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iSnort - that is all
posted by mattoxic at 10:27 PM PST - 37 comments

Long before becoming a national treasure and celebrity Twitter addict the 16 year old Stephen Fry sent a letter to his future self, to which he has now responded, in a letter first published in the 25th birthday edition of Gay Times.
posted by Artw at 10:19 PM PST - 36 comments

One Hundred Years, One Hundred Scores. The Hollywood Reporter and a jury of film music experts select the 100 greatest film scores of all time. One of the jury is Dan Goldwasser, editor of Soundtrack.net, which publishers interviews with composers, reviews of soundtracks and keeps a valuable list of trailer music - for when a new trailer uses old film music and you can't quite remember where it's from. [more inside]
posted by crossoverman at 8:51 PM PST - 60 comments

Yet another reason to be spider-averse - traumatic insemination.
posted by idiomatika at 8:21 PM PST - 39 comments

[Ezra Pound] worked on and for poetry as others might work on a major scientific discovery or a drawn-out military mission. Thus, as Sieburth reminds us in his introduction to The Pisan Cantos, when, on May 3, 1945, Pound was arrested at his home in the hills above Rapallo, he immediately put a small Chinese dictionary and a copy of the Confucian classics in his pocket. Working as he then was on his Confucian translations, he knew that, wherever the military police were taking him, he would need these books.

From Pound Ascendant by Marjorie Perloff. Ezra Pound's ability as a translator of Chinese poetry has long been disparaged by sinologists, such as George A. Kennedy in Fenollosa, Pound and the Chinese Character. Other academics have sought to defend him. Two examples are Zhaoming Qian's Ezra Pound's encounter with Wang Wei: toward the "ideogrammic method" of the Cantos and Stephen Tapscott's In Praise of Bad Translations: Ezra Pound and the Cultural Work of Translation (pdf). Eric Hayot draws the contours of this long-running debate and explores its significance in Critical Dreams: Orientalism, Modernism, and the Meaning of Pound's China. Pound's Cathay in full and a public domain audiobook version (iTunes link).
posted by Kattullus at 8:03 PM PST - 16 comments

EA games releases a new adaptation of the epic Italian poem The Divine Comedy that casts the player as Dante - a crusade veteran - who journeys through the Nine Circles of Hell to save his beloved Beatrice. [more inside]
posted by puckish at 6:00 PM PST - 51 comments

British poetry has a mixed day: Carol Ann Duffy looks very much like she's going to be the first ever woman poet laureate. U.A.Fanthorpe sadly won't be there to see her awarded the terse of Canary Wine [more inside]
posted by calico at 5:02 PM PST - 18 comments

Everyone needs a hug, and some people charge. (SLYT)
posted by P.o.B. at 4:29 PM PST - 25 comments

Growing up, Public Service Announcements were part of my Saturday morning cartoon TV experience. [more inside]
posted by Oriole Adams at 4:11 PM PST - 25 comments

Canned Whole Chicken. Seriously, that's all it is. (photos are SFW, but not for the faint of stomach).
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 3:15 PM PST - 110 comments

What do you get when you mix, unisex bathrooms, drugs, Eurotrash music and thousands of horny yuppies? From 1984 to 1989 in Dallas, TX you got The Starck Club. [more inside]
posted by punkfloyd at 1:12 PM PST - 50 comments

OdyseeTV explores the pressures faced by wildlife and habitat. Featuring video content like the Plight of the Snow Leopard, or a feature about manatees, Can Gentle Survive?, by conservation organizations worldwide. Limited at present to about 30 programs, but growing as more groups come on board.
posted by netbros at 12:05 PM PST - 2 comments

Louie Palu is a Canadian Photojournalist. His series, Goodbye, Guantánamo, is up for some big awards.
posted by chunking express at 11:57 AM PST - 9 comments

"The reason many people worry that the written form is dying, and the reason most writers consider online publication second-rate, is that no journal has yet succeeded in marrying the editorial rigors of print to the freedoms of the internet." -- The new journal Wag's Review attempts to bridge the gap. Included are an interview with David Eggers and a near 30-page treatise On Douchebags.
posted by HumanComplex at 11:22 AM PST - 109 comments

Lost in Space: What really happened to Russia's missing cosmonauts? An incredible tale of space hacking, espionage and death in the lonely reaches of space. "There are those who believe that somewhere in the vast blackness of space, about nine billion miles from the Sun, the first human is about to cross the boundary of our Solar System into interstellar space. His body, perfectly preserved, is frozen at –270 degrees C (–454ºF); his tiny capsule has been silently sailing away from the Earth at 18,000 mph (29,000km/h) for the last 45 years. He is the original lost cosmonaut, whose rocket went up and, instead of coming back down, just kept on going." [Via]
posted by homunculus at 11:13 AM PST - 80 comments

Glum Buster is a charityware puzzle/adventure/exploration game developed over the course of 4 years by Justin Leingang. Kind of like a more linear Seiklus. Windows only.
posted by juv3nal at 11:06 AM PST - 7 comments

A catalog of unfortunate moments in maleness courtesy of Awkward Boners (NSFW).
posted by hermitosis at 10:37 AM PST - 105 comments

The second most powerful United States Senator admits, "And the banks -- hard to believe in a time when we're facing a banking crisis that many of the banks created -- are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. And they frankly own the place." [more inside]
posted by Joe Beese at 10:25 AM PST - 54 comments

"a hoax that that continues to be used as an excuse for passing these bills." - Despite some vile rhetoric from North Carolina calling his death a hoax, the memory of Matthew Shepard was honored yesterday by passage of a Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Bill in the House. [more inside]
posted by spicynuts at 10:09 AM PST - 150 comments

Kenyan women call to mind Greek comedy, though perhaps they have other reasons to take a week off...
posted by mdn at 9:37 AM PST - 17 comments

Your laptop computer says a lot about you. Maybe my husband and I need to put more thought into our purchases. We'd want to make sure we're projecting the correct images, right? [more inside]
posted by Neofelis at 9:28 AM PST - 63 comments

After receiving complains from upset parents, FEMA took the PDF coloring book "A Scary Thing Happened" offline, and now the story is spinning around the internet. Created by the Freeborn County Crisis Response Team in 2003 as a tool for children to use with a responsible parent or adult to help cope with the disaster, the book has been used with children who have experienced disasters related to Hurricane Katrina, California wildfires, floods and even the Interstate 35 bridge collapse, to name a few instances. There have even been international requests from the Australian Red Cross to use the coloring book as a model to aid Australian children. Looking for more than the offending page? The Smoking Gun has made the original PDF available, and FEMA still has three other coloring books online. (More coloring book fun inside) [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 9:25 AM PST - 43 comments

Steel Town is a pretty cool little film made in 1944 highlighting Youngstown, Ohio's steel industry and it's workers. The shots inside the mill are amazing. Now, much like other old steel towns, Youngstown is working to make a come back in new ways
posted by nnk at 9:21 AM PST - 11 comments

Music Journalist David Stubbs has a new book exploring why when the audience for modern art is huge, that for new music is tiny. The BBC, has an article about this with an interview with the author and some sound samples.
posted by ob at 9:01 AM PST - 33 comments

Babbo's recipe archive. [via]
posted by AceRock at 8:23 AM PST - 17 comments

This presentation was given at the golden gate ruby conference. The author of the talk has posted an apology of sorts, but some people still aren't happy.
posted by handee at 5:29 AM PST - 146 comments

