth of meritocracy in tech and how skater culture broke her heart. You might know Sierra as the unfortunate victim of mega-troll weev, but her concise and touching analysis of her years as a promising skater shows an entirely new side of her.
posted by averysmallcat at 3:38 PM PST - 29 comments

Anyone who writes articles on the web knows the maxim: "Don’t read the comments." Fortunately for Yoni Appelbaum, a recent Ph.D. in history from Brandeis University, the well-known writer Ta-Nehisi Coates routinely ignores that rule.

How a history Ph.D. who was on the tenure-track market ended up in with a pretty good gig in journalism, primarily because of the quality of his comments.
posted by Toekneesan at 2:48 PM PST - 8 comments

A brief history of Toronto's rave scene
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 2:45 PM PST - 15 comments

The 1970's Batman parody Electra Woman and Dyna Girl. is being rebooted (again) with YouTube stars Grace Helbig and Hannah "My Drunk Kitchen" Hart in the title roles. [more inside]
posted by zarq at 2:36 PM PST - 27 comments

A short, interesting article on the palindromists of Bletchley Park. Via Mefi's own.
posted by Tsuga at 2:34 PM PST - 30 comments

When President Obama appointed Tom Wheeler (a former top telecom lobbyist) as chairman of the FCC, he got a lot of grief for selling out his '07 pledge to protect Net Neutrality -- the founding principle long prized by open web activists that ISPs cannot privilege certain data over others, without which dire visions of a tiered and pay-for-play internet loomed. Earlier, weaker attempts at net neutrality had failed in court, and the new chairman looked set to fold. But after an unprecedented outcry following last year's trial balloon for ISP "fast lanes" -- including a viral appeal by John Oliver, a public urging by the president, and perhaps Wheeler's own history with the pre-web NABU Network -- the FCC yesterday voted along party lines to enact the toughest net neutrality rules in history, classifying ISPs as common carriers and clearing the way for municipal broadband. ISPs reacted with (Morse) venom, while congressional Republicans are divided over what they called "Obamacare for the internet."
posted by Rhaomi at 2:28 PM PST - 126 comments

In 2010 Garrick Ohlsson, the first American to win The International Chopin Piano Competition (in 1970), delivered an insightful 80-minute lecture (plus Q&A) at UC Berkeley about what exactly makes Chopin's music so great. Highly recommended for anyone that likes seeing people who are really passionate about something explain their passion.
posted by MattMangels at 1:22 PM PST - 9 comments

"A bottle of nerve manna, a disappearing golf ball and some rocks...it all adds up to the Hardly Boys' toughest case yet. The Hardly Boys have returned to Rangeley Lake for another relaxing summer at the Hardly Inn. Fishing, boating, tennis and their friend Chip Mason await them, but the boys soon find themselves enmeshed in a perplexing mystery that puts to the test their sleuthing skills and secret dog powers..." [more inside]
posted by Iridic at 10:40 AM PST - 6 comments

Dragon Age's Post-Racial (High) Fantasy
posted by Fizz at 10:01 AM PST - 47 comments

How Adam Savage became obsessed with building a scale model of the maze from Kubrick's film The Shining. The Making Of and The Making Of The Making Of (both SLYT). [more inside]
posted by carter at 9:24 AM PST - 45 comments

Poet, author, director, actor, cultural icon... Leonard Nimoy has passed away at age 83 from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Rest well, Spock, you will be missed.
posted by hippybear at 9:22 AM PST - 613 comments

The study, which has been accepted for publication in the journal Applied Animal Behavioral Science, adds to the growing body of evidence that many animals respond favorably to species-specific music. This is music that takes into account a particular animal's favorite sounds, hearing range, commonly used tones and other factors.

Introducing: Music For Cats [more inside]
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 8:13 AM PST - 53 comments

Robert Macfarlane says we are losing the best descriptive words for our landscape. This matters, he says, "because language deficit leads to attention deficit. As we deplete our ability to denote and figure particular aspects of our places, so our competence for understanding and imagining possible relationships with non-human nature is correspondingly depleted. To quote the American farmer and essayist Wendell Berry – a man who in my experience speaks the crash-tested truth – “people exploit what they have merely concluded to be of value, but they defend what they love, and to defend what we love we need a particularising language, for we love what we particularly know.”"
posted by purplesludge at 8:08 AM PST - 23 comments

Imagine you could invest in the stock market last week, with perfect knowledge of how it will move this week. 25 year old Frenchman Max-Hervé George does not need a Delorean, he is the beneficiary of a very unusual 8000 euro life insurance policy that lets him do just that. He could be a billionaire by the end of this decade and, by the end of the next, his contract would be worth more than the insurance company which stands behind it, Aviva France.
posted by Another Fine Product From The Nonsense Factory at 7:56 AM PST - 91 comments

Linda Holmes describes her favorite Survivor moment: Not Just Eating Bugs For Money! A Story Of 'Survivor' And Strategy. "This is a story of watching a couple of people who aren't very likable lose a million dollars, fair and square, because they got outfoxed."
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 7:41 AM PST - 23 comments

A graduate student at MIT has published an analysis of the Mars One colony plans. Turns out that surviving off local crops is a bad idea. [pdf] Mars One is an ambitious and highly publicized plan to start a colony on Mars by launching groups of astronauts on a one-way trip to the red planet. The Mars One foundation claims that all of this is feasible with current technology: Falcon heavy launchers, Dragon capsules, inflatable structures, and life support systems similar to the International Space Station. Sydney Do, a Ph.D candidate in MIT's Strategic Engineering Research Group disagrees. His detailed and impressive analysis of the Mars One architecture reveals a few surprising and counter-intuitive results: the astronauts are better off eating food delivered from Earth, and the need for spare parts to sustain life support system ends up dominating the materials required to keep the colony going.
posted by amy27 at 6:50 AM PST - 54 comments

The Bookseller/Diagram Prize for Oddest Title of the Year (previously on Metafilter) has revealed its 2015 shortlist. [more inside]
posted by Ziggy500 at 3:57 AM PST - 46 comments

NYMag profiles American military deserters in Canada, Germany and the Netherlands.

Desertion is always a solitary choice, but it can be especially so for those who seek refuge in other countries. The deserter in exile is cut off from community, family, and country, knowing there may never be a safe way home. For the alienated troops who fled to Canada in the early years of the Iraq War, the decision seemed to offer solace. The northern border has always welcomed disaffected Americans, from the British Union Loyalists who opposed the Revolutionary War to the draft dodgers and deserters avoiding Vietnam. Between 1965 and 1975, roughly 50,000 U.S. citizens took shelter in Canada, where the Liberal Party of Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau quietly embraced them. In the first three years of the Iraq War, at least 200 new American troops joined them, believing they would find the same open arms. Most of the new deserters chose to live and work in cities like Toronto and Montreal without revealing their military past; only about two dozen stepped forward publicly to request political amnesty as “war resisters.”

posted by frimble at 2:51 AM PST - 15 comments

It’s happened to me several times at a literary event — sometimes one at which I’m reading or speaking — that a kindly, affable chap, after regaling me with a long account of his next book, smiles generously and asks me what I do at Penguin, or how long I’ve been working for the venue. When I say, Oh, actually I’m a writer, a spasm of embarrassment comes over his face. As it should. Not, of course, because of any career’s merit over another’s, but because he’s revealed his inability to see me as a writer. A flustered flash of insight has taken place.

Katherine Angel on the problems of gender representation in literature. [more inside]
posted by MartinWisse at 1:47 AM PST - 113 comments

Eddie Marritz, a cinematographer and photographer in remission from small-cell carcinoma, was a participant in one of NYU's Psilocybin Cancer Anxiety research studies. Marritz, and the researchers, take us through the experience. Magic Mushrooms and the Healing Trip. (7 min) [more inside]
posted by paleyellowwithorange at 12:34 AM PST - 7 comments

"Bien sûr," Delzor said. He had even seen them: affectless men and women with a deathlike pallor, high nasal voices, and the characteristic drooping at the chin – men and women who he knew for a fact had died and been buried. "Ayiti, se repiblik zonbi," Delzor added. Haiti is the republic of zombies.

[more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 11:01 PM PST - 9 comments

The Question is the Question: Dilip D'Souza on the competitive sport of 'Quizzing' in India. "Quizzers branch out like fractals, into the minutiae, looking for questions in the interstices of knowledge.” [more inside]
posted by beijingbrown at 10:46 PM PST - 8 comments

The Only Woolley Rhinoceros Calf Ever Found: Woolley Mammoths of all ages have been found. Adult Woolley Rhinoceros finds are so rare they can be counted on one hand. This is the first baby
posted by Katjusa Roquette at 6:56 PM PST - 26 comments

What color is this dress? is a really strange phenomena currently seen taking over twitter, as people see a blue dress with black lace while others insist it is white with gold. So far, no one can tell why exactly it is happening, other than it is baffling for both sides.
posted by mathowie at 5:06 PM PST - 931 comments

Two llamas enjoy several minutes of lliberty while evading the Keystone Cops Sun City llaw enforcement.
posted by Cold Lurkey at 4:53 PM PST - 50 comments

"Fertile Ground" asks you to place yourself in the shoes of a young woman in South Dakota facing tough decisions in the wake of a one night stand. With a Choose Your Own Adventure format, you have to make the best choices you can. [more inside]
posted by Monochrome at 4:17 PM PST - 23 comments

The music video to the song Los Villanos, by a band called Poolpo, is pretty damn joyous. I like it and I hope you like it too.
posted by rorgy at 4:11 PM PST - 7 comments

Pet Shop Boys - "Go West" video [YouTube] - more about the music video at Wikipedia. [more inside]
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 3:56 PM PST - 58 comments

from NYMag: When the notorious cancer doctor Gil Lederman cadged an autograph from a dying George Harrison, the world was appalled. But as Lederman scrambles to salvage his reputation, the very nature of his experimental practice has come under attack.
posted by steinwald at 3:04 PM PST - 6 comments

"Wladimir (Put Put Putin)" is the surprise winner of this year's Protestsongcontest. [more inside]
posted by Omnomnom at 2:48 PM PST - 10 comments

Now, never ask me about Wes Anderson again. Please. [more inside]
posted by DynamiteToast at 1:59 PM PST - 37 comments

A radical plan for transplanting a head onto someone else’s body is set to be announced. But is such ethically sensitive surgery even feasible? (SLNewScientist)
posted by adept256 at 12:52 PM PST - 117 comments

"We don't want them to see diversity as a burden or a moral obligation. We want them to see it as a business imperative."

UCLA’s Bunche Center for African American Studies has released its 2015 Hollywood Diversity Report: Flipping The Script [PDF]. The Hollywood Reporter has the exclusive story (with lots of sidebars.)
posted by Room 641-A at 12:47 PM PST - 3 comments

Oh No, She Didn’t: The Strong Female Character, Deconstructed by Ilana C. Myer
posted by Fizz at 9:55 AM PST - 85 comments

The Holy Junk Heap: In 1896, a cache of manuscripts -- mostly fragments -- was discovered in the storeroom ("genizah") at the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Old Cairo. The collection outlines a 1,000-year continuum (870 CE to the 19th century) of Jewish Middle-Eastern and North African history and comprises the largest and most diverse collection of medieval manuscripts in the world, including Jewish religious texts such as Biblical, Talmudic and later Rabbinic works (some in the original hands of the authors), "letters, wills, bills of lading, prayers, marriage contracts and writs of divorce, Bibles, money orders, court depositions, business inventories, leases, magic charms and receipts" which give a detailed picture of the economic and cultural life of the North African and Eastern Mediterranean regions, especially during the 10th to 13th centuries. [more inside]
posted by zarq at 9:19 AM PST - 16 comments

How Your Pretentious Local Record Store Asshole Got That Way
posted by alby at 8:30 AM PST - 155 comments

"I tilted my head in cartoon-like confusion. Where had he picked that up? Bruce Lee? He knew nothing of martial arts nor had he ever watched Kung Fu Panda (this is where my brain went). So I asked Noah to repeat himself. Perhaps I’d misunderstood or heard it incorrectly."
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 8:18 AM PST - 35 comments

As she and Plummer munched their respective fractions of peanut-butter bar, they recalled A Royal Christmas. “We played every awful hockey rink all the way from Canada to Florida,” Andrews said. “We had huge buses we could sleep in. It was with the London Philharmonic and the Westminster Choir and the Somebody Bell Ringers and the Something Ballet. And Chris and me doing our bit. It turned out to be great fun under awful circumstances, didn’t it?” “The bus was the most fun,” he said. “We had our own bar, so we couldn’t wait to get there.”

If you have not yet read this Vanity Fair article about Julie Andrews, Christopher Plummer, their lifelong cranky friendship, and the 50th anniversary of The Sound of Music, doing so will probably make your day at least 50% better.
posted by Stacey at 5:29 AM PST - 32 comments

Football fans – and here I naturally include myself – act as if they are mentally ill. This is an article that is nominally about football, but is just as much about the pressures of modern life and the plight of men (in particular, but not exclusively). This is both a very personal account and an observation of how others behave. It is about being a football fan, but also the impact of social media on our appreciation of life (and sport), and how constantly striving for more can lead to increased unhappiness – even if you attain it.
posted by modernnomad at 5:19 AM PST - 31 comments

A little girl started feeding the crows accidentally, decided to make it a habit, and now receives gifts in return. Apparently, this is a crow thing.
posted by purplesludge at 4:35 AM PST - 116 comments

Today we bid a sad farewell to the last of the old-school Mississippi Hill Country bluesmen: Mr. Robert Belfour was a purveyor or that gritty, driving, riff-based, often one-chord Hill Country style pioneered by people like Mississippi Fred McDowell, and in more recent years popularized by artists like RL Burnside, Junior Kimbrough and Jessie Mae Hemphill. Let's take a listen, then, as we pay our respects to the "Wolfman", to some of his rocking, soulful blues. Here's Black Mattie, I Got My Eyes On You, Hill Stomp, Go Ahead On, My Baby's Gone, Done Got Old and You Got Me Crying. And here's an hour-long recording from February 2013, via NPR: Robert Belfour: Live In Concert.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 10:59 PM PST - 13 comments

Masha Tupitsyn interviewed by Keaton Ventura for Sex Magazine:

What sort of trouble? Mainly the reaction was, what is this? What are you doing? This isn’t a novel. This isn’t fiction. This isn’t straight criticism. It’s all mixed up. Or this criticism is too personal or too critical about the wrong things. But the minute I would call Beauty Talk nonfiction people would accept the terms that I using. So it was always about how I was categorizing that book. What I was calling it. That would determine how people would respond to the book and its ethos, which I always thought was absurd. If I called it nonfiction, if I called it essays, if I called it criticism, people accepted the book more. But if I said it was fiction, people would say, Well, this is not what fiction does. Fiction does this and criticism does this, and you have to keep these things separate and clear. But I am really not interested in keeping things separate. Not in my work and not in my life either. I’m interested in looking at them and putting them together because I think one of the problems with Western culture in general is that everything is reduced to binaries and categories because it keeps us from fundamentally being able to make valuable links. To connect the dots.

[more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 10:57 PM PST - 2 comments

Dang! Have you ever seen waves get so cold they turn to slurpee? Get seawater cool enough, but not too cold; keep it agitated, and you get some beautiful waves.
posted by peripatetron errant at 7:51 PM PST - 38 comments

There's an odd bright spot on the dwarf planet Ceres. Scratch that, there's actually two bright spots on the its surface. Cue speculation as the Dawn spacecraft prepares to orbit Ceres.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 7:47 PM PST - 51 comments

This Is Not Happening is a series where comedians tell true stories. It was orginally greenlit by Comedy Central back in 2013 as web series. [more inside]
posted by joeyjoejoejr at 7:37 PM PST - 5 comments

The DevOps League is your fast track to DevOps certification by the industry's leading Thought Lords. Supported by one man – one stunning man – you will deep dive into such important concepts such as Dark Data, Data Beans and Terry the Data Goblin, to fully learn what DevOps really means. (But beware of the Realm of Dark Jon Hendren or 2014's Worst DevOps Article Headers.)
posted by slogger at 7:31 PM PST - 37 comments

The Rocky J. Adkins Public Library in Elliott County, Kentucky recently posted a job advertisement for a new director. The wage? US$7.25 per hour -- in other words, minimum wage. This garnered some immediate expressions of dismmay from librarians on social media. For others, it also reminded them of where they grew up. [more inside]
posted by metaquarry at 6:49 PM PST - 74 comments

Old Game Mags is a Tumblr that looks at the way game culture was disseminated before the widespread acceptance of the net: through specialty, hobbyist print magazines. It features snapshots from the past such as the obligatory fan art pages, covers, dev interviews, reviews, advertisements, and special features. The site has fairly regular updates, and features high quality scans.
posted by codacorolla at 5:56 PM PST - 10 comments

The day Chris Kyle died - an account of the fateful gun range encounter between the subject of the film "American Sniper" and fellow veteran Eddie Ray Routh. Routh has received a life sentence for killing Kyle and freind Chad Littlefield, with a jury finding his claims of PTSD to be "an excuse".
posted by Artw at 5:42 PM PST - 33 comments

When the Bauhaus art school opened in 1919, more women applied than men.
One woman who attended in 1927 was Amercan born Florence Henri who in the 1920's had moved to Paris.
However it wan't until she returned from a course at the Bauhaus, where she lived in the same house as Moholy-Nagy and became a close friend of his first wife Lucia Moholy and also where she met her lifetime companion Margarete Schall; that she took up photography.
She met Man Ray, Germaine Krull and the photographer André Kertész, developlng a very personal work, by using mirrors and prisms.
Her style oscillates between Bauhaus, Dadaism and Surrealism.
Photos NSFW Still lifes, and Nudes and Portraits.
posted by adamvasco at 5:41 PM PST - 3 comments

Carrot Top is known as a Comedian. That is a statement of fact. [more inside]
posted by Jessica Savitch's Coke Spoon at 5:06 PM PST - 72 comments

Gerbils, not rats, 'gave Europe the Black Death' BLACK rats might not be responsible for the plagues that killed millions of people across medieval Europe, research suggests. Instead scientists believe that repeated outbreaks of the Black Death may in fact be traced to gerbils arriving from Asia. [more inside]
posted by Michele in California at 4:28 PM PST - 21 comments

One mom's take on the Ages & Stages Questionnaire.
posted by Ruki at 4:27 PM PST - 23 comments

Digital technology has enhanced music production, recording and distribution in ways unimaginable just a few decades ago, but are we losing something more essential in the process? Chris May (of The Vinyl Factory) talks to ambient pioneer and friend of technology Brian Eno about the dangers of digital dependence in modern music. “It doesn’t just apply with African recordings. It’s a problem everybody is having at the moment. Do I resist the temptation to perfect this thing? What do I lose by perfecting it?"
posted by misterbee at 2:40 PM PST - 49 comments

How we saved Baltimore $600,000 in one day.
posted by josher71 at 1:29 PM PST - 77 comments

​How Parks and Recreation Took Aim at Silicon Valley​ (Laura Hudson at Wired): ​

"​Over the course of the season, Leslie remarks on how the character of the town has morphed since the arrival of Gryzzl, with juice bars, yoga studios, and pet hotels popping up across Pawnee. “Everything has changed. This town is going to be unrecognizable in 10 years,” she says wistfully. One episo​​de revolves entirely around trying to save their perennial waffle hangout J.J.’s Diner; thanks to the surging housing market, the property has been bought out by a perfume magnate who plans to flip it for profit.

​"​If that sounds reminiscent of the housing crisis that’s currently plaguing San Francisco—and displacing large numbers of long-time residents—it should. Rental prices in the tech hub city are currently in the highest the nation, with the median price of a one-bedroom apartment hovering at more than $3,400 a month. Meanwhile, local establishments like the Lexington Club (the J.J.’s Diner of lesbian bars) are getting ​​sold to new owners."

[more inside]
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 12:46 PM PST - 37 comments

and yet it has somehow become the stand-alone representative of the form it is on the whole sardonically setting itself against: something about the way it’s been made — its constituent parts, its presentation — exactly and completely masks this subtly hostile aspect of it, to the extent that it’s instead become a kind of nice-to-hear-in-the-background chill-out classic, which in my opinion suggests a flaw in its conception or execution: that it can’t (or anyway doesn’t) draw the newbie into its darker heart

KIND OF BLEUGH, or seven better stand-alone ways into jazz in the early age of the long-playing disc (possibly).
posted by MartinWisse at 11:52 AM PST - 104 comments

Put animated ASCII art in your browser's address bar
posted by Going To Maine at 11:49 AM PST - 21 comments

The rise and fall of Sports Phone, the place to get live sports scores before the internet.
posted by Chrysostom at 11:02 AM PST - 14 comments

Who is the most important rapper right now? A Grantland Survey.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 10:35 AM PST - 80 comments

My Saga, Part 1 By Karl Ove Knausgaard [New York Times] Following the trail of the first Europeans to set foot in America, the first of two parts. Previously. Previously. [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 9:19 AM PST - 29 comments

A grown-ass man replays Final Fantasy VII. The unfortunate part about replaying Final Fantasy VII is realizing that it is terrible. I mean, not terrible terrible, but it’s bad the way, say, a very old sci-fi movie is bad. It is enjoyable exclusively with mountains of qualifiers, with context and air-quotes and, preferably, your own reminiscences filling it in, making its absurdities lovable.
posted by tybeet at 9:08 AM PST - 193 comments

How to Save Us (trailer) is a low-budget horror film made by Jason Trost, creator of the cult hit The FP (previously). Jason Trost is a young filmmaker who continually puts out unique, sometimes satirical, but always creative films across all genres, pulling them together despite shoestring budgets derived mostly from crowdfunding that he manages himself. Jason Trost's films often draw negative reviews mostly centered around their lack of budget, however they are unique and odd enough that he has accumulated his fair share of loyal fans and supporters.
posted by Librarypt at 8:59 AM PST - 9 comments

Do you like radios? And museums? Then you need the radiomuseum.org gazatteer of museums and historical places around the world where you can look at radios and associated technologies!
posted by carter at 8:57 AM PST - 8 comments

After every terror attack the call rings out for the Muslim world to become modern. Whenever jihadi groups carry out an atrocity, or – as is happening a lot these days, western foreign policy failures lead to large areas of the world coming under the sway of oafs who claim to be acting for God – the call goes up for a Muslim Enlightenment. The imputation of Védrine, the French schoolteachers, and thousands of other commentators is that various internal deficiencies have excluded Islam from this indispensable cultural and intellectual event, without which no culture can be considered modern. Such views cut across political borders; they would find sympathy at the BBC as well as in the editorial offices of the Sun. Islam needs to get with the programme. [more inside]
posted by standardasparagus at 8:38 AM PST - 70 comments

The private photo shoot that sparked a war within Van Halen. A session with photographer Helmut Newton exposed tensions within the band, revealing and exacerbating the rift between David Lee Roth and the Van Halen brothers. The article does not explore whether Sammy Hagar, sitting in a distant supervillain lair, tented his fingers and smiled in satisfaction as his sinister plan bore fruit.
posted by the phlegmatic king at 8:35 AM PST - 41 comments

It's 2015, so first-person-view quadcopter racing is a sport now. [more inside]
posted by theodolite at 8:29 AM PST - 22 comments

For years, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended avoiding feeding peanut products to very young children to minimize the risks of developing a severe peanut allergy. Turns out that might not have been good advice. A study recently published in the New England Journal of Medicine suggests early exposure to peanuts is a better strategy. And while you're at it, don't worry about sanitizing everything in the dishwasher; hand-washing dishes is also associated with fewer allergies.
posted by Metroid Baby at 6:55 AM PST - 125 comments

The Urban Institute has released (PDF) the first study to focus on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer or questioning (LGBTQ) youth; young men who have sex with men (YMSM); and young women who have sex with women (YWSW) who get involved in the commercial sex market in order to meet basic survival needs, such as food or shelter.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 6:49 AM PST - 7 comments

You are a good man, and a good father, but all this good cannot continue to make up for the race we cannot touch. I am so tired of slipping into black and out of daughter whenever race is evoked. I need for you to meet me as your daughter, as your daughter of color, all at once. We cannot keep evacuating our bodies to love each other. We cannot simply ignore the way our bodies are policed and politicized as antithetical, irreconcilably raced when we stand side by side.

"An Open Letter to the White Fathers of Black Daughters, from Kelsey Henry in Bluestockings Magazine.
posted by Stacey at 5:22 AM PST - 67 comments

A Few Silent Men. The courtroom scene from A Few Good Men, but without dialogue.
posted by (Arsenio) Hall and (Warren) Oates at 4:40 AM PST - 16 comments

It’s 2015—when we feel sick, fear disease, or have questions about our health, we turn first to the internet. According to the Pew Internet Project, 72 percent of US internet users look up health-related information online. But an astonishing number of the pages we visit to learn about private health concerns—confidentially, we assume—are tracking our queries, sending the sensitive data to third party corporations, even shipping the information directly to the same brokers who monitor our credit scores.
posted by chavenet at 2:28 AM PST - 57 comments

‘Gresham College has provided free public talks within the City of London for over 400 years.’ ‘Since 2001, the college has been recording its lectures and releasing them online in what is now an archive of over 1,000’ of them. Some examples: Snails in Art and the Art of Snails; The History of the Bowler Hat; “Speaking Scars” - The Tattoo; Mother Green Tree Frog and her Children: How Folktales Contributed to the Confucianisation of Korea; The Psychology of Doing Nothing; Möbius and his Band; Harmony in the Lowest Home: The Guitar and the Labouring Poor. [more inside]
posted by misteraitch at 2:27 AM PST - 3 comments

When your father is the BTK serial killer, forgiveness is not tidy
posted by Sticherbeast at 2:20 AM PST - 38 comments

PES Film makes amazing stop-motion film shorts in which everyday objects take on unexpected utility.
Western Spaghetti (YT 1½m) - Fresh Guacamole (YT 1½m, Oscar-nominated "Best Short Film" 2013) - Game Over (YT 1½m) - The Deep (YT 1½m) - Submarine Sandwich (YT 2m previously) - Fireworks (YT 32s) - Moth (YT 20s)
These may be slightly NSFW depending on workplace: Roof Sex (YT 1m) - Black Gold (YT 1m) - Pee-Nut (YT 1m)
A few bits made for advertisements after the break. [more inside]
posted by JHarris at 12:59 AM PST - 8 comments

Andy Rehfeldt (previously) is at it again -- here's his latest, the death metal version of "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious". It works the other way, too... for example, the Radio Disney version of Slayer's "Angel of Death". Andy specializes in these types of musical reboots.
posted by not_on_display at 11:19 PM PST - 16 comments

Essentially two-hand-touch taken to bloodsport level, with two 25-minute halves, a mostly running clock, and referees to nominally control the mayhem, it's the closest these weekend warriors will come to professional sport, though many are high-caliber athletes.
posted by MoonOrb at 10:49 PM PST - 7 comments

John Richard Boyd was a U.S. Air Force F-86 and F-100 pilot. Indeed, at the elite Fighter Weapons School he was arguably the best pilot and instructor in the world during his tenure. Boyd could make jet fighters do “impossible” things and simultaneously out-think adversaries. As a result Boyd gained the moniker “40 Second Boyd” because he quickly defeated all challengers in simulated aerial combat.

from a review of “Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War” by Robert Coram. [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 10:38 PM PST - 28 comments

"Bracket bolts the book open to the page 'LIFE, WITHOUT BIRTH AND WITHOUT END, EMITTING LIGHT!'"