The Tarantino Mixtape from Eclectic Method is not the first mashup to cross the audio/video copyright streams, but they are pretty good at it.
via the always excellent giavasan [more inside]
posted by hypersloth at 4:03 AM PST - 17 comments

Vangelis: The Man And His Music (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4) profiles prolific Greek keyboardist and composer Evanghelos Odyssey "Vangelis" Papathanassiou in a rare 1984 television interview. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 12:35 AM PST - 36 comments

"The ability to convey the depths of despair, the heights of jubilation and the serenity of an abiding faith are all that is required to be known as “The Voice.” Unfortunately, very few possess the ability to do all that and what’s more unfortunate, we lost one of those few–possibly the best of those few–with the death of Vern Gosdin at the age of 74." [more inside]
posted by dawson at 11:31 PM PST - 7 comments

A story about a little squirrel and a big wall. [slyt]
posted by no1hatchling at 9:45 PM PST - 50 comments

TV-INTROS - Where all we care about is how the show starts. [more inside]
posted by carsonb at 9:24 PM PST - 60 comments

Microworld by Licht. More of Paul's macro droplet shots can be seen at his Flickr gallery and others' macro droplet shots in the Refractions in Liquid Drops group pool.
posted by Orb at 8:04 PM PST - 5 comments

Cool Antarctica is a site dedicated to all things Antarctic. There are pictures (penguins), videos (including, among much else, an old documentary about Edmund Hillary's and Vivian Fuchs' Transantarctic Expedition), a history section focusing on the famous explorers (e.g. Amundsen, Scott, Shackleton, Charcot and de Gerlache) and a fact file, which includes what may be my favorite section, an Antarctic slang dictionary (degomble: removing snow that's stuck to clothing before going inside - monk-on: a term for being in a bad, usually introspective mood, "he's got a monk-on" - poppy: alcoholic beverage that is chilled with natural Antarctic ice). All this is but a taster of what's on the website.
posted by Kattullus at 7:39 PM PST - 20 comments

Gather 'Round the Cadaver! : A new "coffee-table" book, Dissection: Photographs of a Rite of Passage in American Medicine is a new collection of photographs documenting what happened when bored medical students of the early 1900s met the camera.
posted by grapefruitmoon at 7:07 PM PST - 22 comments

Chroma Circuit a color matching game for you to enjoy. Each level has you matching facets on squares or triangles, playing against a par move. The rules are simple, but complexity ramps up fast.
posted by boo_radley at 5:59 PM PST - 24 comments

Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth by Apostolos Doxiadis, Christos H. Papadimitriou, Alecos Papadatos, and Annie Di Donna. Covering a span of sixty years, the graphic novel Logicomix was inspired by the epic story of the quest for the Foundations of Mathematics. This is another kind of epic battle that does not quite lead where the characters thought it would take them. Featuring Bertrand Russell as narrator and the awesome might of the villain (of sorts) Incompleteness. Themes include the high personal price paid for knowledge.
posted by incompressible at 4:42 PM PST - 24 comments

On April 23, 2009 Natalia Rybczynski, Mary R. Dawson, and Richard H. Tedford published their paper "A semi-aquatic Arctic mammalian carnivore from the Miocene epoch and origin of Pinnipedia" in the journal, Nature, detailing their 2007 discovery of the species they have named Puijila darwini. The carnivorous marine mammal, which lived about 21 to 24 million years ago, was discovered practically by accident, but as a "transitional fossil" is re-writing our understanding of pinniped evolution. It could also be noted that it was most likely cute as all get out, and is already the star of it's own mini documentary.
posted by vertigo25 at 3:39 PM PST - 28 comments

"It's not about hate, it's about love. Love of white people. That's the message in songs, speeches and casual conversation during a weekend retreat in Zinc, Ark., sponsored by the Christian Revival Center and the Knights Party, an offshoot of the Ku Klux Klan. There's no overt threat of violence here. No cross burnings (or "lightings," as the KKK prefers to call them). The only fire at the grassy compound, located at the end of a long, rocky road circled by turkey vultures, is a bonfire for the Knights youth corps to roast their s'mores. The kids draw pictures of white-hooded Klanspeople and sing songs about the oppressed Aryan race; rousing sermons are read from Bibles decorated with Confederate flags. Aryan souvenirs are for sale, including baseball caps proclaiming IT'S LOVE, NOT HATE and advertising THE ORIGINAL BOYZ IN THE HOOD."
posted by mr_crash_davis mark II: Jazz Odyssey at 3:24 PM PST - 114 comments

The World Health Organization, which had recently warned of the danger of swine flu, has now raised the pandemic threat level to 5, indicating a pandemic is "imminent". The WHO chief was quoted as saying "all of humanity" is threatened by the virus
posted by crayz at 1:55 PM PST - 333 comments

Frankie Manning, as seen previously, passed away, but his 95th birthday party will go on as scheduled which will feature a Battle of the 'Bones with the Wycliffe Gordon Quartet. [more inside]
posted by psylosyren at 1:48 PM PST - 10 comments

"Wookiees and Bea Arthur? Luke Skywalker and Harvey Korman? Singing and dancing and storm troopers? If George Lucas had his way, no one would remember, but yes, Virginia, there was a Star Wars Holiday Special."

Indeed there was (Google video). [Holiday Special previously on metafilter: 1, 2] Bonus Star Wars audition footage below the fold. [more inside]
posted by dersins at 1:30 PM PST - 53 comments

90 minutes of rally car crashes. That is all. [via]
posted by schyler523 at 12:59 PM PST - 101 comments

A game developer resigns in style [possibly autoplaying music]
posted by desjardins at 12:28 PM PST - 27 comments

Fyrdility has been busy with useful web building tools. First, he has a jQuery plug-in to provide support for the CSS Template Layout Module. Template layout demos using the plug-in here. Then, there's the When can I use... browser compatibility tables that let you know when you can start using the latest web technologies, like CSS3, HTML5, SVG, etc.
posted by netbros at 11:43 AM PST - 13 comments

In the town of Wilson, North Carolina, an ISP battle is underway that could have implications across the entire United States. When Greenlight began offering cheaper and faster internet service to the town's residents, Embarq and Time Warner couldn't compete. So they responded by sponsoring legislation that "would effectively either cripple or ban the service all together", and backing this up by phoning local residents to urge their support. The city of Wilson has responded: "[Embarq and Time Warner] don't want to level the playing field. They want to be the only team on the field." Time Warner defends the legislation, saying in part that, "Cities can cross-subsidize their service, using income from water or electric service fees to pay for the system. We can’t solict door to door. They can." (Via)
posted by Marisa Stole the Precious Thing at 11:14 AM PST - 55 comments

In a landmark defeat for the UK Government, the House of Commons has voted to allow all former and existing Ghurkas the right to live in the UK. [more inside]
posted by Happy Dave at 10:30 AM PST - 70 comments

FREE BOUNCY RIDES, courtesy of Club Animals. [more inside]
posted by hermitosis at 10:10 AM PST - 17 comments

Once dismissed as "the Anna Kournikova of chess" for marketing her glamour, Alexandra Kosteniuk is now the Women's World Champion. (previously) [more inside]
posted by Joe Beese at 9:42 AM PST - 103 comments

Last year, best-selling biologist Jared Diamond (prev) published an article in the New Yorker describing a cycle of revenge in Papua New Guinea, contrasting the conflicting human needs for vengeance and for justice. (Mefi discussion). Now, the subjects of Diamond's article are seeking their own revenge, suing the publishers for $10 million, claiming Diamond's story amounts to false accusations of serious criminal activity, including murder. [more inside]
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 8:00 AM PST - 64 comments

The Happy Hacker offers you the secrets and tools to become an Überhacker and Cyberwarrior, and even how to build a railgun. But who is this Happy Hacker? Though other folks are now involved with the website, Carolyn P. Meinel is the primary face of The Happy Hacker. She is a long-time computer hacker, going back to getting unapproved access to the PLATO system (previously). She started Happy Hacker because "all sorts of guys were begging me, 'teach me how to hack'." Her webpage gained attention, getting mentioned in The Happy Mutant Handbook, and being invited to speak at Defcon. But there are people who doubt her credentials, and others who are a lot more harsh. Regardless of the backlash, and the appearance that the peak of The Happy Hacker has passed, her articles are still being published.
posted by filthy light thief at 7:57 AM PST - 23 comments

Anna Skladmann's Little Adults. Photographs of the children of the ultra-rich in Russia.
posted by chunking express at 7:26 AM PST - 49 comments

Everybody knows that high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) is unhealthy, unnatural, and unappetizing. Or is it?
posted by Afroblanco at 6:51 AM PST - 174 comments

If you're in the mood for some of that juicy, satisfying, blues-inflected and soulful-as-hell organ jazz served up Jimmy Smith-style, check out these 1964 BBC TV appearances from Smith and his trio: The Sermon, Wagon Wheels, Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf, Uptempo Blues and Theme from Mondo Cane. [more inside]
posted by flapjax at midnite at 6:02 AM PST - 16 comments

OCD or amazing? Or both?
posted by orthogonality at 4:37 AM PST - 89 comments

! ! ! !!!
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 1:47 AM PST - 38 comments

The Dark Knight - On Sir Allen Stanford
posted by Gyan at 12:27 AM PST - 9 comments

Years from now, when people think about the quintessential creepy old man, they'll have one face in mind. None other than Ed Muscare, aka "Uncle Ed" aka horror host Edmus Scary who was on Channel 41 in Kansas City in the 70's through the mid 80's hosting All Night Live. He was on briefly in Phoenix around 1986 hosting Friday Night Frights prior to becoming a registered sex offender. He's served his time and has an offbeat youtube channel now.
posted by Catblack at 11:25 PM PST - 58 comments

Given all the attention the new Star Trek movie is generating, it's not surprising that the porn industry is attempting to cash in (SFW). What is surprising is that the production team clearly knows their Star Trek (SFW). Hustler's "This Ain't Star Trek XXX" appears to be a send-up of the classic Trek episode "Space Seed," (heh... space seed). In addition to the reasonable-for-porn casting of Kirk, Spock, and Bones (heh... bones), Hustler takes the effort to be faithful to even the minor characters and costumes (SFW).
posted by Jon_Evil at 10:53 PM PST - 54 comments

The Meatrix: parts I, II: Revolting, and II 1/2.
posted by parudox at 9:17 PM PST - 51 comments

Is Swine Flu Captain Trips? Probably not. But Mother Abigail's following is growing all the same.
posted by tylerfulltilt at 9:01 PM PST - 84 comments

After one hundred days, the wait is over: Pete Souza's Gargantuan Presidential High-Definition Executive Flickrdump is here. Warning: If you put it on fullscreen you won't get anything else done for a while.
posted by East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabaddi Champion '94 at 8:39 PM PST - 42 comments

Swinging on BART (SFW)
posted by telstar at 8:19 PM PST - 34 comments

Earlier this month, to mark the 150th anniversary of the birth of Edmund Husserl (born April 8, 1859; yesterday marks the anniversary of his death in 1938), the Husserl Archives in Leuven, Belgium, hosted a conference (audio files of the keynotes are available: here's Robert Sokolowski on "Husserl on First Philosophy") in his honor. Husserl's influence on philosophy is difficult to overstate, and continues to this day: as the founder of phenomenology, his contributions to logic, philosophy of mathematics, psychology, philosophy of mind, epistemology, existentialism, and many other areas of thought, has been immense.
posted by ornate insect at 7:22 PM PST - 15 comments

Do you have a rash? Is your knee deformed? Why does my tooth hurt? (and other fun medical flow charts) [more inside]
posted by puckish at 6:28 PM PST - 18 comments

New burst vaporizes cosmic distance record. "NASA's Swift satellite and an international team of astronomers have found a gamma-ray burst from a star that died when the universe was only 630 million years old, or less than five percent of its present age. The event, dubbed GRB 090423, is the most distant cosmic explosion ever seen."
posted by homunculus at 5:40 PM PST - 13 comments

Police in Denmark target bike riders. SLYT Police in Denmark take drastic steps to change the habits of bike riders...
posted by HuronBob at 5:34 PM PST - 49 comments

The Princess Taiping, a replica of an ancient Chinese sea-going Junk, was built to make a round trip across the Pacific from China to North America to show that Asian sailors might have reached North America before Columbus. [more inside]
posted by The Light Fantastic at 5:04 PM PST - 23 comments

Last year saw the launch of the first 'Men on A Mission' calendar -- featuring 'beefcake' photos of young Mormon men recently returned from their two-year missions. Church elders were not pleased. As a result, calendar creator Chad Hardy was excommunicated from the Church of Latter Day Saints. The church also revoked his "BA degree in Communications Studies at Mormon-owned Brigham Young University." Hardy has just released the 2009 Men on a Mission Calendar. Again, the church ai'nt too happy. [Photos- 1, 2 click-through to Java-based slideshow]. [more inside]
posted by ericb at 4:59 PM PST - 35 comments

A few years ago an old NES game called Sunman was discovered. Developed by a company called Sunsoft, it was clearly a repurposed Superman game, with the Man of Steel seemingly having been replaced at some point during the games development by a generic new superhero. This was likely done to avoid expensive licensing costs for a game that was due to be released around the end of the active lifespan for the NES (and would probably not sell well as a result) but this was purely speculation. Until now. For now a build of the original Superman game by Sunsoft has been found and you can download it for free here. [more inside]
posted by Effigy2000 at 4:12 PM PST - 29 comments

Man fell from the garden of Eden, and he planted the Garden of Herbal Evil, to justify Brutal Myths against women. Fortunately women have the Blissful Garden of Herbal Good to bind the evil herbs. (possibly NSFW, contains line drawings of genitals.) [more inside]
posted by fontophilic at 2:07 PM PST - 30 comments

Three years ago, David Nixon took over the principalship at John C. Calhoun Elementary School. "Thirty minutes into his first day of school at John C, a father walked into Nixon's office and said, 'I want to give you the authority to whip my son's butt.' Nixon was surprised, but after he thought it over, he decided to give every parent the same option." Did corporal punishment save a struggling school? [more inside]
posted by jeeves at 2:00 PM PST - 155 comments

"Jesus is to be mass-produced, imprinted on metal, given a reflective coat and sold for money." The Florida Senate is considering a bill to put Jesus Christ on a license plate. Governor Charlie ("No H.") Crist has come out in support of the bill (or at least in support of not vetoing it). [video]
posted by dersins at 1:22 PM PST - 148 comments

National Trust Releases 2009 List of 11 Most Endangered Historic Places , including Frank Lloyd Wright's Unity Temple. Additional detail and sites from past years here.
posted by Miko at 11:31 AM PST - 18 comments