A collection of tampered-with books for sale.
posted by glass origami robot at 7:46 PM PST - 11 comments

In the years since the financial crisis, central banks across the world have struggled to stimulate adequate aggregate demand. Most mainstream economists agree that this is due to inherent impotence of monetary policy at the zero lower bound, although some, including some central banks, now say that the effective lower bound, though finite, is below zero. The Swiss and Danish central banks are currently testing that idea. [more inside]
posted by PMdixon at 7:22 PM PST - 31 comments

According to a British linguist's research on Twitter users in the U.S. (direct link to 55-page PDF), what do young Southern black women and young Northern and Western white men have in common? They're "lexical innovators" whose slang creation skills are on fleek. [more inside]
posted by fuse theorem at 6:57 PM PST - 71 comments

A statement posted to the Russian space agency’s website said a meeting of the Roscosmos science and technical council considered Russia’s future human spaceflight plans, favoring the continued use of the International Space Station until 2024.

Then Russia plans to remove its modules from the International Space Station to form an all-Russian complex in orbit.
posted by Artw at 5:15 PM PST - 53 comments

Lead Paint. It's been noted here before, but here's a new lead->crime connection, based on barn color:
Red (Iron oxide) good.
White (Lead) bad.
Here's where and when. And the year-old gasoline-soaked earlier Mother Jones citation [more inside]
posted by hexatron at 4:18 PM PST - 32 comments

"In recent months, a number of writers and photographers have begun to utilize Instagram beyond its common use as an application that enables the creation, stylizing, and sharing of personal photographs to a particular group of friends and acquaintances, and rather as a journalistic tool. In particular, writers like Jeff Sharlet (#Nightshift // A Resourceful Woman ) and photographers like Neil Shea have paired their photos with short narratives, constrained to 2200 characters by Instagram’s caption limit. The effect is similar to that of “Flash Fiction”—short, impactful self-contained stories—except that these stories are true and paired with a photograph of the subject." [more inside]
posted by zarq at 4:08 PM PST - 9 comments

Men in miniskirts take stand for women's rights in Turkey Turkish men have taken a stand with a simple, unconventional approach to combatting violence against women— miniskirts. (TW: Sexual assault and murder) [more inside]
posted by Michele in California at 2:30 PM PST - 10 comments

Harry Warren and Al Dubin wrote it for the smooth harmonies of the Mills Brothers in the 1935 film Broadway Gondolier. Fats Waller popularized it with more spark and swing soon after, and Art Tatum performed a blistering yet tuneful version that same year. Young heartthrob Frank Sinatra crooned it in 1945, and 11 years later Mel Tormé crooned it some more. Thelonious Monk had a humorous take on it in 1964, while 1968 saw two wildly different versions from Oscar Peterson and an actual Lulu. Need more? Here's The Four Freshmen, Leon Redbone, and Ellis and Branford Marsalis. TV loves Lulu too! Sanford and Song on Sanford and Son, and Circe on the Justice League (voiced by Broadway singer Rachel York). But here's what happens when Lulu's back on Sesame Street. (With introduction by Mr. Hooper, Bob, Susan, Matt Robinson's Gordon, and a very orange Oscar.)
posted by Orange Dinosaur Slide at 1:11 PM PST - 4 comments

meet the unlikely Airbnb hosts of Japan
posted by and they trembled before her fury at 12:33 PM PST - 57 comments

How Madden Ratings Are Made (SL538)
posted by box at 12:01 PM PST - 11 comments

"Foregrounding the back of Martin Luther King’s head, Selma’s poster is an act of protest in itself. But as a recent book on black movie poster art shows, many past poster designs have obscured, caricatured or edited out black actors altogether." Isabel Stevens writes on black movie poster art at the British Film Institute (BFI).
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 11:14 AM PST - 9 comments

Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta: The document we're publishing is interesting in that, in the early stages of the Ukrainian political crisis — that is, before Yanukovych's escape from Kyiv and the "Bandera junta" coming to power — it perscribes detailed, step-by-step justifications, as well as political and PR logistics, for the intervention by Russia in Ukrainian affairs and the tearing of Crimea and the eastern regions from Ukraine. [Google translated] Although the actual course of the Ukrainian drama made some adjustments, there is overall a strikingly high degree of coincidence between this project and the subsequent actions of the Russian authorities. [more inside]
posted by Kabanos at 11:07 AM PST - 68 comments

The Chicago Police Department has been since "the late 1990s" operating a secret, off-the-books black site at Homan Square where prisoners can be disappeared to to be interrogated and tortured. [more inside]
posted by Pope Guilty at 10:42 AM PST - 129 comments

Edward Snowden, Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald recently did an AMA on Citizenfour, their Oscar winning documentary about Snowden and the NSA scandal. Among the highlights is Snowden discussing the relationship between people and their governments and how enforcing the law too well actually can have severe drawbacks.
posted by Drinky Die at 10:40 AM PST - 24 comments

The secret life of superhero toys. [more inside]
posted by sparklemotion at 10:30 AM PST - 4 comments

The secret life of a public library security guard.
posted by Chrysostom at 10:10 AM PST - 21 comments

Why Are People Still Surprised That Aquaman Is A Badass?
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 9:42 AM PST - 64 comments

POWER/RANGERS (NSFW), a short "de-boot FAN FILM" from director Joseph Kahn. Featuring Katee Sackhoff as Kimberly/Pink Ranger and James Van Der Beek as Rocky. [more inside]
posted by zombieflanders at 8:04 AM PST - 40 comments

A new genre has emerged, the mock jihadi video. This involves short clips with ISIS-ish sound tracks layered on for shocking and/or comic effect. [more inside]
posted by doctornemo at 6:57 AM PST - 34 comments

Today is the 46th anniversary of the Supreme Court decision in Tinker vs. Des Moines. Two high school students refused to remove the black arm bands that they wore to school on December 11, 1965 as a form of silent protest and in mourning of those lost in the Vietnam War. The Supreme Court agreed with their right to express their political opinions, stating "Students don't shed their constitutional rights at the school house gates." This was also the decision that stated that expression of an idea need not be verbal or written in order to be covered under the umbrella of free speech. [more inside]
posted by batbat at 6:56 AM PST - 19 comments

"We need to deal with the fact that our kids are starting to go through puberty much younger than they used to," said Sandals, Education Minister. [more inside]
posted by Kitteh at 6:08 AM PST - 70 comments

Another way of looking at this is that all Premier League clubs already receive more money from their domestic league TV deal than all but 5 other European Clubs: Real Madrid, Barcelona, Juventus, Inter and Milan. When the new Premier League deals starts in 2016/17, this list will reduce to just Real Madrid and Barcelona – and even that is in doubt following La Liga’s decision to move to collective bargaining, where the top club will only be allowed to receive 4 times more than the lowest club.

The Swiss Ramble analyses the Premier League's new domestic television rights deal.
posted by MartinWisse at 3:58 AM PST - 56 comments

"Nothing better defines Kim than how little we actually know about him. When asked, even the most respected outside experts on North Korea in the United States and in South Korea—not to mention inside the White House—invariably provide details that turn out to be traceable to Dennis Rodman or to a Japanese sushi chef named Kenji Fujimoto, who was employed by the ruling family from 1988 to 2001, and who now peddles trivial details about them (such as how Kim II once sent him to Beijing to pick up some food at McDonald’s)."
posted by MoonOrb at 10:40 PM PST - 39 comments

Racing the Mongol Derby

The ponies that carried Genghis Khan’s warriors are small, tough, and skittish as hell, making the prospect of riding them for 1,000 kilometers seem downright insane. American cowboy Will Grant couldn’t resist, so he entered the Mongol Derby—the longest, hardest horse race in the world—determined not just to finish but to win.

[more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 10:09 PM PST - 11 comments

Kashmir + The Ocean performed by 50-plus percussive pre-teens. Straight outa Louisville. Note the seriousness of purpose.
posted by philip-random at 10:00 PM PST - 38 comments

How crazy am I to think I actually know where that Malaysia Airlines plane is? *Kinda crazy. (But also maybe right?)

In the year since the vanishing of MH370, I appeared on CNN more than 50 times, watched my spouse’s eyes glaze over at dinner, and fell in with a group of borderline-obsessive amateur aviation sleuths. A million theories bloomed, including my own.

[more inside]
posted by Golden Eternity at 9:17 PM PST - 92 comments

Leisuretown (probably NSFW) (previouslies), the webcomic created by Tristan A. Farnon (aka Spigot of Jerkcity), includes several 'flipbooks' that have been broken and unviewable on the site for some time. Working direct links to these lost stories have been discovered, including one that was slightly losterer than the others. (link to dickmissles's tumblr is also NSFW, due to large amounts of Jerkcity comics and fanart)
posted by BiggerJ at 8:03 PM PST - 16 comments

At the bottom of the ocean, several kilometres down, is the abyssal seafloor. The pressure is crushing, the temperature is two to three degrees Celsius. The darkness is absolute: no light means no nutrients, and thus almost no life. Except when a whale falls.
posted by latkes at 7:13 PM PST - 17 comments

"There are many like me. We don't believe in a monolithic practice of Islam. We love Islam, and because we love it so much we refuse to reduce it to an inflexible and fossilized way of life. Yet we still don't fit anywhere."
posted by Ragini at 7:02 PM PST - 62 comments

Flood Live in Australia. They Might Be Giants has released a live cover of their album, Flood. Songs are recorded in reverse order because, you know, Australia.
posted by CrunchyFrog at 6:56 PM PST - 16 comments

Just a ticklish hedgehog. [slyt]
posted by Going To Maine at 6:52 PM PST - 8 comments

The Comic's Comic site provides a list of comedians who died in 2014, along with some photos and video links. Some you likely know, like Robin Williams and Joan Rivers. Some perhaps not, like the great John Pinette. And some goddamn tragedies, like Jan Hooks.
posted by anothermug at 5:18 PM PST - 21 comments

Perhaps the easiest way to sum up Jupiter Ascending is to describe it as a gender-swapped, space opera retelling of The Matrix...
posted by prefpara at 4:07 PM PST - 91 comments

Emailing Breitbart is a retort by journalist Martin Grüner Larsen to Breitbart's Jordan Schachtel calling the Muslim-initiated Ring of Peace a media hoax . After the horrific shootings in Copenhagen and Paris, young muslims in Oslo wanted to show their solidarity with the Jewish community, saying that if anyone wanted to hurt the Jews they would have to go through the Muslims. [more inside]
posted by magnusbe at 3:59 PM PST - 56 comments

Octopi have proven themselves to be intelligent creatures time and time again. However, one Australian octopus made his or her cephalopod brothers and sisters proud by taking a traditionally water-based activity (hunting) and applying a unique twist.
posted by Fister Roboto at 1:27 PM PST - 38 comments

The Story Behind the Most Famous Picture from World War II A story told with lots of photos and a little writing.
posted by Michele in California at 1:19 PM PST - 29 comments

Using DNA to Build a Face, and a Case by Andrew Pollack [New York Times]

The growing capability to determine physical characteristics from genetics can help the police, but it also raises questions of rights and profiling.

posted by Fizz at 12:47 PM PST - 12 comments

40 maps that explain the internet
posted by infini at 11:45 AM PST - 10 comments

love and marriage in myanmar: celebrating same-sex relationships in a nation that deems them illegal [more inside]
posted by and they trembled before her fury at 11:29 AM PST - 2 comments

Last night at the Oscars, Patricia Arquette, after making an impassioned statement about wage equity for women during her speech, said, backstage, "The truth is: even though we sort of feel like we have equal rights in America, right under the surface, there are huge issues that are applied that really do affect women," she mused. "And it's time for all the women in America and all the men that love women, and all the gay people, and all the people of color that we've all fought for to fight for us now." [more inside]
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 11:22 AM PST - 218 comments

Photographer Andrew B. Myers makes photographs that don't look like photographs so much as like clean-edged graphic design illustrations. Much of his work combines vibrant colors, flat, non-gradated lighting with crisp shadows, and a long-lens isometric composition to create tableaux that resemble old-school screensavers or wallpaper prints.
posted by cortex at 10:18 AM PST - 7 comments

Feminist writers are so besieged by online abuse that some have begun to retire, an opinion piece by Michelle Goldberg at The Washington Post. Geek Feminism Wiki has a page on mitigating internet trollstorms, snippet: "This document intends to provide actionable guidance for people who are being attacked or who are concerned about being attacked in the future, and includes both information security, physical security, and self-care advice drawn from the experiences of the Geek Feminism community."
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 9:19 AM PST - 41 comments

Two and Half Men hit a new low every season and then continued to sink even further underground. During this last season, the show went off the rails in terms of absurdity and offensiveness. After a death scare, Walden decides that he wants to adopt a child and, since he’d have more luck if he were married, he and Alan decide to wed and adopt the child together. What follows are a plethora of obvious jokes, mostly at Alan’s expense — no one is surprised that he married a man; they all assumed he was gay already — as he girlishly demands a fancy wedding, fawns over his new husband, and brags about Walden’s attractiveness to everyone he can. Isn’t that funny, these two straight men playing gay for a roaring laugh track? It’s as low as the show can go but then, again, it goes lower. (SL Grantland)
posted by josher71 at 8:51 AM PST - 90 comments

The Nest thermostat, as described by usability expert Kara Pernice: "When I turned the dial to increase the heat to 66 degrees, rather than responding by making the house warmer . . . the next day the house temperature plummeted to a punishing 50 degrees. So I pull on another sweater and mittens and a hat. Indoors. And I wait until my thermostat decides that I am worthy of radiant warmth." [more inside]
posted by mark7570 at 8:43 AM PST - 120 comments

Mother Falcon is an orchestral rock act with a flexible crew of a dozen-plus multi-instrumentalists. Mother Falcon got its name when its founder misheard a sanitized version of Bruce Willis' famous battle cry from Die Hard. Mother Falcon plays tiny desks at NPR, SXSW, and is getting some prominent press for its photography as well. Their lush, bouyant sound, alternately serene (Marfa, Sanctuary) and feisty (Marigold, Dirty Summer) might justify the kind of hubris they must have needed to reimagine Radiohead. [more inside]
posted by cross_impact at 7:44 AM PST - 12 comments

Monster Pamphlets. Monsters for all your tabletop RPG needs. [slTumblr]
posted by prize bull octorok at 7:39 AM PST - 6 comments

Authenticity, anti-vaxxers, and the rise of neoprimitivism
posted by Faint of Butt at 7:11 AM PST - 164 comments

How impressionism was saved from obscurity [slGuardian]
posted by ellieBOA at 4:24 AM PST - 11 comments

I wanted to do the same for people of colour. I feel as if my decision brought home just how white my reading world was. For whatever the reason and context, it took me until I was 30 years old to learn that Octavia E. Butler existed – how embarrassing! I’m not blaming anyone or anything for this travesty, and we all know late is better than never … but I think we can do better. I shouldn’t have needed to undertake a 12-month project to discover world class authors.

In 2014 Sunili Govinnage set herself the challenge to read only authors of colour for a year.
posted by MartinWisse at 1:17 AM PST - 17 comments

Twee, then, is a symptom of profound cultural exhaustion, a pop-cultural response to the death of grand narratives and radical politics: too weary to fight the corporate capitalist machine, the twee instead create hyper-stylized alternative worlds in which kittens play, ukuleles sound and childhood is eternal. Their basic disposition is melancholy rather than angry, and they will always opt for owl-print wallpaper over kicking against the pricks.

In this week's TLS, Anna Katharina Schaffner discusses Twee. [more inside]
posted by Sonny Jim at 1:12 AM PST - 94 comments

Mother Jones reports on Bill O'Reilly's claimed experience in combat zones, reaching conclusions like one of his claims "is at odds with news reports from the time—including the report from his own bureau." O'Reilly responded, and Mother Jones factchecked his monologue. Meanwhile, a veteran CBS News reporter weighed in, backing the work by Mother Jones.
posted by MoonOrb at 10:08 PM PST - 66 comments

Strange Days
Southland Tales
Her
Kiss Me Deadly
Brother
The Crimson Kimono
and more

posted by the man of twists and turns at 10:08 PM PST - 16 comments

William Frank Carver was a renowned shooter in the wild west, generally called Doc Carver for his (unused) dentistry training (or possibly his time caring for animals when he was younger [Google books preview]). He went on to put on shooting and wild west exhibitions with Buffalo Bill and others (source). To expand his shows, he turned to other feats of showmanship, including horse diving. Eventually, horse diving eclipsed the rest of the shows, and Doc added his son and daughter to the events. His son Al built the ramp and diving apparatus, while his daughter Lorena was the first “girl on the diving horse.” Going forward, most of the notable divers were young ladies, including Sonora Webster, who joined the show in 1923. She went blind from a diving accident in 1931, but continued to dive until 1942. There's not much video of diving horses due to the whole practice losing general support and/or appeal well before the proliferation of personal video cameras, but here is a short clip of 19 year old "Jackie" Carvan diving 60 feet on a horse from 1923, and two horses diving without riders in the mid-1960s. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 8:09 PM PST - 16 comments

Dark Leviathan: The Silk Road might have started as a libertarian experiment, but it was doomed to end as a fiefdom run by pirate kings
posted by Sticherbeast at 7:15 PM PST - 42 comments

The real you Your conscious self evaluation is often different from your underlying implicit reactions in this Psych' study at Harvard that tries to reveal ones prejudices and preconceived biases. [more inside]
posted by naight at 5:55 PM PST - 15 comments

(NSFW) For three decades, Brassai's piercing eye focused on the urban landscape of the City of Light; famously Paris by Night.
One of his subject interests was Graffiti - The language of the wall.
He formed a great friendship with Picasso; An extract from Conversations with Picasso who himself admitted to the occasional graffiti.
Here is an interview from 1970 (Pt II never seemed to make the light of day) and a 1999 pdf article from the Smithsonian.
Letters to my Parents was collected and published posthumously.
And finally many pages.
posted by adamvasco at 5:38 PM PST - 3 comments

In terms of sheer devastation, Syria today is worse off than Germany at the end of World War II. [more inside]
posted by standardasparagus at 5:02 PM PST - 23 comments

The Oscars 2015: What They Tell Us. Watch out for these 5 types of upsets. It's National Margarita Day, why not drink along to the show with a George Clooney margarita?
posted by Artw at 1:55 PM PST - 319 comments

Retro Terminal for Linux Old school terminals for people with enough sense to love CLIs, but not enough to use sane modern terminals. (And one other cool proggie.) [more inside]
posted by Samizdata at 1:51 PM PST - 64 comments

"My Eating Disorder Had Nothing to Do with Barbie or the Media" [more inside]
posted by John Cohen at 9:12 AM PST - 47 comments

How to Make Handmade Candy (SLYT)
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 8:59 AM PST - 18 comments

Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice Screenplay [.pdf] Warner Bros. has made the For Your Consideration draft of the full screenplay available for download via: indiewire.com.
posted by Fizz at 7:44 AM PST - 44 comments

...we appreciate that it could have been made clearer that the article is not describing a new tool for visualization of data but rather a simpler application of an existing one... Make sure to read the comments and correction.
posted by PMdixon at 6:01 AM PST - 43 comments

In 1963 novelist Doris Lessing took in a fifteen year old former schoolmate of her son she had never met who couldn't live at home anymore. This teenage girl later grew up to be a writer herself, Jenny Diski (formerly of this parish), and has written a couple of essays in the London Review of Books about her relationship with Lessing. The first, What to Call Her?, was an obituary published shortly after Lessing's death. The second, Doris and Me, is a part of Diski's longer reckoning with her own life following her diagnosis with terminal cancer. [The last essay has been linked previously as part of a megapost.]
posted by Kattullus at 1:58 AM PST - 19 comments

Johan Grimonprez is a Belgian multimedia artist, filmmaker, and curator. He is most known for two 'not-quite documentary' films which use experimental forms to explore the relationship between media, politics, history, identity, and manipulation in the second half of the twentieth century: 1997's dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y , which traces the history of skyjacking throughout the 20th century using montages, and Double Take, which explores the Cold War through the lens of real and imagined versions of Alfred Hitchcock and Folger's instant coffee commercials. Both are available online. [more inside]
posted by MCMikeNamara at 12:20 AM PST - 3 comments

“In this area you should go just behind me,” the stout man says, the th of his this buzzing like a bee. Then, as if to reassure me, he adds, “I’ve been here before, with other colleagues and journalists, and no one died.” I’ve traveled here, to the former Iron Curtain, still studded with the occasional land mine, in pursuit of a love story. It’s an improbable tale about two boys, a friendship, and a passion for birds. Twenty-five years earlier, in 1989, the man in front of me had hatched a plan to transform the former no-man’s land that separated Western Europe from the Eastern Bloc into an eco-corridor running through the heart of Europe. It was a preposterous idea. The Iron Curtain had been just that—a series of steel-reinforced barriers. Electrified fences, razor wire, land mines, trip lines, and machine guns: If it could stop, maim, or kill you, the Soviets put it there. Not exactly “eco.”

posted by the man of twists and turns at 8:54 PM PST - 6 comments

The Last of the Typewriter Men: “Years ago, if you looked at the yellow pages, there were six pages of typewriter companies in Manhattan. Now, there’s us.” [more inside]
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 7:58 PM PST - 25 comments

"​These vintage GE appliances are original to my house circa 1956. The house was never occupied and appliances were never used. ​ The manuals were still taped to the appliances.​.." (Flickr) Welcome to the New Frontier - as defined by mid-century American suburbs.​ via​
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 7:56 PM PST - 54 comments

Follow The Leader is a new webcomic by Jonas McCluggage about cannibal children making a living in a rundown city park. Jonas' previous work is the slice of life comic entitled "The Adventures of Jonas" and has been released in dead tree form.
posted by ulteriormodem at 5:01 PM PST - 10 comments

For years, politicians wanting to block legislation on climate change have bolstered their arguments by pointing to the work of a handful of scientists who claim that greenhouse gases pose little risk to humanity. [more inside]
posted by standardasparagus at 4:55 PM PST - 39 comments

Why was Mexican food so pervasive in Pynchon’s work? (via the Paris Review)
posted by glass origami robot at 4:54 PM PST - 21 comments

Cooking with Christopher Walken Spoiler: They roast a chicken.
posted by boo_radley at 3:49 PM PST - 29 comments

This is a piece of magical music VooDoo by Ry Cooder and VM Bhatt. [more inside]
posted by bobdow at 2:41 PM PST - 12 comments

"The world exists. Why recreate it?" Adelle Waldman explains why.
posted by shivohum at 2:15 PM PST - 28 comments

Smith confronts Neo like this - his intent is hostile, and yet it's also friendly in the same way. He acknowledges how he himself has been changed by Neo's defeat of him in the previous film - "I'm a new man," he says. The way the two rivals look at one another and shrug is not unlike two trans people who knew one another before transition meeting one another, either; it's clear that Smith has been "queered" in some way, as the other agents act creeped out by him in an explicitly homophobic way.

Looking at The Matrix series through a trans lens.
posted by MartinWisse at 11:25 AM PST - 45 comments

Samantha Cristoforetti is an European Space Agency astronaut, Italian Air Force pilot and engineer and polyglot, fluent in Italian, English, German, French and Russian. She is also the first Italian woman in space and cheerfully tweeting and taking photos from the International Space Station.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 9:45 AM PST - 13 comments

In 1988, two college students filmed themselves sneaking into the Oscars. It landed them a spot with Johnny Carson.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 9:18 AM PST - 23 comments

There's been a small, but influential, hysteria surrounding the idea is that a huge wave of automation, technology and skills have lead to a massive structural change in the economy since 2010. The implicit argument here is that robots and machines have both made traditional demand-side policies irrelevant or naïve, and been a major driver of wage stagnation and inequality. Though not the most pernicious story that gained prominence as the recovery remained sluggish in 2010 to 2011, it gained an important foothold among elite discussion. That is over.

David Autor and Larry Summers tear apart the idea that a Machine Age is responsible for our economic plight.
posted by ennui.bz at 9:15 AM PST - 41 comments

Stockholm-based design firm Söderhavet has designed a typeface for Sweden that it thinks sums up the country's own design heritage. The resulting typeface is a practical serif/sans hybrid that is inspired by Sweden's tradition of minimalist design, and the principal of lagom—not too much, but not too little.
posted by polywomp at 9:02 AM PST - 55 comments

Flula with his Mama & Papa (on the accordion) - "Mama Said Knock You Out", and Flula with Sir Mix-A-Lot - "Baby Got Back (remix)", more autotunes (playlist).
posted by filthy light thief at 7:20 AM PST - 11 comments

Ten years ago today, two teenagers found a boy and his sky bison in an iceberg, and Avatar: The Last Airbender began. Set in a world where people can control one of the four elements - fire, air, water, and earth, the Avatar is the one being who can control them all, reincarnated life after life to bring balance and harmony to the world.