Women in Photography — WIPNYC presents a solo exhibition of work from select photographers every couple weeks so viewers can discover and enjoy the work of female artists. [some nsfw images]
posted by netbros at 10:24 AM PST - 4 comments

Home of the Double-Headed Eagle is a short film by Ali Colleen Neff and Brian Graves, featuring the kaleidoscopic work of visionary architecture created by Reverend H. D. Dennis and his wife, Margaret Dennis.
posted by hermitosis at 10:00 AM PST - 2 comments

The last time any party had a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate was 1977-1979. With Arlen Specter's announcement that he is switching parties and Al Franken's recent court victory all but guaranteeing his victory in Minnesota, the Democrats will have a filibuster-proof 60 seats in the Senate. Eight years ago, Jim Jeffords switched parties to change control of the Senate from a 50-50 tie (resolved by VP Cheney in favor of the GOP) to Democratic control. [more inside]
posted by allen.spaulding at 9:36 AM PST - 224 comments

James Wallace Harris on Variable Star, Spider Robinson's posthumous collaboration with Robert A Heinlein, the elements that make up a Heinlein juvenile and what the equivalent might be today.
posted by Artw at 8:59 AM PST - 81 comments

On the role of MBA-based management culture in the current credit-crisis. Downloadable audio and transcript of a radio show that presents some strong opinions on MBA oriented management culture. [more inside]
posted by jouke at 8:57 AM PST - 59 comments

Yarl's Wood immigration removal centre has seen hunger strikes and rioting. Now the British government has issued a report finding that its children "are being denied urgent medical treatment, handled violently and left at risk of serious harm". The Border and Immigration Minister replies, "If people refuse to go home then detention becomes a necessity." [more inside]
posted by Joe Beese at 8:52 AM PST - 18 comments

Just what is the deal with Jughead's weird crown cap? I'm learning to share investigates a forgotten history of haberdashery.
posted by Astro Zombie at 6:15 AM PST - 101 comments

Craig Murray (Previously: 1 2) Attends the Formal Evidence Session on UK Complicity in Torture on Tuesday 28 April 1.45pm UK time. You can (hopefully) watch it on Parliament TV. If you want to have a good look at UK / US complicity in torture, this might be a good place to start... Please note he has said "There is absolutely no way I am going to kill myself. Just thought it might be wise to get that out in public!". Hopefully statements like that won't be necessary.
posted by debord at 5:57 AM PST - 9 comments

Some weeks back, the venerable Singaporean women's organization AWARE got caught with their bloomers down - over a hundred new members signed up just weeks prior to the 2009 officer's elections, and these new members promptly voted themselves into office. The whole thing was apparently orchestrated by members of Church of Our Savior, which is home to Singapore's largest ex-gay ministry, and whose members have been particularly outspoken against gay issues in the past. The leader of the insurgents, now president, Thio Su Mien, had complained in the past that AWARE was "promoting a homosexual agenda" in schools, which the Singaporean Ministry of Education denies. Thio's emails orchestrating the takeover have recently come to light.
posted by micketymoc at 5:27 AM PST - 22 comments

Getting into a lather wondering which of the new wave of URL modifiers - tinyurl, bitly, trim, etc - to use? Why not give gianturl a whirl?
posted by puffmoike at 12:13 AM PST - 49 comments

I have heard many explanations of the housing crisis, but First Things, A Journal of Religion, Culture, and Public Life had one that I had never heard: America’s housing market collapsed because conservatives lost the culture wars even back while they were prevailing in electoral politics. A number of observers have pointed to household formation as a key driver in the current and future housing markets, but no one else I have run across writes things like "the world is poorer now because the present generation did not bother to rear a new generation".
posted by Adamchik at 12:06 AM PST - 49 comments

We Don't Want Ads, We Want Art!
posted by BuddhaInABucket at 9:04 PM PST - 49 comments

GM is struggling to survive, announcing today tens of thousands of layoffs and plant closings by next year, and eliminating the Pontiac Brand. Meanwhile just a few weeks ago, the president announced a high speed rail plan [pdf] between many major cities. An interesting turn of events since the documentary Taken For a Ride uses interviews and public records to argue that GM deliberately killed off transportation via rail.
posted by cashman at 8:59 PM PST - 88 comments

OMG, Multi-Threading is Easier Than Networking [pdf, white paper about the multi-core future from Intel(R)]
posted by Monday, stony Monday at 6:30 PM PST - 19 comments

Touch screen. Awesome graphics. Online community. No, I'm not talking about the latest handheld device to hit the market, I'm talking about Control Data's PLATO system. [more inside]
posted by WolfDaddy at 6:29 PM PST - 31 comments

Get your swine flu shot! (Circa 1976)
posted by miss lynnster at 6:26 PM PST - 39 comments

A Presidential Boeing 747 along with two fighter planes continuously circled jarringly close to the tops of buildings in Lower Manhattan and Jersey City this morning. From the ground it looked as though a plane had been hijacked again, and the Air Force was attempting to force it down. Panic ensued. Another terrorist attack? No, just a top secret photo op. [more inside]
posted by stagewhisper at 6:09 PM PST - 179 comments

Nine days ago, an Air France flight en route from Paris to Mexico City, and not due to stop in the US, was refused entry into American air space, and had to be temporarily re-routed to Martinique. The reason? A Colombian journalist (exiled in Paris) named Hernando Calvo Ospina was on board. His crime? As a left-wing book author and contributor to Le Monde Diplomatique, Ospina has written critically of US policies, and of the CIA's covert role in Latin America.
posted by ornate insect at 5:29 PM PST - 23 comments

David Kessler Knew That Some Foods Are Hard to Resist; Now He Knows Why. Former FDA commissioner David Kessler goes dumpster-diving to investigate the neurological impact of eating junk food. [Via]
posted by homunculus at 5:26 PM PST - 40 comments

Fans of video game music and/or piano aficionados, I present three pieces from the Super Mario Bros series: Super Mario World's Air Platform rag, SMB2 overworld theme, and SMB1 overworld theme, expertly played "blind" by ragtime pianist Tom Brier. [more inside]
posted by knave at 4:19 PM PST - 41 comments

Been overjoyed with hulu and other online internet television sources? You need to know about Miro, the video podcast tracker and media display program for everyone. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 4:18 PM PST - 19 comments

Photos from the Neverland Ranch auction A while ago, Michael Jackson was short of cash, and decided to auction off the contents of Neverland Ranch, his combined palace/fun park, down to the last vanity painting and statue. A guy named Paul Scheer went along with a camera, took photos of some of the more peculiar items and put them online. It's certainly a unique collection.
posted by acb at 4:08 PM PST - 56 comments

How to brew beer in a coffee maker, using only materials commonly found on a modestly sized oceanographic research vessel. [Via.]
posted by mudpuppie at 3:28 PM PST - 38 comments

By the time he was twenty years old, artist, writer, and adventurer Everett Ruess was paling around with Dorothea Lange and Ansel Adams and had spent several years trekking around the southwest United States. In November 1934, Ruess left Escalante, Utah and disappeared - never to be seen again. Seventy-five years later, Ruess has been found. (previously on MeFi)
posted by quartzcity at 2:35 PM PST - 17 comments

Some have questioned Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner's neutrality in dealing with the elite of the financial community. Here's his calendar [150MB pdf] for the last two years. You decide.
posted by Xurando at 2:32 PM PST - 31 comments