The creation of Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko, The Last Airbender drew upon fully fleshed-out characters, stirring music, and Japanese-inspired animation to convey the serialized story of Avatar Aang, siblings Katara and Sokka of the Southern Water Tribe, Toph Beifong, and the rest of Team Avatar as they faced off against the Fire Nation and the evil Fire Lord Ozai. And, in the process, changed our world as much as theirs. [more inside]
posted by Atreides at 6:47 AM PST - 52 comments

SLYT: Jerusalem singer Victoria Hanna's music video - Aleph-bet (Hosha'ana) [more inside]
posted by rosswald at 6:46 AM PST - 4 comments

After receiving over 2,300 complaints from UK television viewers regarding Booking.com's "Booking dot Yeah!" ad campaign, the UK's Advertising Standards Authority investigated and ruled that it was not, in fact, profane. [more inside]
posted by LEGO Damashii at 2:08 AM PST - 55 comments

February 21st is the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Malcolm X. This might be a good time to review this African-American civil rights activist’s life and discuss his legacy.
posted by Sir Rinse at 1:34 AM PST - 47 comments

Super Smash Bros: Now with realistic, disturbing handclap sounds (SLYT)
posted by Strange Interlude at 10:42 PM PST - 25 comments

Meet the most important legal scholar you’ve likely never heard of: Ruth Bader Ginsburg is this Supreme Court's liberal hero, but her work sits on the shoulders of Dr. Pauli Murray [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 8:52 PM PST - 7 comments

HOT NEW TRENDS FOR 2015 [via mefi projects]
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 7:50 PM PST - 33 comments

Dr. Dre's Secret (Sequined) History; or, that show in 1983 that widened Dr. Dre's horizons.
posted by goatdog at 7:45 PM PST - 11 comments

The Time Everyone “Corrected” the World’s Smartest Woman
posted by brundlefly at 6:05 PM PST - 292 comments

The most anticipated boxing match of the decade - rumored to involve a quarter-of-a-billion dollar deal - is finally set to happen, after a number of false starts. If you pay any attention to boxing, you already know who these two fighters are. But what if you don't? Perhaps a review of their nicknames is in order. [more inside]
posted by clawsoon at 5:06 PM PST - 50 comments

Danny Cooke’s Postcards from Pripyat, Chernobyl summons a lost history of familiar and alien dreams. The drone-mounted camera glides deliberately through the spaces within and above the empty city. The soundtrack is haunting, or “haunting.” We think of drones moving relentlessly forward: into the hidden terrain of surveillance, into the kill zone, into the future. Yet many of the shots point the lens in reverse, effectively pulling back to show first a figure and only then its surroundings. A diving platform with paint peeled away, then the empty pool. A circular emblem, large and sculptural, then the great apartment block on whose roof it sits, visible for miles. Not all shots follow this rule, and not all are taken by drone, but this is the general approach of Danny Cooke’s Postcards From Pripyat, Chernobyl, a three-minute video from last year. It’s quite beautiful. [more inside]
posted by standardasparagus at 4:27 PM PST - 9 comments

Every Breaking Wave [13m17s] is a short film set in 1980s Belfast during The Troubles. Directed by Aoife McArdle [Vimeo], using music by U2, as part of Vice's The Creators Project.
posted by hippybear at 3:59 PM PST - 9 comments

I Know This! is a game about movie-hacking. (via) [more inside]
posted by curious nu at 3:33 PM PST - 8 comments

‘Why Not Us Women?’ “Men fight,” she told Brown. “Why not us women? I love our country. You have to love your country to sleep outside, live under the sun and rains, cross rivers and forests when you know that many people don’t care — they’re enjoying their lives while you’re on the front lines.”
posted by Michele in California at 2:56 PM PST - 8 comments

Tomatan: a wearable robot that feeds you tomatoes as you run.
posted by GuyZero at 2:45 PM PST - 53 comments

Dan Laidler, ex of indie art rockers Tiger, ponders the drive and effect of the human pursuit of glamour.
posted by freya_lamb at 2:38 PM PST - 2 comments

Robot tweets "I seriously want to kill people", prompts police response. Who is responsible when a bot randomly tweets something that alarms the authorities?
posted by ubiquity at 1:49 PM PST - 55 comments

Pearl and The Beard are awesome Blending folk, gospel, pop, and Americana, eclectic Brooklyn-based trio Pearl & the Beard formed in the late 2000s around multi-instrumentalists Jeremy Styles, Jocelyn Mackenzie, and Emily Hope Price. Employing an arsenal that includes glockenspiel, guitar, cello, accordion, melodica, and pitch-perfect three-part harmonies, the band's skillful and soulful brand of acoustic art pop has drawn comparisons to artists like Andrew Bird, Beirut, Bonnie "Prince" Billy, and the Low Anthem.
posted by bobdow at 1:40 PM PST - 15 comments

Vincent Price is theologically significant. Price wore a devilish goatee that made him look like Satan. How do we know that’s what Satan looks like? We learned it from Vincent Price — and from a thousand other pop-culture and folk-culture figures preceding him. Price carries a pitchfork — a red one, of course. That tells the audience that he’s the devil. What does a pitchfork have to do with the devil? Simple: It’s what we always see him carrying in movies. The pitchfork simultaneously references those folk traditions and reinforces them for future audiences.

But these pop-culture portrayals also reference and reinforce our “theology” of the devil. Sure, most Christians realize that the pitchfork and goatee don’t come from the Bible. But the devilish stuff that most Christians think does come from the Bible cannot be found there either. [Fred Clark, The Slacktivist]

[more inside]
posted by Atom Eyes at 11:24 AM PST - 96 comments

Half a century ago, a Selkirk historian received, then forgot about, and only now remembered, a 1904 charity pamphlet that may contain a lost Sherlock Holmes story by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The anonymous story entitled "Sherlock Holmes: Discovering the Border Burghs and, by deduction, the Brig Bazaar" revolves around Holmes deducing Watson's upcoming visit to Selkirk, which coincides with Conan Doyle's real-life one as a guest of honour to help the Border town raise funds to build a new bridge. But if it's not by him, then who wrote it?
posted by Doktor Zed at 11:22 AM PST - 15 comments

The King of Kombucha
posted by box at 11:21 AM PST - 34 comments

Like most media workers, Matthew Lazin-Ryder, a Vancouver-based producer with CBC Radio, spends a fair amount of time on Twitter. When he tweets, his messages are seen by some percentage of his 3,470 followers. They retweet, favorite, write pithy replies. And then, a week later, his tweets disappear.
posted by Chrysostom at 10:53 AM PST - 15 comments

Random House announced today that a never-before-published Dr. Seuss book titled What Pet Should I Get? will appear on bookshelves this July. The book, a spinoff of Seuss’s One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish, centers on two young children attempting to choose a pet. Seuss’s widow, Audrey Geisel, discovered the manuscript in 2013. RH said that two or more books derived from the found work will be released, as well, with publication information to follow.
posted by Fizz at 10:20 AM PST - 46 comments

Football/Soccerfilter. Jose Mourinho is a football manager. But he is more. He is The Special One. A few years ago a short documentary came out about him. Bonus: Mourinho on Mario Balotelli.
posted by josher71 at 9:34 AM PST - 33 comments

The Great SIM Heist
American and British spies hacked into the internal computer network of the largest manufacturer of SIM cards in the world, stealing encryption keys.
In all, Gemalto produces some 2 billion SIM cards a year.
posted by adamvasco at 9:17 AM PST - 79 comments

As of 5 am last Friday morning, Sun News went off the air. Unable to find a buyer, the controversial news network is no more. Ratings were falling, Ezra Levant kept doing stupid things, and briefly, the network gave a show to the Ford brothers (but it didn't work out).
posted by Kitteh at 8:33 AM PST - 55 comments

The spikes installed outside Selfridges in Manchester are the latest front in the spread of ‘defensive architecture’. Is such open hostility towards the destitute making all our lives uglier?
posted by ellieBOA at 8:29 AM PST - 46 comments

In 2010 Alan Prendergast wrote a long article about the life of novelist John Williams and how he was beginning, at long last, to find a sizable audience. How true that turned out to be, as Williams' 1965 novel Stoner subsequently became a bestseller all over Europe, first in French translation, but later elsewhere in Europe, and it has begun to get glowing notices in his native US. Williams is not around to enjoy the success, as he passed away in 1994. Now another of his novels, Augustus, has also begun its rise from obscurity. The New York Review of Books republished it last year on the occasion of the 2000th anniversary of the first Roman Emperor's death. On the NYRB website you can read Daniel Mendelsohn's fine introduction to the book.
posted by Kattullus at 8:03 AM PST - 15 comments

The End of Black Respectability Politics (SL TPM)
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 7:59 AM PST - 27 comments

How will strengthened Title IX enforcement at colleges handle the "hard cases"? Janet Halley, Professor at the Harvard School of law, relates some interesting anecdotes as potentially recurring situations to which there is no straightforward solution. There is the "young man who was subjected by administrators at his small liberal arts university in Oregon to a month-long investigation into all his campus relationships, seeking information about his possible sexual misconduct in them (an immense invasion of his and his friends’ privacy), and who was ordered to stay away from a fellow student (cutting him off from his housing, his campus job, and educational opportunity) — all because he reminded her of the man who had raped her months before and thousands of miles away. He was found to be completely innocent of any sexual misconduct and was informed of the basis of the complaint against him only by accident and off-hand. But the stay-away order remained in place, and was so broadly drawn up that he was at constant risk of violating it and coming under discipline for that."
posted by anewnadir at 6:37 AM PST - 134 comments

Watch People Code is a site where you can watch livestreams, as well as browse an archive, of people programming in real time. [more inside]
posted by frimble at 12:36 AM PST - 26 comments

Long time Parks and Recreation writer and recurring character, inventor of the Humblebrag, curator of the goofiest segment on Comedy Bang Bang, and very sexy drummer for the joke band Don't Stop Or We'll Die, Mr. Harris Wittels passed away today suddenly. He will be missed. (Many links extraordinarily NSFW) [more inside]
posted by Potomac Avenue at 9:28 PM PST - 73 comments

The betting market in Las Vegas isn’t much different from Wall Street. Fed by rumor, speculation and greed, teams, like investments, can grow hot or cold for no good reason. Moving lines is remarkably similar to market bubbles. Walters insists that “[b]etting on a ball game is identical to betting on Wall Street.” Walters even claims that he has lost a lot of money in the markets and thinks the Wall Street “hustle” is far more dangerous than that in Las Vegas. It should be no surprise then that many Wall Streeters have gambling histories, most prominently Ed Thorp. For more information, read Scott Patterson’s excellent book, The Quants. I even know a few.

Gaming The System by Robert P. Seawright [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 8:49 PM PST - 13 comments

"It's not just that feminist ideas may be more accessible when packaged in a clever Internet meme. It's also that, for decades, opponents of the movement have painted feminists as unattractive, humorless, man-hating, lesbian militants. And we tend to find our feminist messengers more persuasive when they challenge these stereotypes." Can Feminist Ryan Gosling Really Make Men More Feminist? [more inside]
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 7:49 PM PST - 42 comments

Mashable's 'The Watercooler' YouTube channel teamed up with Sesame Street to bring us two marvelously Muppety short videos in two days.
First, Cookie Monster visits New York's museums and has deep thoughts about food (via Reddit's r/showerthoughts).
Then, in a scene very reminiscent of a certain Oscar-nominated movie, Muppeteer Caroll Spinney deals with his most famous alter ego in "Big Birdman"
posted by oneswellfoop at 7:31 PM PST - 18 comments

A Chicago detective who led one of the most shocking acts of torture ever conducted at Guantánamo Bay was responsible for implementing a disturbingly similar, years-long regime of brutality to elicit murder confessions from minority Americans. Part one. Part two. This is not the first time the Chicago police have been accused of torture.
posted by AceRock at 6:26 PM PST - 36 comments

Cable TV is speeding up its shows slightly to show you more ads. The Wall Street Journal has more including a side-by-side comparison video a sharp eyed viewer made of a "Seinfeld" episode.
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 5:04 PM PST - 85 comments

His homes would give feudal-age rulers property envy. There’s the 28-bedroom, 32-bath, 12,500-square-foot French-inspired home in Brentwood that has an actual moat around it. The 30,000-square-foot European manor in Beverly Park. The 40,000-square-foot home with a 8,500-square-foot guest house in Beverly Hills.

Nearly becoming a teacher, he turned to California and became King of the Megamansion.
posted by four panels at 4:16 PM PST - 63 comments

Bridge: the greatest card game. [more inside]
posted by The Ted at 4:15 PM PST - 63 comments

It could have been the greatest television show ever. Conceived by Harlan Ellison. Ben Bova acting as technical advisor. Special effects genius Douglas Trumbull was on board. Scripts and storylines had been contracted from Phillip K. Dick, Ursula K. Le Guin, Frank Herbert, Joanna Russ, Thomas M. Disch, Alexei Panshin and A.E. van Vogt. Keir Dullea starred. (Dave from 2001: A Space Odyssey). Guest stars: John "Baltar" Colicos (Battlestar Galactica), Walter Koenig (Star Trek) and Barry Morse (Space:1999). And then it all fell apart. In all, 16 deliciously terrible episodes of The Starlost were made. Was it the worst science fiction series ever? Watch and decide for yourself! [more inside]
posted by zarq at 2:03 PM PST - 119 comments

What pushes scientists to lie? The disturbing but familiar story of Haruko Obokata. The spectacular fall of the Japanese scientist who claimed to have triggered stem cell abilities in regular body cells is not uncommon in the scientific community. The culprit: carelessness and hubris in the drive to make a historic discovery.
posted by daisyk at 2:01 PM PST - 20 comments

East Texas town fights attempts to commemorate the 1910 Slocum Massacre. Fort Worth writer E.R. Bills' book on the Slocum Massacre adds momentum to the decades-long push by survivors to have it acknowledged and memorialized. [more inside]
posted by emjaybee at 1:58 PM PST - 31 comments

"You need to know who Billy Wilder was. You need to know the names of people who are no longer alive. Because it’s very important—it’s what our history is made of. You need to see the movies the way they were—with the racism, the violence, and the censorship. All the things that let you see what the movie past had been so you understand where we are! But really nobody’s interested in that right now. Their interests are so bifurcated." - An interview with Joe Dante (Part 1, Part 2)
posted by brundlefly at 1:54 PM PST - 16 comments

Have you ever wanted your own teeming swarm of vermin? Do you enjoy compulsively clicking on buttons and watching numbers go up? Then Swarm Simulator is the game for you!
posted by escape from the potato planet at 1:29 PM PST - 19 comments

"The new dawn lights the eastern sky; Night shades are lifted from the sea": British and French ships entered the Dardanelles and opened their attack on Turkish forces, one hundred years ago today. This bold naval assault, planned by Winston Churchill, will falter, leading to the brutal Gallipoli campaign, an Allied defeat and Turkish triumph. [more inside]
posted by doctornemo at 1:29 PM PST - 19 comments

Is it the Year of the Sheep, the Goat, or the Ram? February 19 marks the Chinese New Year (and simultaneously Lunar New Year holidays in Vietnam, Tibet, Mongolia and Korea). As many people know, there is a 12-year animal zodiac cycle in the traditional Chinese calendar: the Year of the Horse has just ended. But what exactly is the animal sign for the year that is just now beginning? [more inside]
posted by andrewesque at 12:56 PM PST - 44 comments

Alan Sepinwall sits down with Parks & Recreation creator Mike Schur to walk through the origins of all the tiny details of Pawnee, IN. Part 1, Part 2. (Obviously, here there be spoilers.)
posted by Navelgazer at 12:27 PM PST - 51 comments

The Sneeze column, Steve, Don't Eat It! Although most of this material was written in the early 2000's, I'm surprised when I talk about it and people look at me like I'm crazy. The Sneeze was an ambitious and funny blog full of insights about life, parenting, humor and also had solid reporting on gross food items that are still available in grocery stores. Steve ate weird and gross stuff so we don't have to.
posted by bobdow at 12:26 PM PST - 44 comments

The 10 worst misconceptions about medieval life that you would get from fantasy books debunks a number of fantasy-novel myths, inspired by this terrific Reddit thread where historians discuss high fantasy novel tropes [prev]. Some of the greatest misconceptions were around combat in the Middle Ages, which apparently included exotic weapons - like the scorpion bombs used in ancient warfare. [pdf] Also see the Medieval People of Color site to see some other dimensions of Middle Ages diversity that are often missing from fantasy novels. And, of course, a tip of the hat to the venerable and hilarious Tough Guide to Fantasyland.
posted by blahblahblah at 12:04 PM PST - 97 comments

Climb into hell. For you are a Brother Coleman and Hell Is Your Business.™ [SLCH]
posted by Librarypt at 11:40 AM PST - 3 comments

The Ghost in the MP3 [warning, flashing imagery] — "moDernisT" was created by salvaging the sounds and images lost to compression via the MP3 and MP4 codecs. The audio is comprised of lost mp3 compression material from the song "Tom's Diner" famously used as one of the main controls in the listening tests to develop the MP3 encoding algorithm. Here we find the form of the song intact, but the details are just remnants of the original. The video is the MP4 ghost of a corresponding video created in collaboration with Takahiro Suzuki. Thus, both audio and video are the "ghosts" of their respective compression codecs.
posted by tonycpsu at 11:28 AM PST - 23 comments

Several years ago (2011?) Stephen Fry sat down for an internet interview with the members of Big Think. The result was an eloquent off-the-cuff laying-out of Fry's background and outlook on life, full of gems of insight and advice. You can watch highlights of the interview by scrolling down here, or you can watch the full hour-long shebang via YouTube.
posted by hippybear at 11:20 AM PST - 26 comments

We could, as a country, look at the root causes of homelessness and try to fix them. One of the main causes is that a lot of people can't afford a place to live. They don't have enough money to pay rent, even for the cheapest dives available. Prices are rising, inventory is extremely tight, and the upshot is, as a new report by the Urban Institute finds, that there's only 29 affordable units available for every 100 extremely low-income households. So we could create more jobs, redistribute the wealth, improve education, socialize health carebasically redesign our political and economic systems to make sure everybody can afford a roof over their heads.

Instead of this, we do one of two things: We stick our heads in the sand or try to find bandages for the symptoms. This story is about how Utah has found a third way.

Scott Carrier reports for Mother Jones on Utah's simple, cost-effective approach to ending homelessness: "finding and building apartments where homeless people can live, permanently, with no strings attached. It's a program, or more accurately a philosophy, called Housing First." [more inside]
posted by divined by radio at 10:59 AM PST - 114 comments

The new music video by Sleater-Kinney features the Belcher children dancing to 'A New Wave'.
posted by dinty_moore at 10:44 AM PST - 38 comments

What's It Like To Live Without Electricity? Ask An Indian Villager One study has found that India’s indoor pollution contributes to disabilities and early death to a greater degree than tobacco, high blood pressure and heart attacks. “It disproportionately impacts those who are indoors a lot, which is women and children” [more inside]
posted by Michele in California at 10:44 AM PST - 7 comments

A very silly trapeze. (SLYT)
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 10:23 AM PST - 8 comments

MB(ecket)TA: Samuel Beckett quotes on photos of Boston's snow. Frankly, a little too real right now.
posted by showbiz_liz at 9:21 AM PST - 75 comments

Bizarre martian plumes discovered by amateur astronomers -- I favor H.G. Wells' explanation: "Why the shots ceased after the tenth no one on earth has attempted to explain. It may be the gases of the firing caused the Martians inconvenience. Dense clouds of smoke or dust, visible through a powerful telescope on earth as little grey, fluctuating patches, spread through the clearness of the planet's atmosphere and obscured its more familiar features." [more inside]
posted by 0rison at 9:19 AM PST - 28 comments

Jim O’Rourke Live in Tokyo in June of 2014 [Part 1] [Part 2] Jim O’Rourke Plays “Women of the World” (Live on Christmas Day, 2013). Jim O’Rourke at Work on the Grizzly Man Soundtrack; Special Appearance by Werner Herzog. [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 9:04 AM PST - 7 comments

Can amateur journalism bring justice to Rio’s favelas?
From last year: Digital Inclusion and the Ninja of News
Media Ninja ; and here in it´s native Portuguese is a decentralized communication network that produces and disseminates content based on collaborative work and online sharing and is supported by Oximity.
(Oximity Mission Statement) and Previously.
posted by adamvasco at 9:04 AM PST - 1 comment

When you watch the Putin Show, you live in a superpower. You are a rebel in Ukraine bravely leveling the once-state-of-the-art Donetsk airport with Russian-supplied weaponry. You are a Russian-speaking grandmother standing by her destroyed home in Luhansk shouting at the fascist Nazis, much as her mother probably did when the Germans invaded more than 70 years ago. You are a priest sprinkling blessings on a photogenic convoy of Russian humanitarian aid headed for the front line. To suffer and to survive: This must be the meaning of being Russian. It was in the past and will be forever.

Gary Shteyngart watches a week of Russian television.
posted by theodolite at 8:23 AM PST - 26 comments

So what is wrong with listening to the drumbeat, to the endless calls to protect ourselves against the coming plague – against Ebola from Africa and bird flu from Asia? Is it possible that a huge pandemic could erupt from some as-yet unknown pathogen? Is apocalypse lurking out there, among rats or monkeys, or bats or flying squirrels or birds? The Black Death shows that you can never say never: there might be an animal pathogen out there that, under the right circumstances, can evolve and maintain both virulence and transmissibility among humans as well as animals.
posted by ellieBOA at 8:10 AM PST - 22 comments

Alan Cumming, the Gay Men's Health Crisis and GLAAD present the Celibacy Challenge. [more inside]
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 7:46 AM PST - 20 comments

Quiz: what mental disorder do you have? (adjusted for scientific accuracy)
posted by Artw at 7:42 AM PST - 27 comments

Wired's first-ever sex issue:

• strange, vivid nudes meant to tap into your emotions
• young, attractive, and totally not into having sex
• according to hollywood, the future of sex is super awkward
• the sex talk you never had with your parents
• 10 extreme close-up photos of everyday objects
• your dick pics are about to be all over the internet
• virtual-reality porn is coming, and your fantasies may never be the same
• animal sex is dangerous and horrifying. so why does sex exist at all?
• penile strain gauges and other strange devices of sex science
• renaissance sex positions reimagined as dreamy erotica
• japanese sex hotels cater to all kinds of fetishes, even hello kitty s&m
• two revolutionary new sex toys, plus 14 top-selling dildos

posted by and they trembled before her fury at 7:08 AM PST - 38 comments

It's been revealed that Lenovo preinstalls "Superfish", a piece of malware which -- among other things -- opens a monstrous security hole. This affects most Lenovo computers sold in the last two years. [more inside]
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 7:05 AM PST - 174 comments

Among web-publishing tools, I see Medium as the equivalent of a frozen pizza: not as wholesome as a meal you could make yourself, but for those without the time or motivation to cook, a potentially better option than just eating peanut butter straight from the jar.

Matthew Butterick talks about the strengths and weaknesses of Medium as web publishing medium. (His entire site is arguably essential reading for those interested in practical typography.)
posted by MartinWisse at 6:59 AM PST - 36 comments

Oliver Sacks, on learning he has terminal cancer.
posted by HuronBob at 4:33 AM PST - 41 comments

Post-rock band 65daysofstatic play a live soundtrack to a video of space adventure game No Man's Sky.
posted by Sebmojo at 4:01 AM PST - 9 comments

Can you learn to be an expert at table tennis in a year? That's what Sam Priestley, 25, from Wimbledon, London attempted to find out. With his friend Ben Larcombe, a table tennis coach, the aim was to reach the top 250 in the UK.
posted by salmacis at 2:29 AM PST - 14 comments

I Wanted to Be a Millionaire. How failing colossally on a game show changed my life for the better.
posted by gottabefunky at 9:44 PM PST - 96 comments

What’s the Hardest Shot in Bowling?
posted by ShooBoo at 9:25 PM PST - 29 comments

Blake Morrison on the literature of the east coast. - "Writers from Crabbe to Sebald have been drawn to the fragile beauty of the east coast of Britain – and have immortalised it in words"
posted by the man of twists and turns at 8:43 PM PST - 4 comments

Halfway through her fifth decade and pregnant with her third child, the woman learned for the first time that a large part of her body was chromosomally male. “That's kind of science-fiction material for someone who just came in for an amniocentesis,” says [clinical geneticist Paul] James. (SL Nature, SFW)
posted by Athanassiel at 6:00 PM PST - 19 comments

"[B]ecause he stays within the religious world, Lipa Schmeltzer is more of a threat to the Hasidic way of life than those who up and leave the faith." Author Batya Ungar-Sargon on Lipa Schmeltzer, [YouTube, also embedded in article] the Hasidic pop star (and now Columbia University student) facing a conservative backlash from rabbinical authorities in his home community, even as his popularity in the Orthodox world soars. [more inside]
posted by spitbull at 4:43 PM PST - 28 comments

Taking care of your vulva is easy (hint: do almost nothing). (Warning: frank talk about genitals, nsfw.)
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 3:14 PM PST - 162 comments

Astronomers have discovered that a red dwarf and a brown dwarf (a binary system known as Scholz's star) passed through our Solar System's Oort Cloud a mere 70,000 years ago.
posted by brundlefly at 12:58 PM PST - 72 comments

Glorious photos of a Reinwardt’s Flying Frog riding a horned beetle , captured by Hendy Mp, wildlife photographer from Indonesia. (previously)
posted by Orange Dinosaur Slide at 11:29 AM PST - 30 comments

London Grammar is amazing live in the KEXP Studios English trio London Grammar combine sparse electronic pop in the model of The XX with dramatic, big-voiced lead singer Hannah Reid, whose vocals evoke contemporaries Florence Welch and Natasha Khan of Bat for Lashes. Here, they play a beautifully restrained set and leave the KEXP annpouncer speechless. If you like this, check out their cover of Wicked Game
posted by bobdow at 11:13 AM PST - 22 comments

Todd McFarlane's Spawn aired on HBO from 1997-99. A faithful depiction of McFarlane's popular action-fantasy-horror comic, this groundbreaking, (NSFW,) animated series won an Emmy for 'Outstanding Animation Program' during its third and final season. [more inside]
posted by zarq at 11:09 AM PST - 34 comments

Tom Petty knows what many don’t—that appropriation and originality can’t be separated.
posted by josher71 at 11:02 AM PST - 90 comments

a lost possibility: women on miscarriage (an open discussion on a topic that nobody talks about) [more inside]
posted by flex at 11:00 AM PST - 51 comments

SB Nation reviews the dogs in Westminster's "Working Group"
posted by backseatpilot at 11:00 AM PST - 31 comments

Pussy Riot's new song 'I Can't Breathe', their first in English, is an ‘Industrial ballad’ inspired by Eric Garner. Q&A. Behind the scenes of the video shoot.
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 10:52 AM PST - 4 comments

Traces of Mavis. David MacFarlane writes about the life and work of Mavis Gallant for Canadian magazine The Walrus.