IBM Research is planning on working on taking artificial intelligence beyond master-level Chess (previously), and on to question answering with a computing system that has been in development for the past two years. Named "Watson," after the I.B.M. founder, Thomas J. Watson Sr., the system will challenge human contestants at Jeopardy (previously). Watson's success depends as much on its ability to understand and respond to the subtleties of human language as it does on the extent of its knowledge database. Don't worry, Alex Trebek knows what's in store. (via)
posted by filthy light thief at 12:45 PM PST - 45 comments

The seven deadly sins, mapped across the USA
posted by jtron at 11:57 AM PST - 60 comments

Unemployment: good for the heart and the soul. "In studies over the past 10 years, Ruhm has consistently found death rates decline during recessions and rise when the economy expands. If unemployment rises 1 percent, he estimates the death rate will fall by about half a percent."
posted by dersins at 11:13 AM PST - 38 comments

I left this here for you to read: You can't buy this magazine in bookstores, and you can't subscribe to it. If you do find an issue, it's purely by chance: each month, 50 issues are printed and left in public places across the US and Canada. Each free, collaboratively produced, handmade issue contains short articles, small greyscale images, and sometimes tiny flat objects attached to the pages. [more inside]
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 11:11 AM PST - 36 comments

You wake up. Yawn. Wipe the sleep and other detritus that may have accumulated from your eyes. God, last night sure rocked. But... what did you do? It's all kind of hazy. Something about a bottle of rum, a statue, and some clown portraits by Red Skelton. Or at least you hope they were portraits. You remember sending out some text messages... but you'll be damned if you remember what they were. That's where Texts From Last Night comes in. Now your very possibly true, but most likely fake, nocturnal e-missives live on in the imaginations of the rest of the world forever. Much like your shame.
posted by tittergrrl at 11:09 AM PST - 45 comments

During the last lap of the NASCAR race at Talladega Super Speedway the car in the lead got tapped by the second place car and went airborne and smashed into the catch fence. The frightening wreck resulted in injuries to seven fans. NASCAR has been using the dreaded restrictor plate (a plate that fits over the carburetor and restricts the flow of gasoline and slows the cars down) since 1987 after Bobby Allison had a similar wreck at the same track. NASCAR officials still give lip service to their commitment to safety but it's well known that NASCAR doesn't really do anything until someone dies in a wreck. David Poole, who writes for the Charlotte Observer is one of the few members of the media calling NASCAR out on this.
posted by zzazazz at 10:47 AM PST - 118 comments

Five US representatives arrested in act of civil disobedience in front of the Sudanese embassy, part of the Save Darfur Coalition's campaign to bring attention to genocide there. One of them, Rep. John Lewis, has seen jail before.
posted by l33tpolicywonk at 10:30 AM PST - 30 comments

Mark C. Taylor, the chairman of the religion department at Columbia, offers a radical proposal in The New York Times for the restructuring of the American university system. Two key components of the proposal entail ending tenure and shuttering academic departments—replacing disciplines with problems, and then tackling them with a cooperative and multidisciplinary approach, e.g. The Department of the Future of Water made up of geologists, anthropologists, political scientists, and ethicists. Should we End the University as We Know It?
posted by Toekneesan at 9:41 AM PST - 84 comments

Flickr geotagging creates ghost maps.
posted by Artw at 8:57 AM PST - 13 comments

Self Portrait of the painter Tamara de Lempicka; Born Maria Gorska 1898 in Poland. Lempicka lived a Life of Deco and Decadence. Her portraits are known for mixing “lighting by Caravaggio, tubism by Fernand Léger and lipstick by Chanel”. Her Complete works are viewable as a slideshow. Criticised as portraying the dubious glamour and discipline of fascism; she became the most talked about Art Deco painter of her time; her erotic portraits are testaments of the glittering 1920's. Here is a reassessment (pdf). She died in 1980 and her ashes were scattered over the volcano Popocatepetl . (wiki) (some links nsfw)
posted by adamvasco at 8:54 AM PST - 12 comments

Design You Trust is a design blog and community that allows public posting like MetaFilter. Recent posts that I found interesting include Diz Decor Vinyl Stickers and Tetris Furniture and A Man Among Bears. This is an active community with several daily posts to choose from. [some posts nsfw]
posted by netbros at 7:59 AM PST - 7 comments

Public Collectors is an eclectic archive of off-line and on-line collections to which anyone can contribute. It is "founded upon the concern that there are many types of cultural artifacts that public libraries, museums and other institutions and archives either do not collect or do not make freely accessible." [more inside]
posted by stbalbach at 6:03 AM PST - 9 comments

Tape Op Magazine exposes Sufjan Stevens' ghetto recording techniques. Via The Buddy Project
posted by chuckdarwin at 2:16 AM PST - 39 comments

From the Dungeon to the Dictionary. A brief discussion of the origins of that least popular form of government, the magocracy, the author analyzes the dweomer of the word itself, consulting many a hefty libram in the process.
posted by kaibutsu at 12:19 AM PST - 78 comments

Windosill New mac/pc downloadable flash thingy from Vectorpark. Free first half, $3 for the rest. [more inside]
posted by juv3nal at 12:09 AM PST - 22 comments

How wrong is it to use a kitten for personal sexual pleasure? Depends on whether you've washed your hands.
posted by limon at 9:02 PM PST - 90 comments

I STEAL YOUR MONEY. Not for the easily-color-blinded. Plenty of good insane here. Click the big green X and go exploring. TORMENT is particularly busy.
posted by Devils Rancher at 7:58 PM PST - 35 comments

Amanda Palmer, of Dresden Dolls fame, returns to her high school in Lexington, MA to assist with an original, student-written play. Running May 7-9th at Lexington High School, the play, entitled "With The Needle That Sings in Her Heart", is inspired by (and features live music from) Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, and is about "Anne Frank as imagined by an artist, and about how Anne uses her imagination and fantasy-mind to escape the horrors she experiences in a death camp." [more inside]
posted by The Pusher Robot at 7:18 PM PST - 40 comments

The Dzrtgrls explore mines, ghost towns, rockhounding spots, petroglyphs, geocaching and metal detecting sites, and take lots of great pictures in the process.
posted by rollbiz at 6:55 PM PST - 12 comments

Maira Kalman, illustrator, author, artist, and designer, visited the United States Supreme Court. She recounts her experience and shares her reflections in this wonderfully illustrated blog.
posted by New Frontier at 6:10 PM PST - 9 comments

Welcome to the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, located to the right side of India, where you can take a ride on an Elephant on the Beach, swim with the local Fauna, and snorkel or scuba dive to your merriment. [more inside]
posted by hadjiboy at 6:00 PM PST - 10 comments

Violin. Them Heavy People. Egypt. The Kate Bush 1979 Xmas Special (QLYT)
posted by fire&wings at 5:26 PM PST - 21 comments

Dame Daphne Sheldrick runs an orphanage in Kenya. For elephants. The orphanage has been the focus of a report on 60 Minutes and a special called "The Elephant Diaries" on BBC1. At the orphanage, elephants are taught skills they will need to know in the wild, including how to play football.
posted by grapefruitmoon at 5:24 PM PST - 11 comments

My gut reaction was that the story--although a legitimate consumer complaint—seemed to reinforce a cultural stereotype about Black people and chicken. I know for a fact that no one on our staff meant for that to be the point of the story, but the fear that we would be accused of this sounded an alarm to me. It’s sad that I even had to worry about this.