...an aspiring novelist once pressed Gallant for advice, which she stubbornly refused to give. She could have said something—anything, almost—to satisfy the would-be writer. But she wasn’t the kind of person who did that. ... How to write? This was not, as far as Gallant was concerned, an uncomplicated question. It was also a question that, were it to be answered meaningfully, would require more soul-searching, more thought, more self-analysis than she would want to undertake in front of a stranger. It’s easy to imagine how the question could come across as rude or impossible to answer—or both. Besides, she firmly believed that writing could not be taught. But the young author persisted. “All right,” Gallant finally said. “Here’s some advice: never drink cheap wine.”

posted by jokeefe at 10:49 AM PST - 5 comments

New research examines the spread (or not) of local dialectical terms on Twitter. [PDF] [more inside]
posted by me3dia at 10:43 AM PST - 24 comments

Violent Gentlemen is a clothing line co-founded by former NHL enforcer George Parros and hockey fans Brian Talbert and Mike Hammer.
posted by xowie at 8:48 AM PST - 38 comments

The Marines Are Building Robotic War Balls

A research team from Stamford, Conn. has developed an amphibious drone that they are currently testing with the Marines. The GuardBot is a robot ball that swims over water at about 4 miles per hour and then rolls along the beach, at as much as a 30-degree incline and 20 miles per hour.

posted by Fizz at 8:43 AM PST - 101 comments

On January 27th, 2015, Canadian Will Gadd became the first person in recorded history to climb a frozen Niagara Falls.
posted by orange swan at 7:55 AM PST - 29 comments

Now in open beta, SCOTUS Search allows users to "search the text of 1,424,780 individual statements within 6,683 Supreme Court oral arguments." [more inside]
posted by jedicus at 7:38 AM PST - 11 comments

Inspired by the recent release of What We Do In The Shadows, the staff over at The Dissolve take a look at one of the more unusual movie sub-genres: Vampire comedies.
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 5:50 AM PST - 62 comments

“When a kid tells you he’s not ‘Charlie’, he’s not saying ‘I’ll kill everybody in two months time’, he’s trying to say something in his own vocabulary, in the space where he is at. We have to stop looking at this with adult eyes”, says Truong.

Valeria Costa-Kostritsky looks at the challenges teachers and pupils face in France, a month after the Charlie Hebdo massacre.
posted by MartinWisse at 5:41 AM PST - 109 comments

An Indiana grandma killed off a devastating superbug with a homemade fecal transplant and then embarked on a crusade to win over the FDA.
posted by ellieBOA at 5:26 AM PST - 72 comments

Friends, February 18 was a BIG day in American music history. For it was on this day, in 1959, that Mr. Ray Charles recorded "What'd I Say". Here is that recording, including Ray's spoken explanatory introduction. Here's a live version from that same year. Heres a version from 1963, live in Brazil. Here's a version in living color, with none other than Billy Preston sitting in on organ, from 1964. Also from 1964, here's an artfully filmed version from a British motion picture called 'Ballad In Blue. A mere 18 years later, here is a decidedly uptempo version from 1982, live in Japan. Finally let's fast forward 41 years from the original recording, and hear Ray doing it one more time (with some serious note bending) live in Paris the year 2000. Feels so good.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 4:56 AM PST - 24 comments

At some start-ups, Friday is so casual it’s not even a workday. "Treehouse is closed every Friday. The 80-and-counting employees work a 32-hour work week Monday through Thursday. On Fridays, employees are expected to be home, with their families, having fun, doing something, anything, other than work." How's it doing? "The company has raised $13 million, saw 100 percent revenue growth last year and has close to 100 percent employee retention."
posted by storybored at 9:47 PM PST - 85 comments

The Science of Cast Iron Cooking. The Truth About Cast Iron. How To Season A Cast Iron Skillet:

The skillet you want is at least fifty years old, and right now it is probably sitting on a thrift store shelf or a yard sale table. Your first task is to locate it. Until the 1960s, the final stage in manufacturing cast iron was to machine-polish each pan until the cooking surface was as smooth as glass. New cast iron is sold unpolished, that is, fresh out of the mold, with a texture like pitted Formica. The cast iron companies claim that the new, unpolished skillets are as easy to season and as non-stick as the old, polished ones—but then they would say that. You can polish new cast iron yourself with an orbital sander and some 80 grit, followed by hand sanding with 220 grit wet-dry, then 320, then 400, then 600 for good measure, but let’s face it, you’d rather have those five hours of your life and the ridges on your fingernails intact. The skillet you want is polished already.

How To Season A Cast Iron Pan. 5 Myths Of Cast Iron Cookware. [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 8:35 PM PST - 177 comments

Want to make something just for you and your sweetie? Maybe two tiny cheesecakes? One dozen cookies? Four cupcakes? Small-batch baking blog Dessert for Two has you covered.
posted by Adridne at 7:01 PM PST - 8 comments

Kanye takes more heat than anyone. Post-Grammys and "SNL" 40, we're finally seeing his critics for what they are. Social media has changed the game a lot in the past six years. There’s a lot of voices–lumped under names like “Black Twitter”–who have begun to consistently speak out to fill in the missing pieces from stories like the Kanye West Saga, to poke holes in pat narratives like “Kanye West is an egotist” or “Kanye West is a maniac.” [more inside]
posted by standardasparagus at 6:29 PM PST - 222 comments

(SLYT) Miniature foods and cooking. Does what it says on the tin. A very small tin.
posted by scrump at 6:11 PM PST - 16 comments

British-based webforum Mumsnet (For Parents, By Parents) had a fun time this weekend, when a new member decided she was sick and tired of dinosaurs being forced on our children. [more inside]
posted by suelac at 1:03 PM PST - 152 comments

Via the Verge, a trailer for Don Herzfeldt's forthcoming new film.
posted by Ipsifendus at 12:52 PM PST - 24 comments

Bronze Age maps. Maps of Ancient Greece and Rome, India and China. Maps of the Viking era, the Crusades, and the High Middle Ages. Maps of Asia after the Mongol conquest, of Mexico before the Spanish conquest—dozens upon dozens of intricate historical maps.
posted by Iridic at 12:35 PM PST - 19 comments

Why I have resigned from the Telegraph; an open letter by Peter Oborne, until now the chief political commentator of the Daily Telegraph, alleging that the conservative-leaning British broadsheet has allowed advertisers to veto its editorial policy, a process which culminated in the suppression of stories about the recent tax avoidance scandal involving the HSBC bank, itself a major Telegraph advertiser.
posted by acb at 12:22 PM PST - 42 comments

In 1900, the average dairy cow in America produced 424 gallons of milk each year. By 2000, that figure had more than quadrupled, to 2,116 gallons. We explore the incredible science that transformed the American cow into a milk machine—but we also uncover the disturbing history of prejudice and animal cruelty that accompanied it. Along the way, we’ll introduce you to the insane logic of the Lifetime Cheese Merit algorithm and the surreal bull trials of the 1920s. This is the untold story behind that most wholesome and quotidian of beverages: milk. Prepare to be horrified and amazed in equal measure.

posted by infini at 12:00 PM PST - 33 comments

A Flickr album of Mad Magazine advertisements from the 60s
posted by slogger at 11:38 AM PST - 24 comments

Beginning in 1920, Robert J. Flaherty spent a year in the Canadian Arctic (Port Harrison in Northern Quebec) documenting the daily struggles of an Inuk man named Nanook. The resulting feature-length film, an American silent documentary with elements of docudrama, was the first of its kind, in a style that would eventually become known as "salvage ethnography." Nanook of the North: A Story Of Life and Love In the Actual Arctic (1922) [more inside]
posted by zarq at 11:01 AM PST - 10 comments

The Side Effects of Cocaine Featuring David Bowie.
posted by josher71 at 10:44 AM PST - 17 comments

Why Chance The Rapper Is Forgoing Solo Fame To Make Jazzy Songs With Friends (Chance previously) [more inside]
posted by Potomac Avenue at 10:30 AM PST - 7 comments

Cyclops, Wolverine, Wolverine Troll Hunter, Professor X, Magneto (MLYT)
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 10:20 AM PST - 14 comments

Pouring paint on top of paint on a wooden box timelapse art piece by holton rower [more inside]
posted by bobdow at 10:18 AM PST - 26 comments

"How People Described the Internet in the 1990s Is Hilarious" A surprisingly rich listicle of some surprisingly deep (so much zeitgeist) revealing 90's videos and cliches pertaining to computers and the internet. Previously [more inside]
posted by aydeejones at 9:43 AM PST - 62 comments

99% Invisible covers Guerilla Public Service - DIY intervention in public infrastructure. [more inside]
posted by zamboni at 9:26 AM PST - 25 comments

A VFX artist calling himself 'John Smith' has created an incredible take on the Tardis' dematerialisation effect, ..."what travelling through time and space might look like from the point of view of the Tardis, from take-off to landing, all in one shot." [via] [more inside]
posted by quin at 9:07 AM PST - 20 comments

Comics artist Brett Ewins, co-creator of Deadline, artist for Skreemer and Johnny Nemo, and frequent 2000AD contributor (cover gallery), has passed away passed away age 59.
posted by Artw at 8:46 AM PST - 18 comments

My lost weekend with the trademark happy, bathroom-break hating, slightly spooky inheritors of est. (Previously, previously, previously).
posted by shivohum at 8:34 AM PST - 96 comments

No city mixes affordability, opportunity, and wealth as well as Minneapolis, Minnesota - at least, according to The Atlantic. However, the Minnesota Department of Health points out that "averages don't tell the whole story." Minnesota's demographics may obscure some socio-economic problems, including severe disparities in health outcomes and educational attainment.
posted by entropone at 8:33 AM PST - 25 comments

The Struggle To Be A Good Critic [Electric Literature] How should or shouldn't white writers write POC characters?
posted by Fizz at 7:37 AM PST - 33 comments

From the initial 202,586 applicants, 100 hopefuls have been selected to proceed to the next round of the Mars One Astronaut Selection Process. The final 100 chosen come from around the world, with 39 from the Americas, 31 from Europe, 16 from Asia, 7 from Africa, and 7 from Oceania. A total of 40 candidates will eventually be chosen to take part in a training programme and live in a copy of the Mars outpost on Earth. [more inside]
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 7:25 AM PST - 88 comments

Black Dog in the Sky; Final Moments of the Universe; The Vile Stuff; Wooden Bag; Poor Old Horse: some songs by the English (specifically Geordie) singer & guitarist Richard Dawson. ‘[A] distinctly English folk equivalent of Captain Beefheart’s deconstruction of the blues,’ opines The Guardian, of his recent album Nothing Important. ‘Syd Barrett’s freewheeling poetry teamed with the guitar strangle of Eugene Chadbourne or Derek Bailey’ hazards Rolling Stone. Of his own work, Dawson has said ‘I have come to think of it as ritual community music. Perhaps you could call that folk music, but it is certainly not in the folk tradition. I hope it belongs to part of a wider tradition of north east artists, people like Jospeh Crawhall, Jack Common, Basil Bunting, John Martin and Peter Beardsley.’
posted by misteraitch at 6:12 AM PST - 15 comments

There’s No Morality in Exercise: I’m a Fat Person and Made a Successful Fitness App "There is a thing I feared when I started making a fitness app, and it was this: that someone would notice that I am fat."
posted by xingcat at 6:10 AM PST - 124 comments

lnside the quasi-legal, science-free world of medical marijuana for children.
posted by ellieBOA at 5:09 AM PST - 34 comments

When my first boyfriend literally couldn’t penetrate me, I assumed we were just doing it wrong. But I was actually living with a rare and confounding condition that made sex impossible.

Swati Khurana describes living with vaginismus.
posted by MartinWisse at 4:24 AM PST - 47 comments

What the collapse of ancient capitals can teach us about the cities of today — Warnings from history: Angkor was a thriving metropolis of 750,000 before a series of mega-monsoons made it unliveable. Can modern flood-threatened cities learn from its downfall?
posted by cenoxo at 3:59 AM PST - 29 comments

Only now Kaspersky Lab’s experts can confirm they have discovered a threat actor that surpasses anything known in terms of complexity and sophistication of techniques, and that has been active for almost two decades – The Equation Group. Kaspersky provides details [pdf]. Securelist.
posted by Pyrogenesis at 1:45 AM PST - 84 comments

17 Astonishing Places You Wouldn’t Believe Are In Pakistan
posted by Nevin at 1:33 AM PST - 45 comments

The Last Man game is an annual competition to be the last person in the United States to know who won the Super Bowl.

Most of the runners [...] found themselves waking up each day in a cold sweat. “I feel like I’m being sequestered for the stupidest jury trial in modern history,” one competitor said. “It’s gotten to the point where three things may end me: recklessness, homesickness, or sheer boredom.” Several players eventually said that they couldn’t take it anymore and quit. “I’ve spent way more time avoiding the Knowledge than I’ve ever spent thinking on it in the past,” one said, committing seppuku with Twitter as his sword.

posted by frimble at 10:43 PM PST - 86 comments

Sometimes a one-line text-only description of your git commits just isn't enough. For those types of scenarios there is software called "lolcommits" that is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux that, when enabled, takes a photo with your webcam every time you commit your code via git. Now you can really let your co-workers know how you feel about having to fix their whitespace issues all the time with just a simple facial expression. After the photo is taken, the git message is overlayed on top of the image is a style reminiscent of lolcats. The resulting image files are then stored locally in your home directory. [more inside]
posted by surazal at 9:50 PM PST - 22 comments

American Tintype - After a personal tragedy, Harry Taylor discovered a passion for the 150-year-old craft of tintype photography.
posted by a lungful of dragon at 9:22 PM PST - 1 comment

Mansplaining 101: Cisadmin Edition - Marni Cohen, Puppet Labs at Velocity Conference [SLYT]
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 9:10 PM PST - 14 comments

film-grab.com: What are the most iconic film images?
posted by gwint at 6:12 PM PST - 30 comments

Most of us are surrounded by a myriad of radio signals. Some inspired people have taken the opportunity to enable us to see them. Often seemingly random but with a semblance of pattern, the Rayleigh fading model describes much of what you see. via Hacker News
posted by escher at 5:44 PM PST - 13 comments

The Chocolate Wars... Begun, They Have. The Great Chocolate War began when Hershey sued two food importers, claiming that they infringed on the trademarks that Hershey has had since acquiring Cadbury’s US operations in the 1980s. Hershey said it noticed the British versions were starting to show up on the shelves of bigger US retailers, and not just the specialty shops, as demand for the imported chocolates grew.
posted by modernnomad at 4:40 PM PST - 84 comments

In a three-part series on BBC2 in the UK over February and March, Reginald D. Hunter travels across the (USA) south and explores the music and culture. There is a bunch of intriguing clips in advance. [more inside]
posted by Wordshore at 4:32 PM PST - 7 comments

Lesley Gore, who sang "It's My Party" (live performance) and "You Don't Own Me," which Wikipedia calls a "proto-feminist" song (live performance + more), died of lung cancer at age 68 today in New York City. [more inside]
posted by John Cohen at 2:21 PM PST - 78 comments

On the day before Danielle Smalley was to leave for college, she and her friend Jason Stone were hanging out in her family's mobile home. Seventeen years old, with long chestnut hair, Danielle began to feel nauseated. "Dad," she said, "we smell gas." It was 3:45 in the afternoon on August 24th, 1996, near Lively, Texas, some 50 miles southeast of Dallas. The Smalleys were too poor to own a telephone. So the teens jumped into her dad's 1964 Chevy pickup to alert the authorities. As they drove away, the truck stalled where the driveway crossed a dry creek bed. Danielle cranked the ignition, and a fireball engulfed the truck. "You see two children burned to death in front of you – you never forget that," Danielle's father, Danny, would later tell reporters. [more inside]
posted by standardasparagus at 2:20 PM PST - 84 comments

Amazon's Mechanical Turk has become an important tool for social science research, but a fascinating piece by PBS Newshour discusses why this might be a problem, with a great profile of professional survey takers, who average hundreds, even thousands of social science surveys each. This is not just idle speculation, recent research [PDF] shows that experienced Turkers no longer have typical "gut reactions" to social experiments, creating a struggle with how to deal with non-naivete [PDF]. Take a look at the questions that professional Tukers are asked the most, and be sure to take the survey in the middle of the first article! [more inside]
posted by blahblahblah at 1:26 PM PST - 46 comments

An interactive map of geologic doom from the Oregon Department of Geology and Mineral Industries. You can model which hazards are most likely to affect your (Oregon) neighborhood, from landslides, tsunamis, and the ever-ominous Cascadian Subduction earthquake.
posted by janell at 1:17 PM PST - 13 comments

If you didn’t know better, you wouldn’t believe it all happened in the space of about five weeks in the summer of 1978. But it did happen. In those five weeks, Bill Murray played professional baseball and established himself as a bona fide movie star and the Grays Harbor Loggers – representing the twin cities of Aberdeen and Hoquiam, Washington – posted the best winning percentage in America and won the Harbor’s only professional sports championship in living memory.
posted by Chrysostom at 1:03 PM PST - 11 comments

Samplestitch maps hip-hop samples (from J. Dilla, 9th Wonder and Kanye West) to keyboard buttons.
posted by box at 12:53 PM PST - 10 comments

The Atlantic has published a thoughtful piece on Vladimir Putin co-authored by a Director and a Senior Fellow of the Brookings Institution. Within they link Putin's Op-Ed in The New York Times from September 11, 2013, perhaps worth rumination now 18 months later.
posted by BurnMage at 12:47 PM PST - 20 comments

Huey Lewis re-enacts the axe-murdering scene from American Psycho with a surprising guest.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 12:45 PM PST - 30 comments

Are you interested in making ambient, drifting, densely-layered electronic music? But don't know where to even start? This is the most thoughtful and gentle introduction I'm aware of, from a fine musician. It's a 45-minute video workshop from Rich Vreeland aka Disasterpeace, composer of the gorgeous, acclaimed Fez soundtrack. Rich composes a Fez-like track on the fly, explaining what he's doing in the process. While he uses Logic and the softsynth Massive in this workshop, his general approach and attention to sound design and synthesis will be applicable to whatever software or hardware you choose to use. (Hat tip to sparkletone for the link. Fez previously on Metafilter.)
posted by naju at 12:28 PM PST - 36 comments

Sufjan Stevens has released a new track, "No Shade In The Shadow of the Cross", from his forthcoming album Carrie & Lowell. The album is named for Stephens's mother and stepfather, and the musician recently spoke with Ryan Dombal at Pitchfork about his past and the album's origins.
posted by Going To Maine at 12:12 PM PST - 24 comments

But perhaps most intolerable to him was the insistence by the industry itself — "the big businesses that run these corporations and multinationals that own the record companies and all of the conduits through which artists get their music out there" — that he and other artists "whore out" themselves in order to continue to make art. An example? "Things like doing station P.A.s, you know, where you have to go, 'You're hangin' with The Party Pig!' [The Party Pig was the mascot for the LA area's now-defunct KQLZ 100.3 AM.] You know? 'This is Gregg from The New Radicals and you're hangin' with The Party Pig!' [more inside]
posted by smcg at 10:15 AM PST - 54 comments

The Philadelphia 76ers are currently the worst team in basketball, but in terms of expected value, they are crushing. [more inside]
posted by Potomac Avenue at 10:08 AM PST - 108 comments

HMS Belfast is a museum ship, originally a Royal Navy light cruiser, permanently moored in London on the River Thames and operated by the Imperial War Museum. You can take a virtual tour of the ship here. HMS Belfast served throughout the Second World War and on into Korea, but these days it's main guns are permanently aimed at Scratchwood Motorway Services
posted by Just this guy, y'know at 9:47 AM PST - 14 comments

The Commodore 65 (aka C64DX or C64DX Development System) was never officially released. Prototypes escaped development hell when Commodore was liquidated in 1994, and 200 have survived to this day. The complete manual can be read here (all 660K of it). One just sold on eBay for €20,500.
posted by slogger at 9:35 AM PST - 22 comments

From Cara Ellison (Embed With, S.EXE), two short pieces: Wordless Reply and Hypercorporeal War Simulator.
posted by kmz at 8:50 AM PST - 4 comments

There’s a scene in Stanley Kubrick’s comic masterpiece Dr. Strangelove in which Jack D. Ripper, an American general who’s gone rogue and ordered a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union, unspools his paranoid worldview—and the explanation for why he drinks “only distilled water, or rainwater, and only pure grain alcohol”
posted by josher71 at 8:49 AM PST - 215 comments

Wind chill is vitally important information. Or is it a meaningless number useful only in making weather forecasts more dramatic? [more inside]
posted by sfenders at 7:42 AM PST - 55 comments

In the past, Westerners who accused Muslims of blindly following ancient scriptures came to deserved grief from academics—notably the late Edward Said—who pointed out that calling Muslims “ancient” was usually just another way to denigrate them. Look instead, these scholars urged, to the conditions in which these ideologies arose—the bad governance, the shifting social mores, the humiliation of living in lands valued only for their oil. Without acknowledgment of these factors, no explanation of the rise of the Islamic State could be complete. But focusing on them to the exclusion of ideology reflects another kind of Western bias: that if religious ideology doesn’t matter much in Washington or Berlin, surely it must be equally irrelevant in Raqqa or Mosul.
posted by shivohum at 7:06 AM PST - 113 comments

If you are one of those who only remember Daffy Duck as the frustrated fowl who says to Bugs Bunny "You're deth-picable!", then you need to see how he earned the name "Daffy". So YouTuber ibcf has compiled every "Woo Hoo!" the Looney Tune has laughed/yelled, from his first cartoon, 1937's "Porky's Duck Hunt", to a 1998 appearance in a live action sitcom. That's over 13 minutes of "Woo Hoo!" as he bounces off walls, ceilings and the surfaces of bodies of water (nice trick). [more inside]
posted by oneswellfoop at 5:34 AM PST - 35 comments

Ashgabat City of White Marble constructed in desert. [more inside]
posted by asok at 4:43 AM PST - 30 comments

I kept a memory book/photo album of everyone I knew that died of AIDS. It's quite large to say the least. Who were these guys? These were the people I had planned to grow old with. They were the family I had created and wanted to spend the rest of my life with as long as humanly possible but by the time I was in my late 40's, every one of them was gone except for two dear friends of mine.

Redditors share memories of having lived through the HIV/AIDS epidemic of the early eighties. [more inside]
posted by MartinWisse at 3:32 AM PST - 87 comments

How identical twins Mike and Bob Bryan serve science.
posted by ellieBOA at 3:28 AM PST - 4 comments

Studying and making an early instrument called a citole. Until recently, this style of instrument was not recognized as separate from a gittern.
posted by Peregrine Pickle at 7:59 PM PST - 26 comments

There goes John [SLVimeo]. He's walking up the sidewalk. Gonna go in to the building to get his putter, and ball. He's got 18 intense holes ahead of him. Who knows how he'll do. A mini-golf game is shot like a pro golf game with commentary.
posted by Deathalicious at 7:55 PM PST - 25 comments

WK Fine Tools is an internet magazine devoted to traditional and fine woodworking. The site also maintains curated collections of downloadable woodworking books and tool catalogs and manuals. [more inside]
posted by jedicus at 6:55 PM PST - 14 comments

Open Mind - "This is a website with numerous peer-reviewed philosophical texts covering a wide range of topics and disciplines that are available for free. This means that the texts are not restricted to the use of academics and students in the developed world who can afford to download them, but are available to anyone, anywhere." [more inside]
posted by nickyskye at 4:10 PM PST - 9 comments

Tickld shows us what That Book would be like had a man written it. 50 Sheds of Gray, on Twitter; on Amazon 'Are you ready to be tortured in a way only a woman can torture a man?' she asked. I nodded nervously. 'OK' she said and ate half my chips."
posted by I_Love_Bananas at 3:17 PM PST - 86 comments

The video for composer and electronic musician Dan Deacon's new single "Learning to Relax" is a dazzling display of pulsating colors. [more inside]
posted by JauntyFedora at 2:30 PM PST - 26 comments

Here’s a personal confession. [more inside]
posted by standardasparagus at 12:29 PM PST - 21 comments

2 Deadly Shootings Within Hours in Copenhagen; 5 Wounded [New York Times]

A shooting at a free speech event featuring an artist who had caricatured the Prophet Muhammad and a second shooting hours later outside a synagogue left two dead and five police officers wounded in Copenhagen, stirring fears that another terror spree was underway in a European capital a month after 17 people were killed in Paris attacks.

[more inside]
posted by Fizz at 12:24 PM PST - 235 comments

After the Charlie Hebdo killings, Voltaire's Treatise on Tolerance is flying off the shelves. [more inside]
posted by jfuller at 12:21 PM PST - 9 comments

These days, we provide thermal comfort in winter by heating the entire volume of air in a room or building. In earlier times, our forebear's concept of heating was more localized
posted by the man of twists and turns at 11:29 AM PST - 100 comments

"Angela: Asgard’s Assassin is one of my favorite comics of moment, with two kick-ass female leads and no shortage of Asgardian humor. Currently, A:AA is being co-written by Kieron Gillen and Marguerite Bennett, with art by Phil Jimenez and Stephanie Hans. It focuses on Thor and Loki’s long-lost sister, Angela, who was raised by the Angels, and has been causing all sorts of trouble now that she’s back in our worlds. Angela travels with a woman named Sera, and the most recent issue gave us some insight into both Angela and Sera’s backstories."
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 8:09 AM PST - 38 comments

Four couples, who are homeless and living in New York, talk about their lives.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 6:05 AM PST - 5 comments

A brief exploration of beautiful historical taxonomy trees, timelines, diagrams and other visual mappings. One of these is from the Codex Amiatinus and could be the oldest mind map in existence.
posted by Foci for Analysis at 4:26 AM PST - 4 comments

On Thursday morning, January the 29th, news percolated through social media that Chadian forces, with the tacit consent of the Nigerian government, had crossed the international frontier and recaptured Malam Fatori – a north-eastern Nigerian town that had been captured by Boko Haram in October last year. This was a watershed moment. For the first time in Nigeria’s 54 years as an independent country, foreign troops are conducting major military operations inside the country. Similarly, with Chad’s intervention, the war against Boko Haram has entered a new phase, and possibly presages a wider regional intervention – the balance sheet of which can only be properly assessed in the fullness of time.

So why did Idriss Deby send Chadian troops into Nigeria? How are we to make sense of this bold gambit?
posted by MartinWisse at 3:18 AM PST - 41 comments

North Korea has published 310 new patriotic slogans which, as translated by the BBC, are a mix of classic socialist pontification ("Wage the class struggle dynamically by relying on the masses!"), insight into the country's multitude of perpetual problems ("Bring to completion the rehabilitation of the northern railways as early as possible!") and frequent WTF-ness ("Read the minds of producers first before measuring the quantity of their products!")
posted by oneswellfoop at 2:08 AM PST - 91 comments

Greece's recently appointed finance minister may have a secret weapon -- charisma. One commenter has called him the world's most interesting man. He certainly lives in interesting times.
posted by Sir Rinse at 12:22 AM PST - 97 comments

Today is the fiftieth birthday of the Canadian flag. Questions have been raised, however, as to why the federal government has more or less ignored it. [more inside]
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 11:00 PM PST - 71 comments

Love Tokens from the Thames, dug up by the Mud God (aka Steve Brooker of Thames and Field).
posted by gamera at 10:15 PM PST - 17 comments

Tony Zhou looks at the quadrant system with scenes from Nicolas Winding Refn’s film Drive, geometric staging with Akira Kurosawa's The Bad Sleep Well, and character decision with Bong Joon-ho's Snowpiercer. [more inside]
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 7:07 PM PST - 30 comments

On the night of 13/14 February 1945, RAF Bomber Command carried out a raid on the city of Dresden, the capital of Saxony, Germany. For all intents and purposes, this was a standard mission undertaken in much the same way as any other sortie... Warning - some graphic images inside
posted by mattoxic at 5:42 PM PST - 77 comments

After qualifying with over 245 metres, Peter Prevc, the Slovenian ski jumper, breaks the world record and becomes the first ski jumper to jump / glide / soar for a quarter of a kilometre. Alternatives here and here.
posted by Wordshore at 4:16 PM PST - 32 comments

French cartoonist Boulet creates a sweet tale for St. Valentine's day. Slightly NSFW. [more inside]
posted by jenkinsEar at 3:52 PM PST - 21 comments

"Kaspersky Lab says it has seen evidence of $300 million in theft from clients, and believes the total could be triple that." The New York Times reports that hackers have pulled off the first successful bank heist from banks in Russia, Japan, the U.S., and Europe. [more inside]
posted by daq at 3:03 PM PST - 70 comments

Icelandic Ultrablue (nsfw) [more inside]
posted by tonycpsu at 1:38 PM PST - 18 comments

Shortly after meeting my wife, she introduced me to the nuanced meaning that the Spanish word nervio had acquired in the lexicon of her family. As used in their Chilean home, the word could be defined as a feeling of such intense affection that one trembles or grits his teeth with restraint so as not to harm the object of his affection. I have heard others allude to the sensation in seemingly bizarre phrases such as, "It's so cute [that] I want to squeeze it to death." I often ask people about nervio. For those like me who have experienced it frequently throughout their lives, a complete definition is unnecessary and the word fills a void in their vocabulary. With others, my description is often greeted with bewilderment. Having never felt such a sensation, it is hard for them to imagine.

More? Tagalog's gigil, corporal cuddling, and some scientific insights into the "cute aggression" phenomenon
posted by Rhaomi at 11:58 AM PST - 67 comments

A Hungarian art student's MA project is a series of banknotes with illustrated animals and plants.
posted by curious nu at 11:53 AM PST - 9 comments

When Hugo Lucitante was a boy, his tribe sent him away to learn about the outside world so that, one day, he might return and save their village. Can he live up to their hopes? [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 11:07 AM PST - 2 comments

The Secret History of South Asian & African American Solidarity. South Asians and African Americans have been standing up for each other for over a century -- and continue to do so. Race politics, shared heritage, and issues of caste and class are among the few examples of interconnected history that largely go untaught in the U.S. [via mefi projects]
posted by automatic cabinet at 10:34 AM PST - 16 comments

The Big Fun Glossary: “Big Fun began its life as the home of the Malvern Girls, three young adults from the Philadelphia Suburbs. From its initial disastrous housewarming and continuing on through the worst winter on record and into a spring infested with ticks, flies and cicadas, Big Fun, a stately yellow farmhouse in rural Central Virginia, saw many interesting sights: impromptu punk rock concerts, Dextromethorphan chug-fests, Nomadic Festivals, nazi skinheads, and (most importantly) record alcohol consumption. Like most tight social groups, Big Fun had its own language, history and collection of in-jokes. This website is designed to grant you access to the inner workings of this remarkable youth culture as it actually functioned in the mid-90s.” [more inside]
posted by smammy at 9:05 AM PST - 18 comments

Valentine's Day Cards of the Late 1800's and Early 1900's (Tillie's Antique Chatter)
A Flowering of Affection: Victorian Valentines Day Cards at the Lilly Library (Indiana University Libraries, Bloomington)
History of the Card
Victorian Valentine's Day Cards - in Pictures (The Guardian, from The Laura Seddon Collection held by Manchester Metropolitan University’s Special Collections)
A Victorian Treasury's piece on Esther Howland (1828-1904), Mother of the American Valentine
National Valentine Collectors Association
An antidote for saccharine: Vinegar Valentines (Pinterest)
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 7:49 AM PST - 7 comments

Judge Carlton Reeves sentenced three young white men in the murder of an innocent black man. But first, he had something to tell them. [more inside]
posted by magstheaxe at 6:52 AM PST - 74 comments

A cappella renditions of songs off the Cardiacs album Sing to God, aka the best album you've never heard of. The original double album (Part I, Part II) is arguably the band's magnum opus, inspiring (among other things) parts of Radiohead's OK Computer; these renditions capture some of the glorious derangement of the originals, and add all manner of delightful innovations to the material. Don't miss: Fiery Gun Hand, Insect Hoofs on Lassie, Wireless, Dirty Boy, Nurses Whispering Verses.
posted by rorgy at 6:49 AM PST - 20 comments

'041' by Iain Banks [more inside]
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 6:29 AM PST - 6 comments

Fuck Valentine's Day, 'cause really?
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 5:59 AM PST - 54 comments

Youe life time earnings and something you probably do not want to hear. People projected to earn the median amount will see their earnings grow 38 percent from the time they're 25 to when they turn 55; those in the 95th percentile will see their earnings grow 230 percent over the same period; and those in the 99th percentile will see their earnings grow 1,450 percent. That may seem obvious—those at the top of the wealth differential were probably propelled there by astronomical earnings growth, not a streak of flat earnings. The Fed report, however, points out that the steepest pay increases happen early. "Across the board, the bulk of earnings growth happens during the first decade," Fortunately for me mine took the upward swing after 23 years of employment. There is still hope.
posted by rmhsinc at 4:10 AM PST - 26 comments

Drinking My Way Through the Literary 1930's : "The backbone of this blog is the amazing and unfortunately out-of-print book, So Red the Nose. To this 1935, somewhat tongue-in-cheek recipe book, thirty bestselling contemporary authors submitted original cocktails, based around their own original works ... My mission, then, is to recreate 29 of these cocktails ... and combine them with their namesakes, ... discovering which books are classics tragically forgotten and which are better left to collect dust in library basements." [via mefi projects] [more inside]
posted by Monsieur Caution at 3:02 AM PST - 11 comments

Carnival in the Netherlands starts tomorrow. Carnival in the Netherlands is called Carnaval, Vastenavond or Vastelaovend, and is most celebrated in traditionally Catholic regions, mainly the southern provinces North Brabant and Limburg. Dutch Carnaval is officially celebrated on the Sunday through Tuesday preceding Ash Wednesday, but in many places, festivities have started earlier. 'Alaaf' is a traditional greeting, only used during Carnaval. [more inside]
posted by Too-Ticky at 2:58 AM PST - 17 comments

So! The "bird" category has (somewhat culture specific) internal structure. For example, most Americans will agree that a robin is a better example of a bird than an albatross, and an albatross is a better bird than an ostrich. (And while bats are not birds, they are better birds than horses are, and horses are better birds than refrigerators are; so the gradations continue to some extent outside the category boundary).

Let's talk about category structure and oppression: how the way we think about categories feeds into social oppression and justice.
posted by MartinWisse at 2:57 AM PST - 51 comments

"The only cure for a broken heart is reversed slow motion." In this 4-minute video, your friends at the Slow Mo Lab irreverently explode some Valentine's Day clichés. Quite literally. (Not suitable for the corny or hopelessly romantic.)
posted by Sir Rinse at 11:18 PM PST - 6 comments

Kees Colijn's "Walking in..." project is a series of fascinating single shot videos, each up to two hours long, filmed as he walks through cities such as Yangon in Myanmar, Varanasi in India, Makassar in Indonesia and Pokhara in Nepal (Youtube links). See and hear everyday life in these places, not just the slick travel show version.
posted by AnnaRat at 10:45 PM PST - 15 comments

How scientists are using Lego to manipulate insects. An unusual scientific paper has just appeared online detailing how entomologists can use Legos to build apparatuses to handle museum specimens. This is important: museum specimens are what we use to study biological history, and preserving them is increasingly less well funded. Fortunately, innovations like this fall into a larger biological tradition of building your own equipment. [more inside]
posted by sciatrix at 9:32 PM PST - 7 comments

Don't Judge A Book By Its Author by Aminatta Forna [The Guardian]

‘I have never met a writer who wishes to be described as a female writer, gay writer, black writer, Asian writer or African writer’ … Aminatta Forna on her frustration at the book world’s obsession with labels and identity.

posted by Fizz at 6:37 PM PST - 9 comments

After eight years, 57 releases, and a successful kickstarter, the purveyor of soft and sweet indiepop music WeePOP! Records is closing shop today. To celebrate, they've put together a retrospective mix in two parts for your enjoyment: Part 1 and Part 2. [more inside]
posted by vibratory manner of working at 6:36 PM PST - 7 comments

Uber and Airbnb monetize the desperation of people in the post-crisis economy while sounding generous—and evoke a fantasy of community in an atomized population. [more inside]
posted by standardasparagus at 6:00 PM PST - 86 comments

An artificial skylight "It looks like the sun... but it isn't. It's a brand new type of artificial skylight called CoeLux which, for the first time, recreates the scientific process that makes the sky appear blue. It also creates an illusion of depth to make the 'sun' appear to be far above. "
posted by dhruva at 4:19 PM PST - 57 comments

Gary Owens, Announcer of ‘Laugh-In’ Fame, Dies at 80 . Here's Corey Snow's Thank you, Gary - A Tribute to Gary Owens
posted by mikelieman at 3:27 PM PST - 45 comments

Less than 2 days after releasing a statement that he had no intention to resign, Oregon Governor John Kitzhaber has announced that he will step down on February 18th. Over the last four months, a number of ethical issues have come to light surrounding Kitzhaber's fiancé Cylvia Hayes, culminating in a criminal investigation, currently underway.

Secretary of State Kate Brown will be sworn in as Governor at 10am on the 18th, making her the first out LGBT Governor in the US.

(Kitzhaber previously)
posted by polymath at 3:08 PM PST - 34 comments

Horror’s scariest trend is the nonexistent black filmmaker. Via Joe Dante.
posted by brundlefly at 2:41 PM PST - 32 comments

In the May 1975 issue of Oui magazine, Robert Christgau and Carola Dibbell reviewed four dozen American beers, plus eleven imports.
posted by Iridic at 1:18 PM PST - 92 comments

Sunday night, NBC will celebrate 40 years of Saturday Night Live with the SNL 40th Anniversary Special, a three-hour event featuring appearances from past cast members, hosts, and musical guests. SNL has a rich history that is certainly worthy of tribute — and there has been no shortage of them on the Internet this week. But, as everyone knows, it’s also a show that has run out of steam in recent years. While the episodes are never exactly bad, the comedy has a tendency to rehash one trite and tired joke: men kissing men. It’s the show’s laziest “punchline,” and one that is never very funny.
posted by josher71 at 12:49 PM PST - 125 comments

How the Military Waged a Graphic-Design War on Venereal Disease In many ways, such a coordinated public effort to alter sexual behavior was unprecedented. At a time when discussion of sexual activity was anything but frank, the VD posters of World War II addressed the topic directly using clinical language, ominous symbolic imagery, and jingoistic slogans to help enlisted men steer clear of sexually transmitted infections. While American sex-ed programs have taken many forms over the last hundred years, the military’s VD campaign left a unique trail of ephemera in its wake, featuring imagery that’s both gorgeous and deeply unsettling.
posted by Michele in California at 12:45 PM PST - 30 comments

The Internet of Useless Things is a parody site full of bad 'connected-ness' ideas,
like FitSpoon, "a connected spoon that tracks your eating speed and compares with others via a cloud database. When you’re eating too fast, holes open in the spoon releasing the contents."
and the euphemism-filled ThroneMaster that lets you "gamify your daily motions." [more inside]
posted by oneswellfoop at 12:08 PM PST - 29 comments

Who would poison the vines of La Romanée-Conti, the tiny, centuries-old vineyard that produces what most agree is Burgundy’s finest, rarest, and most expensive wine? [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 11:03 AM PST - 20 comments

"This case, which has been picked up by the media, does not fit neatly into the narratives that have fueled an ongoing national conversation about sexual assault of students on campus. But it exposes the risks of Stanford’s open door to Silicon Valley and the pressure that universities are under to do more for students who say they’ve been raped. It also reveals the complexity of trying to determine the truth in a high-stakes case like this one."
posted by crazy with stars at 10:12 AM PST - 73 comments

How Peanuts got its first black character. Come for an interesting back-and-forth between Charles Schulz and a reader. Stay for a jaw-dropping example of what another strip was doing at the same time.
posted by the phlegmatic king at 10:11 AM PST - 69 comments

"Do whatever it takes to not fool yourself, period, that's the scientific method" - Neil deGrasse Tyson. What if we can't do that?
posted by LiteS at 9:29 AM PST - 35 comments

Madison Avenue is looking differently at so-called product placement, the decades-old practice of inserting name-brand cans of soda, gadgets, and cars into the scenes and dialogue of TV programs. [...] The days of jamming the mention of a Subway sandwich or Dr. Pepper into dialogue in, say, CBS’ “Hawaii Five-0” or NBC’s “Chuck” or the CW’s “90210” — all actual examples — may be coming to a close.
posted by Chrysostom at 9:03 AM PST - 92 comments

The global appeal of the novel has led some fans to hallow it as a classic, but, with all due respect, it is not to be confused with “Madame Bovary.” Rather, Fifty Shades of Grey is the kind of book that Madame Bovary would read.

Anthony Lane reviews Fifty Shades of Grey.
posted by jenkinsEar at 7:55 AM PST - 212 comments

Hello, my name is Yusor Abu-Salha. "In May 2014, Yusor Abu-Salha – one of the victims of Tuesday’s shooting in Chapel Hill –recorded a StoryCorps interview with Mussarut Jabeen, who was her 3rd grade teacher." (Direct MP3)
posted by kmz at 7:44 AM PST - 79 comments

Citylab on the new data tool PlaceILive: "While PlaceILive is obviously a more serious endeavor than some of those awful "ghetto-tracker" neighborhood apps we've written about before, (previously) the site does wcore areas with high poverty rates and low educational attainment levels lower on its Life Quality Index score.

"We just genuinely believe that if there are more educated people, it is a nicer neighborhood, and the same with income," Legeckas says.

That may not necessarily be true, but it points to a broader problem with statistics-driven quality-of-life measures—one that Legeckas acknowledges: numbers can be deceiving."
posted by Potomac Avenue at 7:18 AM PST - 32 comments

"Each year around Mother’s Day I go to the historic cemetery where Phoenix is buried to wash and weed his grave. Then I go to an older part of the cemetery where children were buried so long ago that their families are no longer alive to tend their graves. I hope that someday, years from now, when I am gone, maybe another mom will do that for Phoenix." [more inside]
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 6:58 AM PST - 23 comments

The journey of a food intolerant and an intolerable foodie. I'm Kate McCartney and I'm Kate McLennan and we're women! Welcome to The Katering Show! [more inside]
posted by h00py at 6:19 AM PST - 17 comments

Carlos Llaguno Garcia, the Mexican born chef who rose from being an undocumented immigrant to executive chef at Les Halles, has died of cancer. He was 38. Carlos gained some minor television fame when he took his former mentor, Anthony Bourdain, on a tour of Puebla and Mexico City for No Reservations, and also appeared in his role as the restaurant's executive chef when Bourdain and chef Eric Ripert went back to work in the Les Halles kitchen for the show.
posted by BZArcher at 5:51 AM PST - 14 comments

How the NYPD is using social media to put Harlem teens behind bars.
posted by ellieBOA at 5:50 AM PST - 24 comments

About two and a half years ago an odd email dropped into my inbox out of nowhere. It seemed to be a quickly written email from someone in Ireland. The writer, Liam, said he was asking if I had any stories that I thought might be worth filming. In particular, he was trying to find something under fifteen minutes long that he, and a crew of others from his village in Ireland, could enter into a film competition. And they needed it, like, yesterday.

Tobias Buckell tells how one of his short stories became a movie. All Her Children Fought is now availabe on Youtube, proving you can make a sf movie with only three actors and one special effect.
posted by MartinWisse at 2:23 AM PST - 4 comments

An Oral History of Shoegaze In this oral history, Wondering Sound speaks with the bands and other figures on the margins of “the scene that celebrates itself” to discover from whence this distinctive sound sprung, and why it has stood the test of time.
posted by psmealey at 1:54 AM PST - 35 comments

The first science fiction anthology to focus on the immigrant experience [via mefi projects]
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 9:57 PM PST - 8 comments

David Carr, journalist and media columnist for the New York Times passed away suddenly earlier tonight. [more inside]
posted by a lungful of dragon at 9:01 PM PST - 72 comments

Nut Up! Performer, DJ, Producer, and all-around dance music maven Chuck Love shares his personal view of losing a testicle in the most humorous and heart felt way. (SLYT)
posted by djdrue at 8:46 PM PST - 4 comments

Pakistan's booksellers with wooden carts piled high: "Magazines and newspapers all have a standard price, but books—most of them old and, in some cases, quite rare—are sold by tola, a South Asian unit of measurement that works out to less than a pound, for as little as one dollar. A several-hundred-year-old copy of The Royal History of England, with hand-painted borders and diagrams, can sell for less than a set of Harry Potter books."
posted by viggorlijah at 7:23 PM PST - 4 comments

Science fair projects for kids. 128 pages of science fair projects for kids, graded by difficulty. 40 more experiments. This has been your Metafilter parenting resource for the week of February 9-13.
posted by pjern at 6:51 PM PST - 17 comments

Vivek Wadhwa (@wadhwa) has made a career talking about women in tech (amongst other things). You may remember him from Newsweek's recent cover story on Silicon Valley sexism (previously on MeFi), or his crowdfunded book, Innovating Women, on which he was the lead author. However, many women have criticised Wadhwa for what they have percieved as his self-appointment as spokeman for women in tech, including arguing that his views are often paternalistic and problematic, and his ubquitous presence actually has the effect of excluding and silencing women. Amelia Greenhall makes the case: Quiet Ladies - Wadhwa is speaking now. [more inside]
posted by His thoughts were red thoughts at 6:50 PM PST - 147 comments

Letter from Ernest Hemingway’s widow could solve Cuban farmhouse mystery. [The Guardian]

The mystery of whether Ernest Hemingway’s widow volunteered or was coerced into leaving their Cuban house to the nation has come a step closer to being solved, with the discovery of a letter in which she states that her late husband “would be pleased” that Finca Vigía be “given to the people of Cuba … as a centre for opportunities for wider education and research”.

[more inside]
posted by Fizz at 5:59 PM PST - 7 comments

Lego. Macross. Transformer.
posted by boo_radley at 5:56 PM PST - 10 comments

Behold, the Spider-Tailed Horned Viper. That is all. (SLYT)
posted by Huck500 at 5:28 PM PST - 44 comments

Re Made Co. You've drooled over the hand-tooled hand tools of Best Made, but a real man needs a plunger. [more inside]
posted by klangklangston at 4:03 PM PST - 43 comments

"I love you" – WHAT A LIE! LIES, DAMN LIES! Yes, it's like that when you are young, naïve and in love. And you don't realize your boyfriend started dating you just because he wanted to take you to bed! I got this teddy bear for Valentine's. He survived on top of my closet in a plastic bag, because it wasn’t him who hurt me, but the idiot who left him behind.

-- "I love you" Teddy bear
2002 Zagreb, Croatia

"I love you" Teddy bear is one of the exhibits at The Museum of Broken Relationships. [more inside]
posted by Room 641-A at 3:28 PM PST - 11 comments

Wait But Why posted a fantastic in-depth look at the coming AI revolution and the existential danger it presents.
posted by fungible at 3:04 PM PST - 85 comments

RIP Steve Strange lead singer of 80's synth pop band Visage and manager of the Blitz club a focal point for the New Romantic movement.
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 2:17 PM PST - 28 comments

The Virtual Traveller to Sri Lanka. [via]
posted by Think_Long at 1:18 PM PST - 8 comments

China has just released a tremendous rousing tribute to its clean, clear and incorruptible internet. The song is performed by the Cyberspace Administration of China choral group. Called Cyberspace Spirit, the tune features a large mixed choir and four solo singers who regale an audience while informing them that they are also keeping a close eye on everything they view and type. "Keeping faithful watch under this sky, the Sun and the Moon," they sing. "Creating, embracing everyday clarity and brightness; Like a beam of incorruptible sunlight, touching our hearts." The chorus exclaims: "Internet power! The web is where glorious dreams are; Internet power! From the distant cosmos to the home we long for."
posted by infini at 12:44 PM PST - 50 comments

Centireading Force: Why Reading a Book 100 Times is a Great Idea (SL Guardian)
posted by Daily Alice at 12:29 PM PST - 52 comments

Kate Aurthur has put together an entirely subjective list ranking all 86 Best Picture Oscar winners from worst to best.
posted by KChasm at 11:51 AM PST - 133 comments

What It’s Like Living In Boston Right Now
posted by anastasiav at 11:46 AM PST - 355 comments

I had to rearrange everything I knew to allow myself to look up the number for a psychiatrist, and rearrange even more to actually make the call. It takes courage and strength to look the stigma of being medicated in the face and push through it, to persist because you care about feeling whole and happy and calm more than you care about what other people think. Loving yourself enough to take care of yourself when it is easier not to is a revolutionary act.

And so I became a revolutionary.

Tracy Clayton (a/k/a @BrokeyMcPoverty) for BuzzFeed: When Taking Anxiety Medication Is A Revolutionary Act.
posted by divined by radio at 11:04 AM PST - 39 comments

Two men lie suffocated next to an igloo. A writer loses his concentration and dies. A sudden case of hiccups puts an old man in the hospital. What the hell is going on?
posted by Iridic at 11:02 AM PST - 90 comments

Words and Music is an album by the artist David Shrigley (previously on metafilter) and the musician Malcolm Middleton, featuring spoken-word tracks such as A Toast, Monkeys and Story Time (all songs nsfw, full album stream in the first link).
posted by dng at 11:01 AM PST - 4 comments

A.O. Scott and Manohla Dargis talk about what the Oscars mean today and how they paradoxically reach more people than the movies they celebrate. [SLNYT]
posted by wyndham at 10:59 AM PST - 7 comments

The Solar Dynamic Observatory's 5th anniversary of launch was celebrated with the release of a Five year video. [more inside]
posted by dhruva at 10:29 AM PST - 12 comments

Be bugged no more! It's TuneFind!
posted by Kitteh at 10:26 AM PST - 8 comments

Google Maps recently turned 10. Ten Years of Google Maps, From Slashdot to Ground Truth
posted by the man of twists and turns at 8:50 AM PST - 48 comments

Via the Morning News, today I ran across (ahem) this brief but enlightening history of the Brannock device, the two-pound steel instrument invented to provide a universal and precise way of measuring shoe size (previously on MeFi). [more inside]
posted by Smells of Detroit at 8:40 AM PST - 20 comments

Twitter's Chief Sees Plenty of Money in Tweet Flow [more inside]
posted by alby at 8:39 AM PST - 66 comments

"Slipknot, Papa Roach, Soulfly, Disturbed, Amen and Mudvayne were all there, supported by the kind of bands that made every teenage stoner bunking off GCSE maths believe they too could one day play a half-hour set to a room full of disinterested teenagers. I charged to the front as if I was a Minotaur and not a young girl with developing boobs and easily breakable bones." How to be Nu-Metal in British Suburbia
posted by mippy at 7:58 AM PST - 29 comments

"In some zoos in Japan and China, staff members perform regular security drills to practice their response to a large animal escape by using costumed zookeepers as the fugitive animals. Individuals in furry costumes or pairs in full-size mockups of larger animals run through zoo property, sometimes inflicting mock injuries, as fellow zookeepers work to surround, subdue, and recapture them." A photo essay in The Atlantic.
posted by moonmilk at 7:57 AM PST - 33 comments

This Is What Happens When You Repost an Instagram Photo 90 Times is actually a lovely little demonstration of how JPEG artifacts, edge detection, automatic sharpening, and whatever else Instagram does by default to photos stacks up to quickly make an image decay and deteriorate via processing. The video demonstrates the effects in a nice quick time-lapse way as well.
posted by mathowie at 7:03 AM PST - 35 comments

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, nursing assistants suffered back and other musculoskeletal injuries more than any other occupation in 2013. NPR's Daniel Zwerdling investigated the root cause for many of these injuries: Lifting and moving patients. [more inside]
posted by Gelatin at 6:13 AM PST - 11 comments

New High-Tech Farm Equipment Is a Nightmare for Farmers – Kyle Wiens of iFixit vs. the modern family farm tractor.
posted by cenoxo at 4:59 AM PST - 52 comments

How Pan Am Airways Dominated International Travel in the 1930s.
posted by ellieBOA at 4:13 AM PST - 23 comments

We as a society are expected to believe that live shows are fun, even though they’re basically loud, plotless museum exhibits with no chairs and no rules about whether people should yell a conversation at you. In your innermost self, you know this truth. But if you’d like ammunition to make the case to your friends and loved ones, or if you just need to read it on the internet, what follows is an airtight case as to why live music is the grownup birthday dinner of cultural events.