Last week a couple of Popeye's restaurants in Rochester ran out of chicken. And local ABC affiliate WHAM decided to run a story. Some people complained, and WHAM responded. Warning: Second link contains some idiocy.
posted by hifiparasol at 4:28 PM PST - 129 comments

Look at this lovely hamster.
posted by william_boot at 4:11 PM PST - 36 comments

The global financial crisis has severely affected the Russian economy. The unstable situation in the country has contributed to a growing rift between Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and President Dmitry Medvedev. As increasing numbers of Russians become disillusioned with Putin's promise of comfort and security in exchange for authoritarianism, Medvedev has shown some willingness to take the country in a more liberal direction. Some analysts, however, remain unconvinced.
posted by nasreddin at 4:01 PM PST - 25 comments

Enlightenment Therapy: How a Zen master found the light (again) on the analyst’s couch. [Via]
posted by homunculus at 2:24 PM PST - 37 comments

Moody's Collectibles sells vintage postcards, but they also make available a huge catalogue of their stock. You can browse geographically by US State, by country, and by topic. Or, you can search for anything from alligators to the California Zephyr. They also have a blog. [more inside]
posted by Rumple at 2:23 PM PST - 8 comments

Legislation has been introduced in the U.S. Congress to repeal mandatory minimum sentences associated with drug offenses. If passed, the federal government would join eighteen other states in abandoning the "tough on crime" stance of the 1980's when it comes to drug offenders. State reforms include including New York's legislative repeal of the Rockefeller Drug Laws, Michigan's repeal of 650 lifer sentencing, North Dakota's repeal of one-year mandatory minimum sentences for first-time drug offenders, Arizona's Proposition 200, which required probation and treatment for nonviolent drug offenders, Louisiana's decision to restore eligibility for parole and probation to nonviolent offenders, and the Kansas Sentencing Commission's recommendation for mandatory treatment for nonviolent offenders. [more inside]
posted by Law Talkin' Guy at 1:03 PM PST - 46 comments

No matter their approach, the typical French physician who accepted the notion of male hysteria continued to think that its victims were in some way sexually abnormal: "Thus, despite Charcot's innovative work, the male victim of hysteria in late-nineteenth century French medical imagination was still frequently envisioned as an effeminate heterosexual, an overt homosexual, or a physical or emotional hermaphrodite." If not different sexually, male hysterics were said to be different in other ways, such as race or nationality, among whom African, African-American, south Asian, Arab, or Eastern European Jewish men predominated. Outside of France, other methods of denial appeared, such as the suggestion that male hysteria was restricted to Frenchmen. The medical literature of the time is full of evasions and denials and contradictions of the truths that Charcot had quite obviously demonstrated.

- Macho Misery, an extensive and interesting review of Hysterical Men: The Hidden History of Male Nervous Illness. [more inside]
posted by Kattullus at 9:37 AM PST - 8 comments

Do you have good or bad memories of prom? Maybe you wish you would have gone to prom in a sweet ride or without your embarrassing brother. Maybe you just had problems getting a date. Whatever it is "prom is a notoriously awkward situation." Maybe you had a reason to stay home from prom. Whatever your reason, not going to prom is considered unamerican. Of course dancing at prom may make you ungodly(pdf). If you do decide to go to prom do remember that the twirlability is the most important thing. Finally, don't forget prom is All About You
posted by aetg at 7:47 AM PST - 134 comments

Count Chocula::Freakies::Honda 600::Quisp::Pufnstuf::Spümcø - Quaker "Quisp"
posted by vronsky at 8:33 PM PST - 41 comments

This week's New York Times Punch Awards notification brought the news that award winning Boston Globe's The Big Picture was developed and promoted largely on Alan Taylor's own time. The most recent entry is a look at life from the other side of the border by Peering Into North Korea.
posted by netbros at 8:12 PM PST - 23 comments

Matt Smith wrote an SF Weekly cover story this week revealing that the state had given almost $50,000 to Kink.com, the world's largest fetish porn company, for job training. The article resulted in the funding being revoked. Violet Blue responded in detail, interviewing many of the performers. The Bay Guardian tried to interview Smith but he declined to be interviewed. Smith responded to Violet on his blog, citing freedom of speech. Violet says she's not done with yet (NSFW). Now all the San Francisco outlets are writing about it including SFist, Bay Guardian, and The Sword.
posted by Stephen Elliott at 5:13 PM PST - 78 comments

We Got Time [QT video, YT video] is a mind-boggling music video by David Wilson for the band Moray McLaren. It comes with a handy making-of video that explains how the in-camera effects were achieved, the platter artwork, and some very nice behind the scenes stills.
posted by carsonb at 4:39 PM PST - 29 comments

Leonard Cohen live in London, July 18, 2008. The entire two and a half hour concert. Available for one week only. Previously: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.
posted by msalt at 3:56 PM PST - 76 comments

Tour the AlloSphere, a stunning new way to see scientific data. In this TED talk, composer JoAnn Kuchera-Morin describes some visualizations available at the AlloSphere Research Facility, where researchers stand inside a 3-story sphere and are surrounded by visual and sonic representations of data. Some specific visualizations in the video: fly through a brain, biogenerative algorithms, lattice of atoms, Schrodinger equation, and electron spin.
posted by twoleftfeet at 2:53 PM PST - 30 comments

Lunar Lander 3D in 5k
posted by gwint at 2:10 PM PST - 39 comments

Bea Arthur has died. She is best known for her portrayal of Maude Findlay, Edith Bunker's cousin on All in the Family. Her character spawned a CBS spin-off -- Maude. In 1985 Arthur was cast as Dorothy Zbornak in the hit sitcom the Golden Girls. Bea -- thank you for being a friend.
posted by ericb at 1:03 PM PST - 155 comments

Homophobia is still a bully's deadliest weapon.
posted by hermitosis at 11:42 AM PST - 204 comments

Keynes & Marx thought "that productivity would grow sufficiently to allow our needs to be met with very little labour," and that humankind's biggest preoccupation in the future would be leading lives of comfortable (or comparative) leisure. Obviously, that has not yet come to pass. But why?** Yochai Benkler (previously), for one, is working on it... [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 11:42 AM PST - 37 comments

Experts at WHO and elsewhere believe that the world is now closer to another influenza pandemic than at any time since 1968. WHO uses a series of six phases of pandemic alert... The world is presently in phase 3: a new influenza virus subtype is causing disease in humans, but is not yet spreading efficiently and sustainably among humans. The outbreak of a variant of swine flu led federal officials to close Mexico City-area schools indefinitely - the first such shutdown since a devastating 1985 earthquake. [more inside]
posted by KokuRyu at 9:32 AM PST - 294 comments

Sunday at Big Rec Field in Golden Gate Park, the hometown San Francisco Pacifics trounced the Aces 15-5.
posted by william_boot at 9:15 AM PST - 11 comments

Zoom in to brush-stroke level detail of the masters at the World's First HD Online Art Exhibition. At SXSW 2009, France's Zoomorama showed off its latest collaboration with Bridgeman Art Library. So far the collection features the work of only three artists, but for those of us who like to make museum security nervous by getting really close, the results are pretty amazing, and the implications for future exhibitions are exciting. [Flash]
posted by Rykey at 8:26 AM PST - 3 comments

Worth1000 arguably the best place for photoshops on the web, has released their newest creative effort...an online set of image (and eventually audio and video) tools called Aviary (a review here). And look at what it can do (when I looked, there was a three-mouthed monkey - that's definitely awesome)!
posted by Kickstart70 at 7:14 AM PST - 11 comments