Live music sucks.
posted by MartinWisse at 1:18 AM PST - 203 comments

Two Ultra Fast Robots Pick & Place Batteries to Form Group Patterns.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 12:42 AM PST - 29 comments

Gone With A Trace (pop-up audio warning): a 20-min. audio documentary about photographer Richard Misrach (previously) and the objects he finds along the US/Mexico border, which are then turned into musical instruments by Guillermo Galindo. There's an accompanying photo slide on cbc's The Current site.
posted by mannequito at 12:20 AM PST - 4 comments

An update to an update to Into The Wild.
posted by deadbilly at 10:17 PM PST - 54 comments

Shibuya, Tokyo to begin issuing certification to same-sex couples of "relationship equivalent to marriage."
posted by DoctorFedora at 8:45 PM PST - 38 comments

It wasn’t easy to buy a car in the Soviet Union. Usually, the first thing to do was to sign up on a decade-long waiting list to register your interest in owning a vehicle. Secondly, you needed to save what was then a huge sum of money; a new Zaphorozhets cost the equivalent of about 30 times the average monthly salary. A few people found a different way, however – assembling cars with their own hands. [more inside]
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 8:02 PM PST - 16 comments

Paper Arcade! A flickr collection of print-fold-and-glue classic arcade cabinets.
posted by bitmage at 6:36 PM PST - 12 comments

Yemen has fallen. In a striking series of events which has largely flown under the radar except in occasional cable-tv news blurbs -- the nominally pro-Western government of Yemen has been overthrown by Iranian-backed militants. American and British forces have hastily "evacuated" -- an evacuation which may, perhaps, be interpreted as a retreat. Militants have seized abandoned American weapon stockpiles, and a massive defeat for the United States and her allies has gone virtually unnoticed. [more inside]
posted by Avenger at 6:32 PM PST - 80 comments

It's Season 4 of Alessondra's Oklahoma City Great Horned Owl-Cam! ("This time, it's about the owls.")
Watch Mrs. T feed newborn owlet Java! Don't turn away from your screen lest you miss the hatching of the two remaining eggs! See some greatest hits on YouTube! Check instagram for photos! Follow the news on Twitter!
You won't have to pay for your seat because it's free, but you'll only need the edge!
posted by Going To Maine at 6:29 PM PST - 15 comments

This video explains, using a raw-visuals approach (no narration, just lots of images) how the dragons in Game of Thrones are integrated into various scenes. Trigger warning for many scenes of half-eated goats.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 6:06 PM PST - 15 comments

Wesley Morse is best known for the early Bazooka Joe comics and the occasional smutty Tijuana Bible (link not safe for work!) however, an accidental archive has been made of another of his projects: trying to woo actress Avonne Taylor. [more inside]
posted by Peregrine Pickle at 5:04 PM PST - 3 comments

Physics World has reported that "US physicist Val Fitch, who shared the 1980 Nobel Prize for Physics with James Cronin, died on 5 February at the age of 91. Fitch and Cronin were awarded the prize for the discovery in 1964 that subatomic particles called K-mesons violate a fundamental law in physics known as CP symmetry, allowing physicists to make an absolute distinction between matter and antimatter." Fitch's passing was noted in Princeton University News, and an extended obituary appeared in the Washington Post.
posted by Sir Rinse at 4:50 PM PST - 6 comments

Here Is Your Glorious Hour-By-Hour Guide to Netflix on Valentine’s Day [SLMic] by Kinsey Lane Sullivan.
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 4:45 PM PST - 29 comments

How The New York Times Works
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 4:17 PM PST - 10 comments

This is a story about a lost cat, by Advance Base.
posted by theodolite at 2:15 PM PST - 20 comments

What Does the Internet Look Like? The Gothamist takes artist and writer Ingrid Burrington's field guide to New York City's internet infrastructure, which you too can go out and buy for that special someone in your life.
posted by jlittlew at 1:25 PM PST - 14 comments

What I Imagine My Boyfriend’s Ex-Girlfriends Are Doing Right Now (SLNewYorker)
posted by ominous_paws at 1:00 PM PST - 101 comments

Jackie Robinson West Stripped of Its National Little League Title [New York Times]

An investigation revealed that the Chicago team, which captured the attention of the country last summer, had falsified boundaries to field ineligible players.

[more inside]
posted by Fizz at 11:25 AM PST - 117 comments

Hader was a true soul aficionado, with an encyclopaedic knowledge and 10,000 records at home. Which is why he was so amazed to discover 38 albums by a soul singer he had never heard of. His name was Mingering Mike. Hader stared at the record covers. He read the liner notes. There was Mingering Mike’s 1968’s debut, Sit’tin by the Window. The cover art was a painting of a young man in a green T-shirt, good-looking, serious. The comedian Jack Benny had written the liner notes, calling him “a bright and intelligent young man with a great, exciting future awaiting him”.

Jon Ronson looks at the story of Mingering Mike (SLGrauniad), a long-lost soul singer whose records were found at a flea market in 2003, but who turned out to not actually have existed. [more inside]
posted by acb at 10:29 AM PST - 19 comments

Four minutes of magic on ice....
posted by Lanark at 10:24 AM PST - 18 comments

We Got Some of Our Ex-Boyfriends and Girlfriends to Review Us as Lovers(SLVice)
posted by josher71 at 10:23 AM PST - 33 comments

Tiny pigs getting belly rubs.
posted by phunniemee at 10:19 AM PST - 13 comments

Ten years ago, (MeFi's own) John Hodgman (previously) and Jonathan Coulton (previously) created a series of podcasts documenting Hodgman's Little Gray Books spoken-word series:

One: We Remember: How to Generate a Winning Character
Two: We Remember: Secrets of the Secret Agents
Three: We Remember: How to Negotiate All Kinds of Deals and Contracts
Four: We Remember: Hints on Public Singing
Five: We Remember: Brookline: the Town that Has Everything Yet at the Same Time Has Nothing
Six: We Remember: The Countries of Europe Described
Seven: We Remember: How to Observe Presidents Day (Observed)

More about the series here.
posted by carrienation at 10:03 AM PST - 7 comments

Life Inside Jabba the Hutt: "After interviewing puppeteer Toby Philpott at great length over Skype I decided to go a step further and create a mini documentary about his work on Jabba the Hutt for Return of the Jedi. This led me down many paths. Here is the result." (via tested.com)
posted by bondcliff at 10:01 AM PST - 11 comments

Wait, you think THAT'S duck sauce?
posted by Chrysostom at 8:57 AM PST - 40 comments

Louis Prima and Keely Smith attempt to sing "I'm In the Mood For Love." From Louis Prima - The Wildest documentary
posted by Mchelly at 8:53 AM PST - 19 comments

Vistorica: dynamic timelines of European history, 1500-2000. [more inside]
posted by Iridic at 8:48 AM PST - 1 comment

Jessica Francis Kane interviews her mother about working for Playboy in the '60s
posted by the man of twists and turns at 8:47 AM PST - 25 comments

Forbes brings us the case of multiple police departments across the nation that use PredPol (Predictive Policing) to help figure out where crimes are likely to occur in the future based on what crime occured at what time(when) and in what location (where). [more inside]
posted by Hasteur at 8:30 AM PST - 25 comments

The Equal Justice Initiative has released a report (pdf) on the history of lynchings in the United States, the result of five years of research. The authors compiled an inventory of 3,959 victims of “racial terror lynchings” in 12 Southern states from 1877 to 1950 -- documenting more than 700 additional victims, which places the number of murders more than 20 percent higher than previously reported. "The process is intended... to force people to reckon with the narrative through-line of the country’s vicious racial history, rather than thinking of that history in a short-range, piecemeal way." Map. [more inside]
posted by zarq at 6:46 AM PST - 57 comments

In the tradition of Nietzsche Family Circus and This Charming Charlie (previously), here's a mash-up of Louis CK's standup comedy with Cathy newspaper comic strips: Cathy CK
posted by Doktor Zed at 5:50 AM PST - 36 comments

Do the Scandinavians really have it all figured out?
posted by 00dimitri00 at 5:36 AM PST - 121 comments

Put down the boom box: 28 romantic gestures from Film, Television and Music that are actually creepy (SingleLinkAVClub)
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 5:00 AM PST - 104 comments

This was the official inauguration of indigenous futurism. The movement is in part about speaking back to the SF genre, which has long used indigenous subjects as the foils to stories of white space explorers hungry to conquer new worlds. Given these continuously re-hashed narratives of “the final frontier,” it is no coincidence that western science fiction developed during a time of imperial and capitalist expansion. Science/speculative fiction author Nalo Hopkinson, known for her use of creole languages and Caribbean oral stories in her works, writes that people of color engaging with SF “take the meme of colonizing the natives and, from the experience of the colonizee, critique it, pervert it, fuck with it, with irony, with anger, with humor and also, with love and respect for the genre of science fiction that makes it possible to think about new ways of doing things.”

posted by infini at 4:51 AM PST - 18 comments

Godus, billed as a spiritual successor to beloved classic God-game Populous, raised £526,563 on Kickstarter in late 2012, after being teased in the controversial mobile "event" Curiosity (previously.) A well-received demo at PAX Prime in 2013 fueled more hype, but the Steam Early access launch that followed was met with lukewarm reviews, and the release of a freemium iOS version heightened the backlash. It now appears that Godus may be on the brink of abandonment, in the wake of staff shake-ups, Molyneux announcing a new project, and an admission that Kickstarter pledges will probably not be met. [more inside]
posted by kagredon at 4:05 AM PST - 84 comments

The history of paper engineering in books, or the making of "pop-up books" didn't start as a way to entertain children, but in the search for more tools to educate adults, including some proto-computers from as early as the 13th century. Let Ellen G. K. Rubin, known also as The Popup Lady, regale and inform you at length, in either the form of a 50 minute presentation for the Smithsonian Libraries, or read through her website, where she has a timeline of movable books and see the glossary for definitions of the different movements as starting points. Or you can browse the Smithsonian's digital exhibition (the physical exhibition ended a few years ago). And of course, there's plenty more online. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 9:41 PM PST - 17 comments

Richard Sher, host of NPR radio game show Says You!, has died at 66. [more inside]
posted by starvingartist at 8:44 PM PST - 27 comments

Beautiful, leisurely paced video of a woodworker building with hand tools.
posted by bonobothegreat at 6:57 PM PST - 32 comments

Walter Pitts rose from the streets to MIT, but couldn’t escape himself. Pitts was used to being bullied. He’d been born into a tough family in Prohibition-era Detroit, where his father, a boiler-maker, had no trouble raising his fists to get his way. The neighborhood boys weren’t much better. One afternoon in 1935, they chased him through the streets until he ducked into the local library to hide. The library was familiar ground, where he had taught himself Greek, Latin, logic, and mathematics—better than home, where his father insisted he drop out of school and go to work. Outside, the world was messy. Inside, it all made sense. [more inside]
posted by standardasparagus at 6:13 PM PST - 24 comments

The Cast
New Yorker: - What happened to Alberto Nisman?
El Pais : - Argentinean prosecutor drafted arrest warrant for Fernández de Kirchner.
WSJ : - First his death was declared a suicide; now Argentina’s president says it was the work of her enemies. What about Tehran?
NYT : -Reining In Argentina’s Spymasters.
Grauniad : - Argentina investigates mystery DNA found at dead prosecutor's home.
Arutz Sheva : - Aide Who Gave Gun to Nisman is Fired.
Bloomberg : - Who and where is Antonio Stiuso?
Grauniad : - The shady history of Argentina’s Intelligence.
posted by adamvasco at 5:50 PM PST - 19 comments

In the fields of observation chance favors only the prepared mind "Friedmann’s journey from connexins to spinal opsins shows that, even in this day and age, it can be tough to predict what a scientist is going to find when digging into some well-defined problem, like synchronized activity in the spinal cord. Scientists are used to experiments turning up empty, but every now and then, they unexpectedly strike gold (and live for those moments)."
posted by dhruva at 4:19 PM PST - 9 comments

Charlie Brooker and Chris Morris’s 2005 TV series was a comedy about a ludicrous ‘self-facilitating media node’ in east London. But 10 years on, it looks more like a documentary about the future How the Nathan Barley nightmare came true
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 3:00 PM PST - 35 comments

Jeb Bush has published all of the (unredacted) emails he sent and received as Governor.
posted by Going To Maine at 1:59 PM PST - 95 comments

While a few still fret about the ongoing fisticuffs in the eastern parts and the reluctance of Greece to repay a few bucks borrowed for the weekend from Germany, the real surprise, anger and confusion enveloping contemporary Europe is the admittance of Australia. [more inside]
posted by Wordshore at 1:20 PM PST - 62 comments

A short documentary about Toshio Hirano, The Japanese Jimmy Rodgers.
posted by TheCoug at 1:11 PM PST - 8 comments

Bacillakuten, a Swedish childrens' programme about the body has seen both controversy and applause due to a music clip on YouTube was released as a preview for an upcoming episode about genitalia. Initially marked as adult content on YouTube, the video quickly saw several million views and sparked mixed reactions from parents. The composer, Johan Holmström, plans to release an English-language version of the video for international audiences on Valentines' Day.
posted by frimble at 1:01 PM PST - 34 comments

"a highly-automated, vertically-integrated manufacturer" Visit a zipper factory and see how a perceived design flaw translates into a more labor-intensive process. From the blog, bunnie: studios.
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 12:17 PM PST - 39 comments

Outlawry, Supervillians, and Modern Law Before the modern period, the ability of the courts to enforce their authority was quite limited, shockingly so by modern standards. ...So what was the legal system to do? Well, one common tool was “outlawry”, declaring a person to be beyond the protection of the law. The meaning of the sentence changed over time, and it ultimately disappeared with urbanization and doctrines like habeas corpus, but a growth in supervillainy might bring it back into fashion.
posted by Michele in California at 11:26 AM PST - 24 comments

Writer John Reed remembers growing up as a kid in New York in the 1970s, when his mother, artist Judy Rifka, was friends with queer artists like Keith Haring, Jean Michel Basquiat and David Wojnarowicz, under the lurking presence of AIDS.
posted by larrybob at 11:04 AM PST - 16 comments

A Beekeeper's Guide to Game Design
posted by danb at 10:28 AM PST - 7 comments

"It's Schrödinger's cat, unknown unless I examine it. Boy day or girl day? Let me open the box and check. These days it's usually a boy day, but there have been long stretches of time when I'm usually girl, and I'm sure there will be again. Sometimes it's neither; I open the box and can't tell whether the cat's alive or not. And frequently, it's both at once. A tuxedo cat, black AND white all at the same time, not sometimes black and sometimes white." Writer Naamah Darling describes identifying as genderfluid. [more inside]
posted by quiet earth at 10:16 AM PST - 62 comments

Instant Clay Davis. Joining the many other buttons that are out there, you can now hear your favorite public servant from The Wire, Clay Davis, utter his quintessential drawn-out statement of WTF.
posted by snortasprocket at 9:54 AM PST - 13 comments

Dr Phil without dialogue. [YouTube]
posted by Fizz at 9:48 AM PST - 47 comments

Or so say researchers in a new study in the February 9 online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Here's their paper's abstract: "Using human evaluation of 100,000 words spread across 24 corpora in 10 languages diverse in origin and culture, we present evidence of a deep imprint of human sociality in language, observing that (i) the words of natural human language possess a universal positivity bias, (ii) the estimated emotional content of words is consistent between languages under translation, and (iii) this positivity bias is strongly independent of frequency of word use. Alongside these general regularities, we describe interlanguage variations in the emotional spectrum of languages that allow us to rank corpora. We also show how our word evaluations can be used to construct physical-like instruments for both real-time and offline measurement of the emotional content of large-scale texts." And here are descriptions of the research in Science Daily and the LA Times.
posted by Sir Rinse at 8:41 AM PST - 43 comments

Sarah Hird answers the question, Why do Mammals Sleep? A winner is announced in the SMBC-inspired 2014 Festival of Bad Ad Hoc Hypotheses. [more inside]
posted by fredludd at 8:33 AM PST - 13 comments

David Graeber's The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy

Unlike the enormous and comprehensive Debt, Utopia of Rules is mostly argument, not history. It sets out to investigate the problem of "bureaucracy" -- basically, rules, and the simmering threat of violence that underpins them. Hidebound adherence to awful, runaround bureaucracy was always the sin laid at the feet of slow-moving, Stalinist states under the influence of the USSR. Capitalism, we were told, was dynamic, free, and open. But if that's so, why is it that since the USSR imploded, bureaucracy under capitalism has exploded? If you live in a western, capitalist state, you probably spend more time filling in paperwork, waiting on hold, resubmitting Web-forms, attending performance reviews, brainstorming sessions, training meetings, and post-mortems than any of your ancestors, regardless of which side of the Iron Curtain they lived on.

[more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 8:30 AM PST - 53 comments

Minimalist movie posters using only circles, created by designer Nick Barclay. [more inside]
posted by aka burlap at 6:51 AM PST - 72 comments

How YouTube changed the world.
posted by chunking express at 6:43 AM PST - 55 comments

The great thing about social media is that it lets you contact potential customers directly. However, if you're offering a service such as offering to sell tiny plots of land in Scotland to those who wish to style themselves Laird or Lady of Glencoe you should perhaps be up on Scottish property law. Because if you're not, you're quite likely to make the rapid acquaintance of one or two people who do. McPwnage ensues. Includes bonus reference - at no extra cost! - to a drunk Finnish rock singer.
posted by Devonian at 6:23 AM PST - 66 comments

She was a highly- prolific actress of the ’50’s/’60’s/’70’s/’80’s, a record-setting female aviator, an original member of the AFI Directing Workshop for Women, and one of the only women directing major TV shows in the 1980’s. Tragically taken by cancer in 1990, she’s been inexplicably forgotten by the industry to which she gave so much of herself.

You probably know her as that green Orion slave girl from the Star Trek episode The Menagerie, but Susan Oliver was much more than that, as the documentary The Green Girl attempts to show.
posted by MartinWisse at 6:18 AM PST - 11 comments

In Guatemala, the legal age of marriage is 14 with parental consent, but in Petén, in the northern part of the country, the law seems to be more of a suggestion. Underage brides are everywhere. They parade endlessly through Petén’s hospital in San Benito, seeking medical care. Most have traveled from the villages along the mud-soaked roads that flow out in all directions. I visited almost a dozen of these villages to meet some of the child brides of Petén for the latest Too Young to Wed transmedia project, this one a partnership with the United Nations Population Fund. Guatemala was the 10th country I had worked in documenting the issue of child marriage since 2003, after a chance encounter with several young brides in Afghanistan.
posted by josher71 at 6:14 AM PST - 4 comments

A new counselling service harnesses the power of the text message. Depression is common among teens, and its consequences are volatile: suicide is the third leading cause of death for Americans between the ages of ten and twenty-four. In that same age group, the use of text messaging is near-universal. The average adolescent sends almost two thousand text messages a month. They contact their friends more by text than by phone or e-mail or instant-message or even face-to-face conversations. For teens, texting isn’t a novel form of communication; it’s the default.
posted by ellieBOA at 4:48 AM PST - 44 comments

We’re no more or less imperfect or tragic than the average family. We don’t even have measles.
posted by sleepy psychonaut at 10:21 PM PST - 72 comments

Spider-Man is Marvel's marquee character, but due to licensing agreements has long been the subject of films produced by Sony Pictures and could not be featured in films produced by Marvel Studios. Until today.
posted by thecjm at 8:53 PM PST - 153 comments

"Stripped of tenure over a blog post." John McAdams, a tenured politics professor at Marquette University, has been terminated for publishing a blog post critizing a philosophy graduate student, by name, for telling an anti-gay-marriage student he could not make "homophobic comments" on the subject in class, in a conversation the student surreptitiously taped and shared with McAdams. The graduate student was subsequently flooded with hate mail and threats, and has moved to a different university. The case recalls that of Steven Salaita, who was either fired from or unexpectedly un-hired to a tenured position at the University of Illinois after a series of fiery tweets critical of Israel and its war conduct, which some called hate speech. Salaita is now suing the university. Can tenured professors be fired for what they say on social media? Should they be? [more inside]
posted by escabeche at 8:52 PM PST - 215 comments

Coming off a successful Kickstarter campaign, Innuendo Studios has released a really interesting piece of video game criticism, that is somewhat about Call of Duty, but also about the problems with reviewing video games; and it gets better as it goes on. Previously by Innuendo (and enjoyed by MeFi), an engaging meditation on Phil Fish, and the problems of internet fame.
posted by blahblahblah at 8:37 PM PST - 14 comments

You say you don't t like jazz? Too much harmonic complexity just winds up making everything sound like scrambled eggs? Well, I've got something gonna make you change your mind. Right here.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 7:28 PM PST - 37 comments

The sequel to classic b-movie Samurai Cop had a successful Kickstarter that ended September 2014. Here's the recently released trailer for Samurai Cop 2: Deadly Vengeance. With the full original cast (including Robert Z'Dar) none other than Tommy Wiseau playing the villain, and an amazing lineup of b-movie favorites, porn actresses and aged heavy metal musicians providing support. They thought he was dead. He was just coolin' off.
posted by kittensofthenight at 7:22 PM PST - 13 comments

Color Tiles is a simple, yet fiendishly addictive game.
posted by Blue Jello Elf at 7:14 PM PST - 63 comments

Moviepilot puts together a chronological sequence of (selected) scenes from Severus Snape's arc throughout the Harry Potter film series.
posted by Navelgazer at 6:42 PM PST - 33 comments

It's marriage day in Alabama. The Supreme Court refused to stay the marriage equality decision in Alabama, and couples started to marry today (lots of amazing adorable pictures throughout). [more inside]
posted by joycehealy at 6:06 PM PST - 88 comments

JONI MITCHELL: Ask anyone in America where the craziest people live and they'll tell you California. Ask anyone in California where the craziest people live and they'll say Los Angeles. Ask anyone in Los Angeles where the craziest people live and they'll tell you Hollywood. Ask anyone in Hollywood where the craziest people live and they'll say Laurel Canyon. And ask anyone in Laurel Canyon where the craziest people live and they'll say Lookout Mountain. So I bought a house on Lookout Mountain. [more inside]
posted by sallybrown at 3:31 PM PST - 64 comments

"Gendered Language in Teacher Reviews: This interactive chart lets you explore the words used to describe male and female teachers in about 14 million reviews from RateMyProfessor.com." Created by Ben Schmidt, a professor at Northeastern University, the chart lets you enter specific words to see how they correspond with the professor's gender and teaching discipline. Schmidt provides more background on his blog. Feministing compares the results for "genius" and "bossy."
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 3:30 PM PST - 35 comments

Early this morning, viewers of the FXX network were treated to an unheralded TV pilot for a show based on Robert Jordan's epic fantasy series The Wheel of Time (previously on Metafilter). Adapting only the first six pages of the 13,000 page series, it appeared just two days before film and TV rights were due to revert to Jordan's estate. Jordan's wife and editor has stated that the pilot was filmed without the knowledge of anyone involved with the estate, which casts doubt on producer Red Eagle Entertainment's plan to continue the series.
posted by penguinliz at 3:11 PM PST - 58 comments

Over 50 years ago, The Beatles arrived in New York for their first US visit, but what if ....

Having departed Heathrow on the 7th February 1964, John Lennon, in a playful mood, ordered the pilot to divert the plane via the Bermuda Triangle. Newly declassified documents reveal that Pan Am Flight 101 disappeared from US radar screens shortly after midday, local time. At great expense we have obtained – from reliable Russian mafia sources – an MP3 copy of the black box recorder of that ill-fated Boeing 707. This indicates that as far as those aboard the plane knew, after experiencing severe cyclonic turbulence over the Atlantic Ocean, they re-routed towards New York, believing themselves to have narrowly avoided aeronautical disaster. But on arriving at JFK airport, they were stunned to learn that they had arrived in the year 1994.

That's the premise of An Adventure To Pepperland Through Rhyme & Space, a two-hour ill-trippy musical adventure with golden era hip-hop musicians, from P.E. to Spoonie Gee, Tha Liks to Hieroglyphics and Large Professor to Salt n Pepa, courtesy of Tom Caruna, also the artist behind Enter the Magical Mystery Chamber (previously, and still online)
posted by filthy light thief at 2:24 PM PST - 14 comments

A Jewish magazine is testing an unusual solution for toxic internet comments. I think we can all agree that this proposal is ridiculous. Please leave your toxicity in the comments.
posted by pashdown at 1:24 PM PST - 73 comments

25 years after first seeing light as a 6-page story in RAW(Prev), Richard McGuire expanded his time and space-spanning Here to a 300-page novel. In Five Dials Magazine's 35th issue, Richard McGuire Makes a Book, "sketches, notes, phrases, inspirations, paintings, lists and photo collages used to create the essential Here," are presented for your enjoyment and edification. [more inside]
posted by Alvy Ampersand at 1:23 PM PST - 4 comments

The University of Glasgow's French Emblems project hosts thousands of 16th century woodcuts and etchings. The archive boasts an unusually thorough metadata scheme, allowing you to browse cryptic images of beards, birds in cages, pointed fingers, triumphal conquerors, and fabulous animals, among many other categories. [more inside]
posted by Iridic at 12:42 PM PST - 5 comments

As the city of Boston is continually getting buried under record breaking amounts of snow, one Yeti attempts to bring a little joy.
posted by sonika at 12:37 PM PST - 37 comments

Baby chameleon hatching. That is all.
posted by Mchelly at 12:34 PM PST - 20 comments

It got lost in the Kanye vs. Beck hoopla, but metal fans are fuming that "joke band" Tenacious D took home last night's "best metal performance" Grammy for their cover of Dio's "The Last in Line." The comedy duo beat out such metal mainstays as Anthrax, Mastodon, Motorhead and Slipknot.
posted by Clustercuss at 12:22 PM PST - 272 comments

Paint. A Short Lego Film by Jon Rolph
posted by a lungful of dragon at 10:21 AM PST - 6 comments

What is BitchCoin?
BitchCoin is a digital currency backed by the photography of Sarah Meyohas at a fixed exchange rate of 1 BitchCoin to 25 square inches of photographic print. This rate of exchange will not change, even if the value of the photography increases. As her work changes in value over time, so will the relative value of BitchCoin. [more inside]
posted by Potomac Avenue at 9:46 AM PST - 15 comments

"The global elite is basically looking for a safe-deposit box." Last July, NYMag published a lengthy piece on rich foreigners hiding hard-to-track money in NYC Real Estate (prev) This weekend, the NYTimes began publishing on "Towers of Secrecy" with the first in several deeply-researched pieces on the very rich, very shady figures buying high-end real estate in Manhattan: Stream of Foreign Wealth Flows to Elite New York Real Estate. [more inside]
posted by entropone at 9:31 AM PST - 67 comments

1,500 speakers, each playing a single microtonal frequency, collectively spanning 4 octaves. [more inside]
posted by OverlappingElvis at 9:31 AM PST - 56 comments

The Kreyos Meteor Smartwatch has an extremely impressive feature set: Voice and gesture controls. Full integration with iOS, Android, and WP8. Shockproof, waterproof, accelerometer and activity tracker built in. Not a hard product to sell; In fact, it's a marketing person's dream. But after an extremely successful Indiegogo ($100,000 goal, $1.5 million raised) it was time to build the things, and they had no clue how to do it. [more inside]
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 8:56 AM PST - 106 comments

Lebensader [YouTube] by Angela Steffen. A little girl finds the whole world in a leaf.
posted by Fizz at 8:27 AM PST - 2 comments

Optimism of Intellect

Thanks to a new wave of small intellectual magazines, an infectious buzz has returned to public debate in the United States. Roman Schmidt talks to David Marcus who, as a new editor at Dissent, is well placed to provide the lowdown what's driving this genuinely critical movement.

[more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 8:23 AM PST - 18 comments

"You know how every once in a while you buy the $40 bottle of wine instead of the $8 one, thinking you're gonna have a special dinner or something?" Senior Reviews Editor Lee Hutchinson wrote over instant message. "And you get home, and you make the salmon or the pasta or whatever and you light the candles? And you pour the wine, swirl it like they do in Sideways so that it looks like you know what you're doing... you bring it to your lips and after smelling it—it smells like wine—you have a sip? And it's like… yeah, I guess this tastes good or something, but really it just tastes like wine?

"The Pono Player is kinda like that, but for music."
posted by MartinWisse at 6:05 AM PST - 202 comments

When the robotic revolution begins, it will be lead by those that look like young Asian women who use to check you into your room.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 5:54 AM PST - 41 comments

"I was 23 and needed a summer job; he was 21 and needed full-time support. He’s one of an estimated half million people diagnosed with autism who are soon becoming adults — and who society is entirely unprepared for." (Note: graphic description of sexual abuse; SL Buzzfeed)
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 4:44 AM PST - 24 comments

Jails and prisons are supposed to be technological dead zones. In all but the laxest minimum-security facilities, cell phones are banned for inmates, as are personal laptops, tablets, and other Internet-connected devices. Federal prisons have implemented CorrLinks or TRULINCS, e-mail systems that allow inmates to send monitored messages to pre-approved contacts. But the wider Internet remains off-limits. In many prisons, the most up-to-date device approved for ordinary inmate use is the pay-phone. [more inside]
posted by ellieBOA at 3:59 AM PST - 13 comments

"Instead, most current systems, almost without fail, do the opposite. Moderators responsible for content and complaints, regardless of gender, are making decisions based not just on the information they are reviewing, but on the way in which the information flows – linear, acontextual and isolated from other incidents. They are reliant, despite their best efforts, on technical systems that provide insufficient context, scale, frequency or scope. In addition, they lack specific training in trauma (their own or users) and in understanding gender-based violence. " -- "Silicon Valley sexism: why it matters that the internet is made by men, for men", by Soraya Chemaly, The New Statesman
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 12:25 AM PST - 25 comments

Mamoru Oshii, writer/director/filmmaker of famous anime such as Mobile Police Patlabor, Ghost in the Shell (both the original movie as well as the sequel Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence is interviewed at TIFF 2014. [more inside]
posted by gen at 12:06 AM PST - 3 comments

One year later, has Michael Sam been frozen out of the NFL?

When I was a kid, I always outsmarted myself in multiple-choice tests. I'd always get it wrong because I over-thought the question every time. In my adult life I've learned that the most obvious answer is generally the right one. The answer to the question I've posed to so many - Why is Michael Sam not with an NFL team? - is also likely the most obvious one: because he's openly gay. Defensive ends with the same size and the same speed - yet with less production in college and the NFL preseason - are in the NFL and Sam is not because he's gay and he just won't stop being gay.

posted by Drinky Die at 11:37 PM PST - 70 comments

Ry Cooder shares an hour of vignettes about skipping school in the '50s to teach himself guitar by listenting to hillbilly radio, how he came to work with Flaco Jiminez, being schooled by the old time Cuban musicians in the Buena Vista Social Club recording and more. Music journalist Barry Mazor draws him out about his 50-year career in a delightful and highly entertaining chat - an hour didn't seem nearly long enough.
posted by madamjujujive at 7:18 PM PST - 6 comments

The Sweptaways, a Swedish group of "20 women singing choir pop songs," offer a unique take on the American folk song "Oh My Darling, Clementine." [more inside]
posted by banal retentive at 4:00 PM PST - 29 comments

Legendary former University of North Carolina men's basketball coach Dean Smith has died at the age of 83 (NYT obit). [more inside]
posted by MoonOrb at 2:05 PM PST - 28 comments

The Image That Can Break Your Brain: the McCollough effect [via]
posted by quin at 1:59 PM PST - 52 comments

In the witty, gory video game Stubbs the Zombie, the dead roam a "city of the future" circa 1959, forcing the living to do their bidding before feasting on their brains. Meanwhile, on the game's soundtrack (YT playlist), indie rockers both famous and obscure reanimate classic songs from the late '50s and early '60s. Despite the album's high-concept nature, many of these covers aren't nearly as jokey as they could've been, and most of them mix a real love of the original songs with distinctive approaches.

A look back at 12 modern covers of vintage pop hits (and one original song), with Ben Kweller taking on The Chordettes and The Drifters remaking The Walkmen, and more. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 1:50 PM PST - 13 comments

A Life On The Line: For four decades, other gamblers have tried to be Billy Walters while investigators have tried to bring him down. And for four decades, the world's most successful sports bettor has outrun them all.

For 38-year-old Rubalcada, being at the M is a pleasing trip down memory lane, a visit to his primary workplace throughout 2010 and 2011. Back then, he had nearly $1 million in his account at the M. Dressed in slacks and a sport coat, he would saunter in and bet six figures a week on NFL and college games. He was, M Resort staffers say, one of the sportsbook's "bigger guys" -- a high roller who could afford to bet very, very big.

But he wasn't that at all.

In fact, Rubalcada was a faceless grunt in the most successful gambling enterprise of all time.

[more inside]
posted by Room 641-A at 12:47 PM PST - 15 comments

Secret stash of Moon artifacts found hidden in Neil Armstrong's closet. The artifacts have been sent to the National Air and Space Museum for research and preservation. The article shows pictures of each one and where it was used in the Lunar Module. Even more detail over at nasa.gov!
posted by moonmilk at 11:54 AM PST - 70 comments

The USDOT has released a 322-page comprehensive draft report on infrastructure and transportation trends in the next 30 years. {322 pp PDF}
posted by pjern at 10:17 AM PST - 44 comments

A 19-year-old Las Vegas teen is expected to appear in court Monday, days after being arrested in connection to a July swatting incident in suburban Illinois. Brandon Wilson, who goes by the online handle "Famed God," was arrested Thursday in Nevada and faces an extradition hearing to determine whether he should be sent to face hacking and other charges. [more inside]
posted by thegears at 10:01 AM PST - 114 comments

Um, here’s an, uh, map that shows where Americans use 'um' vs. 'uh.' "Every language has filler words that speakers use in nervous moments or to buy time while thinking. Two of the most common of these in English are 'uh' and 'um.' They might seem interchangeable, but data show that their usage break down across surprising geographic lines. Hmm." And these lines may give evidence of the so-called Midland dialect. [more inside]
posted by wintersweet at 9:55 AM PST - 44 comments

Xanti Schawinsky had a prolific artistic life that spanned paintings to drawings, from experimental photography to stage design, from jazz music and complex theater work to exhibition design, commercial graphic and product design.
From The Faces of War exhibition and a few more. (Thanks Tom B).
posted by adamvasco at 9:50 AM PST - 1 comment

"The couple everyone believed was golden and normal and eternally intact, who gave younger musicians hope they could outlast a crazy rock’n’roll world, was now just another cliche of relationship failure – a male midlife crisis, another woman, a double life."

posted by Flashman at 9:47 AM PST - 75 comments

That morning, I was single and 37 years old, almost precisely the average age at which women freeze their eggs, although I didn’t know that then. Freezing my eggs did not change my dating life. What it did do was expose me, again and directly, to the ways we treat women when there is a decision to be made about their bodies: We judge, pressure, and publicly debate a woman’s ability to direct her own life. We fret about women’s susceptibility to “false hope,” about their being manipulated by the egg-freezing industrial complex, rather than believing women to be capable of assessing information and understanding risk. We judge women who pay thousands of dollars to freeze their eggs, rather than spending that energy advocating for those who can’t. We criticize women for not being able to control variables that are necessarily out of their control, something that is insulting to everyone involved. [more inside]
posted by Salamandrous at 9:34 AM PST - 46 comments

Is "the ultimate Wikignome" a "hero of our times" or is he a quixotic "grammar vigilante"? History may be on your side. A debate regarding the correctness of "comprised of".
posted by ChuckRamone at 8:50 AM PST - 90 comments

“[M]uch of the music he recorded this way, including many blues and work songs, are powerful expressions of overlooked cultures. But his quest for a ‘pure’ black music untouched by white influences was problematic... This much is undeniable: right at the time the Civil Rights movement was trying to bring whites and blacks together in a common cause, Lomax drew a hard line between white music and black music that — with help from the record companies — helped keep us apart.” How Alan Lomax Segregated Music.
posted by koeselitz at 8:27 AM PST - 55 comments

Do you love to hate TV? Join the podcast The Televoid as they "travel to the deepest depths bad TV has gone." [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 7:50 AM PST - 12 comments

Brian Williams, Under Scrutiny, Will Take Leave From ‘NBC Nightly News’ [New York Times]

Brian Williams, acknowledging that the scrutiny and criticism he was attracting was becoming a distraction for his network, said on Saturday that he was stepping aside as anchor of NBC’s “Nightly News” for the next several days.

[more inside]
posted by Fizz at 7:47 AM PST - 108 comments

Communi-bear Silo State! United States of Lions! Snow Wizards! This is Earth A-D, the world of Kamandi. (Click for glorious large size version.) [more inside]
posted by ignignokt at 7:19 AM PST - 28 comments

How Quincy M.E. Changed American Law and Saved Lives discusses the serendipitous way that a young man's need for medication for Tourette's syndrome came to the attention of a family member of actor Jack Klugman and resulted in the Orphan Drug Act of 1983. (main article by MeFi's own Garius) [more inside]
posted by sciencegeek at 6:40 AM PST - 16 comments

Soleá follows an aspiring flamenco guitarist around the streets of Sevilla. "Ten years playing for dancers, ten years playing for singers, and, afterward, you can begin to become a soloist." A short video from The New Yorker (alt link).
posted by carter at 6:24 AM PST - 7 comments

Women of the Islamic State: A manifesto on women by the Al-Khanssaa Brigade is a manifesto by women, for women "that aims to clarify the realities of life and the hallowed existence of women in the Islamic State, in Iraq and in al- Sham, and to refute the rumours that detractors advance against it." [more inside]
posted by Another Fine Product From The Nonsense Factory at 5:04 AM PST - 58 comments

Some of the real monsters of the mite world live in soil, where one can find predatory mites armed with a medieval arsenal of mouthparts. Some have jaws with sharklike teeth; others bear smooth blades that snap together with tremendous force; still others stab with sharp and deadly sabers. These beasts stalk the tunnels of worms and the tiny holes between grains of sand.

Not to mention the hairs of your eye lashes...
posted by MartinWisse at 4:16 AM PST - 32 comments

Desire Bot: A Twitter Bot That Re-Posts What the World Wants A Twitter bot that reposts tweets it finds that begin with 'I just want' and pairs the nouns used in that tweet with matching images from Flickr. [via mefi projects]
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 10:16 PM PST - 19 comments

"Death #1: Devoured by bats. Death #2: Sailed too close to the Elder Continent; my ship, bones gained sentience." People have been discussing Sunless Sea, the nouveau-Roguelike game just released by FailBetter Games. What else are they saying? Rock, Paper, Shotgun: "...the most delicious collection of words in all of gaming." Eurogamer: "This is the video game at its most mystical and revealing." There is, of course, a trailer. [more inside]
posted by jsnlxndrlv at 10:12 PM PST - 49 comments

Camera+Wolf , lots of teeth and tongue... From the Wolf Conservation Center.
posted by HuronBob at 9:03 PM PST - 12 comments

Dagny Of Gor; or, what happens when Atlas Shrugged meets the works of John Norman.
posted by acb at 6:24 PM PST - 18 comments

The station is called Junction Gate, a colony seed that never fully blossomed. You see plans for mines, habitat modules, research facilities, and shipyards.
posted by boo_radley at 6:07 PM PST - 55 comments

I know you may not care, but I do. I care about how to tell a personal story like the one I’m about to write, without falling into a million traps laid out in front of you. I’m thinking of the issues of trust and betrayal that come across between a writer and his or her subject. The transfiguration that inevitably takes place in writing. And my friendship with Philip Roth: in which trust was the fundamental condition, despite ambiguity playing a subtler, if ever-present, role.
posted by nevercalm at 5:56 PM PST - 7 comments

"Another simple pseudo-scientist who gets a pat on the back for finding what he was looking for. No subtle thinking here. No qualifying or consideration of alternate interpretation. No honest presentation of the limits of your study. No alternative explanations. This is why the majority of social scientists are flimsy. It is a weak science desperately pretend[sic] it has hard evidence for complex phenomena." [more inside]
posted by Made of Star Stuff at 2:50 PM PST - 61 comments

"A man who doesn’t help is 'busy'; a woman is 'selfish'." Regardless of your opinion of the advice Sheryl Sandberg gives to women in this article, it has some interesting (and disheartening) statistics about how the majority of "office housework" is expected to fall to women:

In a study led by the New York University psychologist Madeline Heilman, participants evaluated the performance of a male or female employee who did or did not stay late to help colleagues prepare for an important meeting. For staying late and helping, a man was rated 14 percent more favorably than a woman. When both declined, a woman was rated 12 percent lower than a man. Over and over, after giving identical help, a man was significantly more likely to be recommended for promotions, important projects, raises and bonuses. A woman had to help just to get the same rating as a man who didn’t help ... When men do help, they are more likely to do so in public, while women help more behind the scenes. Studies demonstrate that men are more likely to contribute with visible behaviors — like showing up at optional meetings — while women engage more privately in time-consuming activities like assisting others and mentoring colleagues. As the Simmons College management professor Joyce K. Fletcher noted, women’s communal contributions tend simply to “disappear.”

posted by Librarypt at 1:54 PM PST - 80 comments

Deep water freediving exposes its practitioners to a form of narcosis, which induces several symptoms, among which a feeling of euphoria and levity that earned this phenomenon its nickname of “raptures of the deep”. In the short film, Ocean Gravity, world champion freediver Guillaume Néry shows us what freediving looks like. In the short film, Narcose, he shows us what it feels like. [warning: may be vertigo-inducing, NSFW] [more inside]
posted by Room 641-A at 12:11 PM PST - 22 comments

Dylan performed no songs at the tribute to him. He just talked and talked. Here are some excerpts.
posted by Sir Rinse at 12:07 PM PST - 30 comments

It came to Al Gore in a dream 17 years ago: An Earth-viewing satellite at L1, streaming a live image of the "blue marble" to an "all Earth, all-the-time" internet TV channel. NASA quickly constructed Triana (nicknamed GoreSat by its critics*) at a cost of $100 Million, but, after the 2000 elections, the satellite was literally shelved.

After being pulled out of storage in 2012 --- and repurposed to also serve as a Sun-facing replacement to the CME-detecting ACE satellite --- Triana (now DSCOVR) will launch on Sunday at 6:10PM EST (watch live on NasaTV). [more inside]
posted by pjenks at 11:04 AM PST - 35 comments

Russia has a problem: Driving on the sidewalk. The remarkably brave activist group СтопХам ('stop him') are responding with cameras, windshield stickers and by putting their bodies in the way.

Episodes: • A Clash with Chechen Mafia • No Driving on Sidewalks • A Dude Shows Up with AK-47 • A Brawl with an MMA Fighter • Crazy Guy with a Crowbar • Guy With a Gun and a Bat • Confrontation with Nightclub Owner & Bouncers • Wannabe Gangster & His Mother • A Fight on Campus • Ladies' Day • Woman Goes Berserk • Hit & Run • Bully Vs. Wrestler • Bully Vs. Wrestler 2 • Magic Stickers • Passerby Punches Driver • Sticker for the Lady [more inside]
posted by anemone of the state at 10:32 AM PST - 44 comments

San Cisco are a band from Fremantle in Western Australia.
posted by josher71 at 6:39 AM PST - 9 comments

“I went on to the foreshore when the tide was out, looked around the riverbed and found three pieces within 20 minutes.”
(The Doves Type, previously.)
posted by scruss at 5:57 AM PST - 22 comments

Apotheon is a Metroidvania-style 2d sidescroller released earlier this week by Alientrap Games. The artwork? It's traditional. [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 5:45 AM PST - 23 comments

It’s a question where the obvious answer is the right one – new audiences live there. Just as Tumblr is more diverse than the Internet as a whole, so comics fandom on Tumblr is more diverse than comics fandom on IGN or CBR or Newsarama. It’s younger, queerer, more racially diverse and most obviously a lot more female – and those voices lead the conversation, they don’t constantly have to fight to win a place on it. It’s also – perhaps anecdotally, perhaps not – newer to comics.

Tom Ewing looks at the (critical) success of Marvel series like Young Avengers and how it's reaching a new audience, the Tumblr generation looking for "social justice and feels". [more inside]
posted by MartinWisse at 3:01 AM PST - 27 comments

Sex educator Colin Adamo is working on an illustrated guide to healthy and enjoyable sex for young straight guys. And about time, too.
posted by Bella Donna at 11:11 PM PST - 61 comments

"In 1914, a four-block-long tunnel was constructed through College Hill in Providence, Rhode Island to let the trolley system easily and quickly move from Main Street to Thayer Street and vice versa. After 34 years of use, it was paved to support buses and trackless trolleys. Though the trolley system was taken apart after about a decade, the tunnel continues to provide a portal for Rhode Island Public Transit Authority (RIPTA) buses to get up and down College Hill without being affected by traffic — but that is not the only purpose the tunnel serves. Despite several messages by the tunnel’s entrances warning passersby of the illegality of doing so, graffiti writers frequent the tunnel to spread their paint on its walls. I followed suit on two occasions to document it for others."
posted by ursus_comiter at 10:31 PM PST - 20 comments

A series of diagrams from A System of Elocution, with Special Reference to Gesture, to the Treatment of Stammering, and Defective Articulation (1846) by Andrew Comstock. To illustrate the proper gestures to adopt when public speaking Comstock has a figure enact out a section from Milton’s Paradise Lost, in which Satan, expelled from Heaven and finding himself in Hell, delivers a speech to awaken his legions.
posted by curious nu at 8:15 PM PST - 14 comments

19 Types of Beer Snobs - by Matt Lynch, Thrillist [more inside]
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 5:58 PM PST - 85 comments

Kubricks' 2001: One Man's Incredible Odyssey - "With today's article I've decided to cover the truly outstanding visual effects and design work from one of the single most influential and remarkable pieces of cinema of the twentieth century - Stanley Kubricks' 2001-A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968) - a film that just gets better and better with the passing years"
posted by a lungful of dragon at 5:00 PM PST - 35 comments

"Ida" (trailer: YouTube & Apple) is a black & white (and a Polish language) film from Poland by director Pavel Pawlikowski (this link contains spoilers). Hailed a film "masterpiece" by more than one critic, the film has now been recognized in America by not just one Oscar nomination (Foreign Language Film) but a 2nd in the broader category of Cinematography. For those interested in filmmaking, cinematography, and lighting, here is a look at three scenes from Ida. More? Here are another four scenes. The film is not without controversy, including Poles who are upset at the portrayal of their countrymen (and women) during the Nazi occupation and the Stalinism that followed WWII. Does 'Ida' misrepresent Poland's treatment of Jews?
posted by spock at 4:48 PM PST - 50 comments

Four years ago, in the wake of the Flashpoint crossover, DC Comics made a semi-reboot of their comics universe and introduced the New 52. This was, unsurprisingly, rather controversial. [more inside]
posted by Guy Smiley at 1:35 PM PST - 64 comments

I TURNED CAPS LOCK ON FOR A WEEK AND EVERYONE HATED IT
posted by randomination at 12:45 PM PST - 122 comments

Confessions of a Congressman: 9 secrets from the Inside
posted by andoatnp at 12:33 PM PST - 71 comments

A look at Emma Sulkowicz's (The Columbia University student who carried a mattress around campus as a statement and art project) accused rapist, Jean-Paul Nungesser (who was found innocent by the university, but branded as guilty by the public) and the messy intersection of colleges handling assault cases themselves, instead of police dealing with the reported crimes. The Columbia University student newspaper weighs in.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 12:09 PM PST - 145 comments

This article , about a software rollback, explains that drone maker DJI can use software updates to limit the places where drones can take off.
posted by ShanShen at 12:05 PM PST - 40 comments

Elevator Saga is a game in which you write Javascript to control a bank of elevators. [more inside]
posted by alby at 11:27 AM PST - 23 comments

The biggest, loudest, nastiest, heaviest amps the world had ever seen. How The Rolling Stones accidentally ended up using Ampeg amplifiers for their 1969 US tour, creating a sound preserved on their Get Yer Ya Ya's Out album.
posted by colie at 10:44 AM PST - 87 comments

BuzzFeed profiles Paul Elam, founder of notorious MRA website A Voice For Men: "Elam calls AVFM “the largest men’s human rights group of its kind anywhere,” though it does few of the things human rights groups typically do. It provides no services, offers no legal aid, and litigates no cases. It does not regularly lobby lawmakers, advise candidates, produce public policy proposals or original research." [more inside]
posted by Phire at 10:43 AM PST - 127 comments

Prehistoric Grave May Be Earliest Example of Death During Childbirth "It might be a bit circumstantial, but I think it's quite strong," Lieverse said of her interpretation. She added that there has been very little postmortem shifting of the bones found at Lokomotiv, and everything is in place on the mother, even her ribs and little bones in her hands. [more inside]
posted by Michele in California at 10:37 AM PST - 8 comments

Florida Man [vimeo] [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 9:49 AM PST - 13 comments

You can tell a lot about a Jewish male by the type of yarmulke that he wears. Like the jacket and shirt on his back, the absence or presence of peyes, the headgear announces to the world his family’s tradition and his Jewish denomination.
posted by Chrysostom at 9:30 AM PST - 72 comments

Beautiful jewelry from Japan's Albion Art [note: autoplaying music] with high resolution pictures and information. Start in Mesopotamia and scroll through to the 1930s or use the Age List on the right to find your favorite era. [more inside]
posted by maryr at 8:56 AM PST - 4 comments

The Science of Survivability (PDF) is a presentation by Anthony T. Brickhouse about maximizing survivability in airplane crashes. It is presented as part of the NOAA Aviation Safety Program, and contains many interesting facts about surviving a plane crash.
posted by blue_beetle at 8:49 AM PST - 20 comments

In a 9-0 decision, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled today that Canada's century-old legislation banning doctor-assisted suicide is unconstitutional. The decision is stayed for 12 months to allow for legal frameworks to be devised.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 8:48 AM PST - 70 comments

To commemorate American Heart Month, The American Heart Association and Go Red for Women present, "Just a Little Heart Attack" starring Elizabeth Banks. Know the Warning Signs.
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 8:28 AM PST - 12 comments

Mapping the Bacteria in New York’s Subways [more inside]
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 7:55 AM PST - 47 comments

Have you any spare mercury about the house? Are you well supplied with saltpetre, phosphorus, and oil of vitriol? Such domestic staples can you afford you ENDLESS AMUSEMENT! in the form of hundreds of science tricks from 1847! [more inside]
posted by Iridic at 7:27 AM PST - 36 comments

From neo-pagan marriage ceremonies to edda study groups and plans for a new temple, Iceland is reconnecting with its pagan past.
posted by infini at 7:17 AM PST - 8 comments

The Brazilian Town Where the American Confederacy Lives On 'I asked if she knew there was a connection between slavery and the American South. "I've never heard that before," she said. She wasn't sure why her ancestors had left the States. "I know they came. I don't really know the reason," she said. "Is it because of racism?" She smiled, embarrassed. "Don't tell my grandmother!"'
posted by kmz at 7:17 AM PST - 32 comments

All About Dominique, the Catman of Key West, FL. Please do not miss the section concerning his clowning days.
posted by josher71 at 6:27 AM PST - 17 comments

Keurig's attempt to 'DRM' its coffee cups totally backfired [more inside]
posted by almostmanda at 6:24 AM PST - 131 comments

Step Aside from US Centric. Eurocentric and Step into Global Debt. 2007 revisited That's the warning today from McKinsey & Co.'s research division which estimates that since 2007, the IOUs of governments, companies, households and financial firms in 47 countries has grown by $57 trillion to $199 trillion, a rise equivalent to 17 percentage points of gross domestic product. While not as big a gain as the 23 point surge in debt witnessed in the seven years before the financial crisis, the new data make a mockery of the hope that the turmoil and subsequent global recession would put the globe on a more sustainable path. This is not new but it is troublesome--particularly the concern that neither austerity nor growth will solve this.
posted by rmhsinc at 5:31 AM PST - 24 comments

"I know I cannot be the only one who still has a cardboard file of copies of Tim Hunkin’s genius cartoon strip, ’The Rudiments of Wisdom’ (previously), clipped weekly from the Observer and cherished through all these years. So I hope you will appreciate my excitement when Tim invited me over to Bloomsbury last Sunday to photograph the arrival of his automata and slot machines, prior to next week’s opening of Novelty Automation, his personal amusement arcade." There, "Londoners will be able to practice money-laundering, witness a total eclipse, lose weight, get frisked, get divorced, get chiropody and – of course – operate a nuclear reactor." Delightful! Hunkin, previously.
posted by MonkeyToes at 4:56 AM PST - 11 comments

How many plots are there? Matthew Jockers says six.
posted by the man of twists and turns at 2:52 AM PST - 61 comments

"The greatest single action the United States can take to fight terrorism is to close Guantanamo." So explains the letter from 40 retired military leaders, including the first commander at Guantanamo, General Hoar, former head of CENTCOM General Maddox, and former head of the US Army in Europe. Senator Graham rebuts: "Common sense would tell us that if you’re still in Guantanamo Bay after all these years you’re probably a high risk.” [more inside]
posted by blankdawn at 12:46 AM PST - 33 comments

In the mid-1960s, Dad purchased several porn novels through the mail. My mother recalls him reading them with disgust — not because of the content, but because of how poorly they were written. He hurled a book across the room and told her he could do better. Mom suggested he do so. According to her, the tipping point for Dad’s full commitment to porn, five years later, was my orthodontic needs.