Episode 4 - Problems "Okay, sometimes I almost want to give up everything." A fascinating insight into the Large Hadron Collider (loving the soundtracks too). YTL
posted by tellurian at 6:13 AM PST - 22 comments

Did you guess wrong about which format would win the high-density disk war? Buy a lot of HD-DVDs? Warner Brothers has a special program now where they'll swap your WB HD-DVDs for Blu-Rays of the same titles for $5 each. [more inside]
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 10:47 PM PST - 49 comments

Like crossbows? Like assault rifles? Got some spare AR-15 parts lying around begging to be crossbowed up? Then the PSE TAC 15 crossbow upper is for you! (video). Or how about this Swiss crossbow that can be cocked in 3 seconds? Alternatively build your own, or even build a repeating crossbow!
posted by Artw at 10:39 PM PST - 38 comments

Everybody knows about the Tax Day Tea Parties held earlier this month. Now, thanks in part to the FBI's arrest of a man calling himself Citizen Quazar, we have news of related events called Oath Keeper Rallies. Who are the Oath Keepers and what is their Oath? Will their next rally & oath taking (June 13 in Washington DC as part of the Gathering of Eagles Victory in Iraq ceremony) get any coverage from Fox? (via)
posted by scalefree at 10:26 PM PST - 72 comments

The Sunlight Foundation's open source development team, Sunlight Labs, have announced the winners of the first annual Apps for America contest. Over 40 entries were judged, with Filibusted (Hold senators accountable for blocking legislation) getting top marks. Legistalker (The latest online activity of Congress Members) got second, and there was a 4-way tie for 3rd. [via mefi projects] [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 10:17 PM PST - 17 comments

bio-bak is a little Monty Python, a little Hunter S. Thompson, and a whole lotta Katamari Damacy rolled up into an absurd little flash world. Updated from the version released in 2006.
posted by anthropoid at 9:53 PM PST - 14 comments

A little late for Flash Fun Friday but it's the thought that counts right? . Like Zelda... but with large squid monsters.
posted by Mastercheddaar at 9:08 PM PST - 10 comments

KISS Burger. Our Meat... Your Mouth.(via)
posted by Joe Beese at 8:57 PM PST - 28 comments

Following the recent uproar over Texas and the possibility of its secession (previously), Fivethirtyeight.com puts forward a theoretical division of Texas into five states: Plainland, Trinity, Gulfland, New Texas, and El Norte.
posted by aerotive at 8:00 PM PST - 51 comments

...the Department of Transportation will not keep secret the data we collect on birds striking airplanes. - Ray LaHood, United States Secretary of Transportation

From the dreaded mourning dove to the nefarious Canada goose to the humble armadillo, the FAA's recently released National Wildlife Strike Database ON-LINE contains information on aircraft/wildlife strikes from over 100,000 reported incidents between 1990 and 2008. [more inside]
posted by shoesfullofdust at 7:57 PM PST - 11 comments

Rasmussen Reports published a poll recently which showed that 20% of respondants believe socialism is better than capitalism. Among those under 30, the percentage goes up to 33%. And apparently, some Republicans believe that percentage is actually much higher, as the Republican National Committee has called upon RNC chairman Mike Steele to start calling Democrats "Democrat Socialists". Steele, for his part, told Fox News, "We don't see this president so much as a socialist as we see him as a collectivist".
posted by Marisa Stole the Precious Thing at 5:34 PM PST - 104 comments

Tarkovsky's Mirror Set to Arvo Pärt's Mirror in the Mirror. [previously] [more inside]
posted by MaryDellamorte at 5:02 PM PST - 32 comments

Scrabble put these out for their 60th anniversary. [more inside]
posted by gman at 4:28 PM PST - 31 comments

Did "Auto-Tune the News" guy accidentally write Coldplay's Viva La Vida? Michael Gregory, aka Auto-Tune the News guy (previously) talks about how his shower singing was turned into something eerily similar to Viva La Vida. [more inside]
posted by spaceboy86 at 2:28 PM PST - 45 comments

Artist and musician Gen Obata photographs unique places around the US, inserts his cat Lilly into them, and sells them as greeting cards. Lilly can be spotted doing everything from zooming on a trolley car in San Francisco to attacking the St. Louis Arch.
posted by wundermint at 1:09 PM PST - 20 comments

And when it's done there's one more thing
A simple little task, it's:
Put the fucking lotion in the basket!
A lego-animated number from "Silence! The Musical". Music and Lyrics by Jon and Al Kaplan.
posted by dersins at 11:45 AM PST - 25 comments

Planning on partying hard this weekend? Here are some yummy (non-scientific) ways to treat your hangover. Canada, England, and the US tend towards piles of greasy foods. Try poutine, fish and chips, or a greasy hamburger. For a Mexican hangover experience, look for menudo (previously) or chilaquiles. Peru lauds ceviche as a cure, while Ecuador turns to encebollado and churrasco. Bulgaria uses sauerkraut brine, Turkey has turnip juice, Korea looks for haejangguk, and Scotland has a soft drink called Irn-Bru. [more inside]
posted by specialagentwebb at 11:30 AM PST - 63 comments

This is what cheerleaders and jello look like at 1000 frames per second. (For comparison, standard film is shot at 24 fps, and animation at 30 fps.)
posted by ocherdraco at 11:11 AM PST - 122 comments

Col. Steven Kleinman, interrogation specialist, was interviewed yesterday on NPR about the use of torture in Iraq: NPR: And these harsh interrogation methods had been used by the Soviets and the Chinese to get people to say things that weren't true? Kleinman:That's true. And it's not just harsh physically, but I think the element that was more persuasive was their ability to induce what is known as debility, depression and dread through emotional and psychological techniques that profoundly altered somebody's ability to answer questions truthfully even if they wanted to. It truly undermined their ability to recall, so therefore it would call into question its efficacy in an intelligence-based interrogation. [link] . [more inside]
posted by mecran01 at 10:55 AM PST - 121 comments

The year is 1991. When a Gozer exhibit loaded with artifacts provided by the Shandors opens at the history museum in New York, it's not long before paranormal forces escape and sweep through the city. When the supernatural strikes back, who ya gonna call? Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Harold Ramis, and Ernie Hudson reunite for the upcoming Ghostbusters: The Video Game. The opening cinematic that kicks off the story has been released at GameTrailers, while the development teams working on the game discuss the project's origin and direction in a series of blog articles at IGN. [more inside]
posted by Servo5678 at 9:18 AM PST - 64 comments

WATIM [We Are the Image Makers] is an online publication that promotes Australian artists, illustrators, designers and photographers. Issue 19 is out this month. There have been more than 150 artist contributors in their four years online. [some art nsfw]
posted by netbros at 9:00 AM PST - 3 comments

the daring and resourceful masked rider of the plains.... This will take you back. SLYT And also your introduction to youtube's version of HULU. [more inside]
posted by HuronBob at 6:48 AM PST - 39 comments

The world is ending in a zombie apocalypse, and even Paris is unscathed. Battle your way around classic Parisian neighborhoods, monuments, and bars as Toxic Sonic, a real-life french rock/punk band. Happy flash friday!
posted by taumeson at 6:45 AM PST - 20 comments

Andy Partridge (ex-XTC frontman) and producer John Leckie (Stone Roses/Radiohead) discuss the making of The Dukes of the Stratosphear 25 o'clock EP, getting sacked by Mary Margaret O'Hara, Roy Harper kissing a sheep and recording Syd Barrett in Abbey Road in 1975 (parts I and II). [more inside]
posted by johnny novak at 5:56 AM PST - 24 comments