If people know of Andrew J. Offutt, it's as a science fiction and fantasy writer. However, it turns out he was much more successfull as a porn writer back in the days you could still make a good living writing softcore porn novels. For the New York Times, his son Chris Offutt, goes through his legacy and finds some real surprises.
posted by MartinWisse at 12:37 AM PST - 36 comments

"Guitar Center, gutted and broken, meets its sad end. Guitar Center's financial condition (previously) - along with bad management and the hyper-financial dynamics of private equity - have finally taken this retail musical instrument powerhouse to the end of its long and winding road.
posted by Vibrissae at 10:40 PM PST - 60 comments

When Annie Dillard wrote Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, she didn't think anyone would want to read a memoir by a "Virginia housewife". So she left her domestic life out of the book - and turned her surroundings into a wilderness. The Thoreau of the Suburbs.
posted by paleyellowwithorange at 9:05 PM PST - 20 comments

In memoriam: Dr. Michael Davidson, cardiac surgeon, killed while doing a job he loved. A reflection on bad outcomes versus mistakes and taking risks versus playing it safe.
posted by treehorn+bunny at 8:26 PM PST - 18 comments

Robert Bruno labored for decades to build one of America’s most striking houses, but died before he could complete it. Is there a way to preserve his work and legacy? [more inside]
posted by jenkinsEar at 7:33 PM PST - 9 comments

I Find Your Lack Of Faith In Autonomous Cars Disturbing [SLMedium] (Previously on the blue.)
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 5:48 PM PST - 175 comments

Michael Pollan in the latest New Yorker about the mainstreaming of research on psychedelic treatment for depression, anxiety, and addiction. "The fact that a drug given once can have such an effect for so long is an unprecedented finding. We have never had anything like it in the psychiatric field.”
posted by vecchio at 5:46 PM PST - 36 comments

According to the laws of Newtonian physics, capillary action occurring in Earth's atmosphere should be able to lift water 10 meters high at most. For centuries scientists struggled to ascertain how, then, trees were able to lift water considerably higher. Finally, in 1894, Irish plant physiologists H. H. Dixon and J. Joly proposed the cohesion-tension theory which remains the leading theory today, though it is still not fully understood (PDF).

On the topic of Newton and his physics, a recently unearthed note from Isaac Newton's college days shows that he had it figured out 200 years before anybody else.

(Previously).
posted by Hot Pastrami! at 4:11 PM PST - 15 comments

Jurassic World has an official website, complete with safety tips, details on accommodations, webcams, and viewing times. Your adventure awaits.
posted by phunniemee at 3:43 PM PST - 103 comments

He has succeeded in the sort of environment least conducive to producing a candidate capable of winning a national majority. Over the past few decades, Walker's home turf of metropolitan Milwaukee has developed into the most bitterly divided political ground in the country—"the most polarized part of a polarized state in a polarized nation," as a recent series by Craig Gilbert in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel put it.

Thanks to a quirk of twentieth-century history, the region encompasses a heavily Democratic and African American urban center, and suburbs that are far more uniformly white and Republican than those in any other Northern city, with a moat of resentment running between the two zones. As a result, the area has given rise to some of the most worrisome trends in American political life in supercharged form: profound racial inequality, extreme political segregation, a parallel-universe news media. These trends predate Walker, but they have enabled his ascent, and his tenure in government has only served to intensify them. Anyone who believes that he is the Republican to save his party—let alone win a presidential election—needs to understand the toxic and ruptured landscape he will leave behind.

Wisconsin's governor will be announcing his intention to run for President of the United States in any... day... now. Last summer, TNR published a lengthy profile of his politics and persona: The Unelectable Whiteness of Scott Walker. [more inside]
posted by divined by radio at 2:32 PM PST - 97 comments

What manner of being is Tom Bombadil? • Why didn't Sauron command his army to search for Frodo? • Why weren't the dwarves corrupted by the Rings of Power? • Why was the One Ring able to be melted in Oroduin? • Why didn't Frodo just fly an eagle to Mount Doom? • Where are the blue wizards? • Why did Saruman need an army if he was so powerful? (multi-link Quora) [more inside]
posted by annekate at 2:18 PM PST - 201 comments

CN Train 406 West didn't seem to mind the snow in Salisbury, NB on Tuesday.
posted by pjern at 1:01 PM PST - 51 comments

Boehner, Netanyahu blindside Obama with speech to Congress
Controversy has erupted in America and Israel over an upcoming speech by Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu to a joint session of Congress about the ongoing nuclear negotiations with Iran. [more inside]
posted by andoatnp at 12:24 PM PST - 230 comments

During the 1980s and ’90s , the historic alliance between the wealthy monarchy of Saudi Arabia and the country’s powerful clerics emerged as the major financier of international jihad, channeling tens of millions of dollars to Muslim fighters in Afghanistan, Bosnia and elsewhere. Among the project’s major patrons was Prince Salman Bin Abdulaziz al-Saud, who last month became Saudi Arabia’s king. [more inside]
posted by standardasparagus at 11:41 AM PST - 40 comments

Medical researchers at Columbia University have developed a smartphone accessory that can diagnose HIV and syphilis in 15 minutes. The device is estimated to cost $34 to manufacture, compared to $18,450 for existing equipment. It also does not require an external power source, which is a major benefit for use in areas without reliable access to electrical power.
posted by tocts at 10:20 AM PST - 41 comments

The Fearless Comedy of The Nightly Show With Larry Wilmore [The Atlantic]

"Wilmore's show seems to be in service of such conversations rather than easy, quick jokes. Not that it isn't consistently funny—but it's finding the humor in dark topics, and finding a way into talking about issues many Americans at home might not be able to broach."

[more inside]
posted by Fizz at 9:39 AM PST - 34 comments

In 1945, as Allied troops liberated concentration camps across what had been German-occupied Europe, the British Ministry of Information commissioned a documentary that would provide incontrovertible evidence of the Nazis’ crimes. Producer Sidney Bernstein's cameramen accompanied US, UK and Soviet troops into Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, Dachau and other camps. Six reels of film, known as the German Concentration Camps Factual Survey, were assembled and edited in part by Alfred Hitchcock (supervising director) and Billy Wilder.

The final product "was meant to be a historical document and a teaching tool; among the stated goals of the filmmakers was that it be shown to Germans to prove to them that the horrors of the camps were real." But the project was deemed too politically sensitive and abandoned before it was completed. The finished reels, storyboards and scripts sat in British archives for years. In 1985, PBS Frontline took some of the footage and created a documentary special: "Memory of the Camps." On January 27, 2015, the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, HBO aired "Night Will Fall,” (trailer) directed by André Singer, which tells the story of the making of Factual Survey "...through the eyes of people who either filmed it, or through the eyes of the soldiers who first went in, to see what happened in the camps - or through the eyes of surviving victims who were in the camps." Film footage at links is disturbing and possibly NSFW [more inside]
posted by zarq at 9:26 AM PST - 28 comments

Dog Confused by Squeaky Toy via sadanduseless (@sadanduseless). See also Ninja Cats, Dogs That Deserve an Apology and Google Search Poetry.
posted by billiebee at 9:24 AM PST - 23 comments

John Oliver left The Daily Show for HBO last year. His show is fantastic reporting AND funny In addition to the best piece anyone has done on net neutrality, he and his writers covered Ferguson, The Death Penalty, and created a multi-network, multi-celebrity crossover joke, The Salmon Cannon
posted by bobdow at 8:28 AM PST - 31 comments

Today sees the launch of Shout Factory TV offering up free (ad supported) MST3K and much more content from their DVD catalog. [more inside]
posted by Otis at 8:18 AM PST - 40 comments

Why I Am The Most Important Public Relations Thought Leader
posted by ThatFuzzyBastard at 8:16 AM PST - 19 comments

The Hundred Birds Project

1 year, 100 carved birds, 100 types of wood.
posted by zamboni at 7:04 AM PST - 8 comments

Jimmy Fallon re-unites the alumni of Bayside High.
posted by Chrysostom at 6:49 AM PST - 47 comments

"We suck at dealing with abuse and trolls on the platform and we've sucked at it for years. It's no secret and the rest of the world talks about it every day. We lose core user after core user by not addressing simple trolling issues that they face every day. I'm frankly ashamed of how poorly we've dealt with this issue during my tenure as CEO. It's absurd. There's no excuse for it. I take full responsibility for not being more aggressive on this front. It's nobody else's fault but mine, and it's embarrassing."

Twitter CEO Dick Costolo addresses the platform's persistent harassment issues in an internal memo.
posted by almostmanda at 6:14 AM PST - 111 comments

"Visiting somebody around here?" Rambo Day was on July 26, 2014. Dana Saint was getting married in August . . . — for a few minutes, go back to the '80s, a world where new Internet stunt videos are not posted every day and enjoy a bunch of friends celebrating marriage the only way they know how, by re-enacting the apex of Stallone's canon.
posted by yerfatma at 5:56 AM PST - 4 comments

In 2013, cell phone footage emerged on the Dangerous Minds blog of The Khun Narin Electric Phin Band playing what appeared to be fuzzed-out, homemade psychedelic rock from the Isan region of northeastern Thailand. The recordings led sound engineer Josh Marcy to track down the band, who turned out to be a loose collective of motorcycle taxi drivers, carpenters, and priests, and field-record an album, the first half of which can be streamed here. [more inside]
posted by Sonny Jim at 5:34 AM PST - 22 comments

Erika Thompson teaches grade school in Whittier, Alaska, a town where most people live and work in one building, and is only accessible by a miles-long tunnel with limited hours. [slyt]
posted by ellieBOA at 5:08 AM PST - 34 comments

Before anyone posts any more comments about restaurant closings, watch a grown man break down in public as he recounts how 12 years ago he hung up the very pictures he now has to take off the walls.

Arrogant Swine proprietor and pitmaster Tyson Ho discusses what happens when a restaurant (not his!) closes its doors for the final time as part of a series on opening a barbeque restaurant in Brooklyn.
posted by ultraviolet catastrophe at 4:28 AM PST - 24 comments

"Philosophy of science is about as useful to science as ornithology is to birds." This is the reported judgment, by the Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman, on my lifelong profession.

Michael Ruse, noted atheist and philosopher, 'stands up for the philosophy of science.'
posted by the man of twists and turns at 1:56 AM PST - 74 comments

God, you sent gluten into this world as you sent your own Son, to save us, not to torment us with vague and possibly imaginary physical symptoms. So please help certain people to remember, gracious Lord, even as they shun and revile gluten, that it is still a creation of your own Almighty hand, and that, being God, you probably knew what you were doing when you created it. Enlighten those of us in your flock, O Lord, who go about slandering gluten with great authority and volume, even though they never heard of gluten until last year. [more inside]
posted by philip-random at 11:34 PM PST - 106 comments

Ross Ulbricht AKA "The Dread Pirate Roberts" has been convicted on all seven charges for creating and operating Silk Road. It only took the jury three and a half hours to reach a verdict. He faces a minimum of 30 years in prison (maximum of life).
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 9:16 PM PST - 80 comments

A song about a pickled egg, by British comedy musician Elliot Mason, which devotees of Devo, Information Society, the Tiger Lillies, the sketch show Jam, and/or vintage Dr. Demento may enjoy.
posted by gusandrews at 8:28 PM PST - 14 comments

Dear all the women who ever existed over the entire span of human history is a performance of the poem Letter to a wish by Emilie Zoey Baker, accompanied on the fiddle by The Man Who Wasn't There (Andrew Watson).
posted by Kerasia at 8:19 PM PST - 4 comments

Many people use the Midori Traveler's Notebook system as an organizer, planner, GTD tool; other people use it as a scrapbook-style journal (or journal-style scrapbook?). Because it is so simple, it's pretty easy to make your own. [more inside]
posted by rebent at 7:50 PM PST - 30 comments

Have you heard Noura Mint Seymali? She's a singer from Mauritania, and neither she nor her band pull any punches. Just fire up "Eguetmar", the first track on her album Tzenni, and dig that gritty, undulating electric guitar: Mauritanian through and through, but reminiscent of the blues and/or psychedelic stylings of the 60s, in just the right way. Then there's the beats: drumming so funky and syncopated, but in such a languidly relaxed way, that it harkens back to the way Ziggy Modeliste worked his drum magic with New Orleans funk legends the Meters. And, of course, Noura's voice: a bold, soaring and self-assured force of nature: stunning. Not to mention her masterful playing of the ardine, a 9-string Mauritanian harp providing delicate, spindly showers of notes that shimmer like droplets on a spider web. Please enjoy: Tzenni.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 7:20 PM PST - 28 comments

It's Never Too Late (SLYT) [more inside]
posted by mrbigmuscles at 6:45 PM PST - 29 comments

Follow the realtime path of a photon leaving the surface of our Sun
posted by a lungful of dragon at 5:08 PM PST - 26 comments

IRON REAGAN - "Miserable Failure" (SLYT)
posted by josher71 at 5:03 PM PST - 25 comments

World-renowned British graphic designer Neville Brody rebrands his studio "Research Studios" as "Brody Associates" after around 20 years of doing business. Reason? Clients misunderstood the services of the studio under its old name. [more inside]
posted by omar.a at 4:44 PM PST - 13 comments

Wire: Dear RadioShack, This Is Why We Adored You. Love, WIRED. "The time is near to bid farewell to that old security blanket, RadioShack. When the remote control broke, it was there. When we needed a cable or 20, it was there. But soon, it won’t be. The company is about to file for bankruptcy. Shares of its stock have been suspended from trading. We are forced to acknowledge that the era of personal electronics championed by the franchise stores that sold soldering gear and robots and had a Battery of the Month Club is really and truly over." [more inside]
posted by Wordshore at 4:28 PM PST - 129 comments

The Secrets of Street Names and Home Values
posted by d. z. wang at 3:14 PM PST - 34 comments

Shred Kelly, a "five-piece "stoke-folk," banjo-driven band from the ski-bum town of Fernie, B.C" have just put out a video for their song Sing to the Night, which may not be the most Canadian video of all time, but it's still a lot of fun, and a bravura piece of one-shot backwards-skiing stoke-folk film-making.
posted by Flashman at 2:11 PM PST - 19 comments

A collection of paper cut-out models representing brutalist architecture of London from 1960s-1970s. See also Warsaw.
posted by Combustible Edison Lighthouse at 2:09 PM PST - 29 comments

LEGO has announced that it will produce WALL•E and Doctor Who And Companions sets selected from submissions to the LEGO Ideas program. [more inside]
posted by Clinging to the Wreckage at 1:25 PM PST - 61 comments

The Upper Middle Class is Ruining America, by Reihan Salam, for Slate. [more inside]
posted by Steely-eyed Missile Man at 10:39 AM PST - 236 comments

My favorite parts of history (as might be obvious from my choice of subject matter when making books) are the ones that fall into easily-categorized genres, genres with associated visual iconographies. This is the sort of stuff I loved as a kid: pirates, knights, cowboys, explorers, romans and Egyptians and flying aces. Stuff you could find featured in a bag of toys or a generic costume.

Chris Schweizer draws epic badasses from history, featuring Matthew Henson, the first man to reach the North Pole, Queen Nanny of the Windward Maroons, Joseph Bologne, Le Chevalier de Saint George, Josephine Baker and ten more. Also available as a high resolution poster download for non-commercial purposes.
posted by MartinWisse at 10:01 AM PST - 6 comments

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded for discovering how your brain creates a map of the space surrounding you, and how you navigate your way through a complex environment. [more inside]
posted by Dashy at 9:36 AM PST - 8 comments

In the grand tradition of John Belushi and Joe Cocker, we now have Jimmy Fallon and Neil Young.
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 9:33 AM PST - 34 comments

Now you can shoot enemies with tampons on your phone, any time you want. In Tampon Run, a young lady fires tampons at her enemies instead of bullets. [more inside]
posted by still_wears_a_hat at 9:28 AM PST - 36 comments

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler: That is why I am proposing that the FCC use its Title II authority to implement and enforce open internet protections.
posted by blue_beetle at 9:15 AM PST - 101 comments

Some statistics and maps about jobs in "Advanced Industries", defined as industries that employ a higher percentage of STEM workers than the national average of all industries and R&D spending per worker above the 80th percentile of industries.
posted by wye naught at 9:08 AM PST - 4 comments

A doctoral candidate in Chinese History at the University of Chicago collects and posts photos of everyday life in China during the Mao era. "I try to cover as many different aspects of life during this time period as possible. Where I can, I note the time and location."
posted by gemmy at 8:56 AM PST - 7 comments

Lincolns, Taxidermists, Ventriloquists, Bronies, Reenactors, Clowns, Santas, Furries, Merfolk - Photography by Arthur Drooker
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 7:24 AM PST - 27 comments

Am I A Famous Writer Yet? (SLInfographic, Electric Literature.) [more inside]
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 7:21 AM PST - 13 comments

Want to hear Martellus Bennett's thoughts about fonts, including bold? Curious to see an impression of Regis Philbin doing an impression of Nicholas Cage eating too hot soup in Bangkok Dangerous? Ever wanted to find out what would happen when Adam "Not A Great Fit For Guest Host of the Late Late Show" Pally acted as guest host of the Late Late Show? During a snow storm? In front of no studio audience? With no laugh track but the muffled responses of the crew, who apparently hate him? With his trusted companion, Ben Schwartz, at his side, Adam Pally made a nearly unimaginable, nearly incomprehensible, at least partially unintentionally brilliant and absurd hour-long mockery of the late show format. Watch it all. [more inside]
posted by meese at 7:19 AM PST - 29 comments

The Quietus interviews Hank Shocklee on hip-hop production team The Bomb Squad and Public Enemy's legendary sound

I've got a big jazz background and listening to a lot of jazz records I got an understanding of how you can be eclectic, in terms of your musical scales. You could create melodies and rhythms that were atonal. It didn't necessarily have any real tone but the tone would be determined by what you layered on top of it. So, for example, because Chuck has this kind of baritone voice, Chuck becomes the melody, and the track becomes the accompaniment. If you take a Billie Holiday record, and a Public Enemy record, in a way they are very similar. This is where it gets crazy. And Flav, well basically Flav is a tenor. I read a Clive Davis interview. And to me, Clive is one of the greatest producers of all time. And he said something that was cool, he said the artist always has to be the star, and sound like a star. And the beautiful thing about the Public Enemy records is, Chuck and Flavor provide the melody, on all the records.

posted by Mothlight at 6:30 AM PST - 24 comments

A map showing the reading habits of 10 countries. For comparison, number of books published per capita in Europe.
posted by Alexandra Michelle at 5:05 AM PST - 32 comments

The Wall Street Journal celebrates the 20th anniversary of John Carpenter's In The Mouth of Madness. Meanwhile, at VICE, John Carpenter wouldn't explain his new album, so they got a bunch of artists to each provide their own interpretation.
posted by Sticherbeast at 4:58 AM PST - 27 comments

The Complete Works: Ranking All 121 Billy Joel Songs Vulture.com music critic Cristopher Bonanos spent the last three months immersed in Billy Joel's back catalogue. Here are his observations, along with links to many of the songs. As he says in the article, "Let the arguments begin".
posted by Optamystic at 3:30 AM PST - 159 comments

Steely Dan Live. Rainbow Theater, London, England. May 20, 1974. People think of Steely Dan as a studio-only band, but their second album "Countdown To Ecstasy" was written for a touring band. Here is a (mostly) complete, soundboard recording of a concert from that tour. [more inside]
posted by msalt at 11:55 PM PST - 31 comments

All bags and boxes in a given room must contain a cat. Any box, really. Big boxes, small boxes, irregularly shaped boxes—it doesn’t matter. Place one on the ground, a chair, or a bookshelf and watch as Admiral Snuggles quickly commandeers it.
posted by michswiss at 11:19 PM PST - 43 comments

According to Editors Guild Magazine. [scroll down to see the article; just the list here; via Hitfix]
posted by MoonOrb at 11:16 PM PST - 71 comments

Tom Bartlett writes for The Chronicle of Higher Education: The Science Of Hatred

What makes humans capable of horrific violence? Why do we deny atrocities in the face of overwhelming evidence? A small group of psychologists say they are moving toward answers. Is anyone listening?

[more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 10:37 PM PST - 13 comments

Locus Magazine has published its 2014 Recommended Reading List. BestSF.net has given its Best SF Short Story Award for 2014. Tables of contents have been announced for The Year's Best Science Fiction, Thirty-Second Annual Collection edited by Gardner Dozois, Year's Best Weird Fiction, Volume Two edited by Kathe Koja and Michael Kelly, and The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume Nine edited by Jonathan Strahan. And several writers have called out their favorite stories of the year too, e.g. Ken Liu, Carmen Maria Machado and Sofia Samatar, Usman Malik, and Fran Wilde, Michael R. Underwood, Tina Connolly, and Beth Cato. Quite a few of these short fiction selections from 2014 have been published online in full. [more inside]
posted by Monsieur Caution at 9:10 PM PST - 28 comments

Zigong Dinosaurs World Science & Technology Co makes animatronic dinosaurs. Some are large and imposing, some less so. Their Youtube channel is a 5-year-old's delight.
posted by dmd at 7:36 PM PST - 6 comments

How do you survive a disaster?

"In life-threatening situations, around 75% of people are so bewildered by the situation that they are unable to think clearly or plot their escape. They become mentally paralysed. Just 15% of people on average manage to remain calm and rational enough to make decisions that could save their lives. (The remaining 10% are plain dangerous: they freak out and hinder the survival chances of everyone else.)"

posted by Blue Jello Elf at 6:45 PM PST - 133 comments

On the eve of the premiere of his sitcom, Eddie Huang (previously) aka Rich Homie Huang aka Sars Blackmon aka the Human Panda gets profiled by Wesley Yang (previously) in the New York Times. [more inside]
posted by AceRock at 6:40 PM PST - 5 comments

The science of misheard lyrics (SL New Yorker)
posted by cozenedindigo at 6:35 PM PST - 48 comments

30 of the Best Pop Culture Spinsters Elisabeth Donnelly presents "our 30 favorite writers, artists, and fictional characters who show the freedom that comes from living an unmarried life — female characters who are defined by their wants and desires, and not characterized through the simple scrim of their relationships." [more inside]
posted by ocherdraco at 4:05 PM PST - 72 comments

This was odd. We don’t really special-case any language in any way, and even if we did… out of 32 Polish characters, why would this random one be the only one causing problems? Turns out, it wasn’t so random. This is a story of how four incidental ingredients spanning decades (if not centuries) came together to cause the most curious of bugs, and how we fixed it.
posted by Chrysostom at 2:52 PM PST - 49 comments

the university of vermont recognizes a third gender: neutral [more inside]
posted by and they trembled before her fury at 2:27 PM PST - 76 comments

Some of the music is worse than the worst album covers, which you'd think would be difficult [via]
posted by voferreira at 2:26 PM PST - 40 comments

In these days of copyright madness it is refreshing to see a dispute resolved amicably by virtue of an amazing coincidence.
posted by grumpybear69 at 2:19 PM PST - 30 comments

You're not going anywhere without your Big Game Liquid Slam!
posted by stresstwig at 2:17 PM PST - 8 comments

INTERESTING.JPG is an AI trying its hardest to describe the contents of random news photos. Sometimes it does quite well. Sometimes it thinks ice is sheep. See also: Novice Art Blogger. See also, if you're daring: the super duper completely not-safe-for-work porn-analysis robot @NSFW_JPG. Via mefi's own cmyr on Projects.
posted by cortex at 2:09 PM PST - 41 comments

Vermibus is a Berlin-based artist who

"regularly collects advertising posters from the streets, using them in his studio as the base material for his work. There, a process of transformation begins. Using solvent, he brushes away the faces and flesh of the models appearing in the posters as well as brand logos. Once the transformation is complete, he then reintroduces the adverts back into their original context, hijacking the publicity, and its purpose."

His process can be seen here.
posted by frimble at 1:09 PM PST - 8 comments

Some are kept in shoe boxes in a forgotten closet corner. Others are glued carefully into albums and kept on the family bookshelf. Many have been lost forever, destroyed out of panic or indifference. In Ukraine, whose tumultuous 20th-century history has spilled over into a bloody battle for its 21st-century identity, every picture tells a story. RFE/RL's Daisy Sindelar traveled to six Ukrainian cities to talk to people about what their old family photographs say to them about who they, and their country, are today. [more inside]
posted by Kabanos at 12:47 PM PST - 1 comment