The Altmann Do-It-Yourself Turntable:

"After the success I had with my homebrew tonearm, I decided to build a turntable that is able to fathom the sonic delicacies that the tonearm is able to produce ... Depending on your local price for wood, and your ability to find some surplus parts, total cost can be as low as $50."
posted by jim in austin at 5:20 AM PST - 28 comments

The entirety of David Attenborough's wonderful nature series The Life of Birds is available on the new YouTube TV Shows section, which is its Hulu-clone. The old PBS Life of Birds website is also worth a visit.
posted by Kattullus at 4:43 AM PST - 33 comments

Who's going out in Cardiff tonight? Most everyone knows all about Hogarth and his work on Gin lane and women under the influence of good old British beer (leading to the passing of the Gin Act). Well, it would seem that nothing much changes, at least in Cardiff (unless, of course, the medical adviser gets his way).
posted by ciderwoman at 4:17 AM PST - 30 comments

"Hi, I'm Mrs Han Solo and I'm an alcoholic" - Carrie Fisher roasts George Lucas (SLYT) (Previously)
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 3:31 AM PST - 52 comments

Soul! New York City PBS affiliate WNET have digitized 9 episodes of Soul!, a early 1970's live music program, providing a groovy video interface with chapters to break down each hour long episode. [more inside]
posted by myopicman at 11:45 PM PST - 20 comments

Erwin James: the real me. Erwin James has written about prison for the Guardian for a number of years, from the point of view of an insider: when his column began, he was serving a sentence for two murders. He completed his sentence a few years ago, but continued to write under that name, a pseudonym. Here, he talks about the crimes that he was originally imprisoned for, his time in the French Foreign Legion, how he became a writer during his time in prison, and gives his real name for the first time.
posted by chorltonmeateater at 11:20 PM PST - 19 comments

"the scale-free network modeing paradigm is largely inconsistent with the engineered nature of the Internet..." For a decade it's been conventional wisdom that the Internet has a scale-free topology, in which the number of links emanating from a site obeys a power law. In other words, the Internet has a long tail; compared with a completely random network, its structure is dominated by a few very highly connected nodes, while the rest of the web consists of a gigantic list of sites attached to hardly anything. Among its other effects, this makes the web highly vulnerable to epidemics. The power law on the internet has inspired a vast array of research by computer scientists, mathematicians, and engineers. According to an article in this month's Notices of the American Math Society, it's all wrong. How could so many scientists make this kind of mistake? Statistician Cosma Shalizi explains how people see power laws when they aren't there: "Abusing linear regression makes the baby Gauss cry."
posted by escabeche at 10:48 PM PST - 28 comments

The ultimate Eamesian (previously, twice) expression of systems and connections, Powers of Ten explores the relative size of things (previously) from the microscopic to the cosmic. The 1977 film travels from an aerial view of a man in a Chicago park to the outer limits of the universe directly above him and back down into the microscopic world contained in the man's hand. But in 1977, this view of the world in leaps and bounds was already 20 years old. Kees Boeke, Dutch educator and pacifist, wrote the essay Cosmic View, which provided the source for Powers of 10. The whole essay was put online 41 years later, and it's still online, if you can't find a physical copy around.
posted by filthy light thief at 10:02 PM PST - 12 comments

In the past many folk rightfully pointed out that IHOP (International House of Pancakes) didn't have a restaurant in Vermont. Times have been a changin.' Last month, Vermont became the 50^th and final state to welcome an IHOP. And, being in Vermont, "old fashioned corn syrup," masquerading as true maple syrup didn't make the grade. "The IHOP here is the only one of about 1,400 in the United States, Canada and Mexico to serve real maple syrup." The managers got permission from the company "with a special dispensation" to serve the real stuff. [more inside]
posted by ericb at 9:54 PM PST - 105 comments

Geocities may be on its way out, but you'll be glad to know the internet of 1998 it celebrated lives on in a strange mismash of bad hypertext and video of pornographic Poser 3D models at Dad-TV.com [NSFW].
posted by sp160n at 9:25 PM PST - 8 comments

Are you a guy with an iPhone? Sent anyone a hot self-pic lately? You might want to check out Guys With iPhones (NSFW) to see if anyone has added you to the pool yet.
posted by hermitosis at 7:04 PM PST - 121 comments

Here are some galleries of amazing sand sculptures. They don't have to be monochrome. Here are some tips on making your own.
posted by Joe in Australia at 6:23 PM PST - 9 comments

The death of SciAm. It's no secret that print media is getting hit pretty hard, but the butchering of Scientific American seems particularly brutal. [more inside]
posted by rosswald at 5:33 PM PST - 50 comments

1980s Australian tv talent show Pot Luck, featuring -- Todd Rixon, Piffy the bell ringer, and Wenkyshafee.
posted by vronsky at 5:15 PM PST - 10 comments

Scholars at odds over mysterious Indus script. The Indus script is the collection of symbols found on artifacts from the Harappan civilization, which flourished in what is now eastern Pakistan and western India between 2,600 and 1,900 B.C. A new analysis using pattern-analyzing software suggests that the script may constitute a genuine written language. [Via]
posted by homunculus at 5:05 PM PST - 20 comments

Now cracks a noble heart. Good-night, sweet prince; And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest. Geocities, we hardly knew ye.
posted by awenner at 4:17 PM PST - 110 comments

Tomorrow is ANZAC Day, when Australia and New Zealand remembers its fallen diggers who gave their lives (video link) in defence of our freedoms in the major conflicts of the 20th century. If you can, you really should try and attend one of the many dawn services that will be held at numerous war memorials located all around both countries tomorrow. Many of these memorials to the fallen have been documented and are now viewable online. Check out the war memorial pages for Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria (The Shrine of Rememberance in Victoria has its own web page), South Australia and the Northern Territory, Western Australia and the big one in the ACT, the Australian War Memorial. New Zealand has documented many of theirs online as well. Lest we forget, there's also a memorial at ANZAC Cove itself.
posted by Effigy2000 at 3:15 PM PST - 32 comments

It's been only two years since the writer Jo Walton proposed a day for authors to post their writing for free online. This was in response to the resignation speech of Howard Hendrix, former V.P. of the Science Fiction Writers of America, which turned into a rant on the evil of giving away work for free on the internet. [more inside]
posted by happyroach at 2:33 PM PST - 42 comments

Lester R. Brown, of Worldwatch and the Earth Policy Institute, has an article in May's Scientific American magazine: "Could Food Shortages Bring Down Civilization?" In the article he addresses three major food-security threats: increased demand, due to the burgeoning population and diversion of staples for energy production; water shortages due to "mining" of fossil aquifers; and topsoil depletion as a result of over-farming. The result? Civilization's demise, not through superpower conflict, but through chaos and failed states. [more inside]
posted by Kadin2048 at 2:30 PM PST - 42 comments

The Bothy Band - Ireland's finest traditional folk ensemble - rip it up in 1977. (SLYT) [more inside]
posted by carter at 1:06 PM PST - 20 comments

Too much Hitler?
posted by Artw at 12:59 PM PST - 129 comments

The Vélocouture flickr pool. Over 1600 photos of stylish (and, uh, "differently-styled") bike fashion, from the hipster to the formal, the casual, the young, the old old-timey, the new old-timey, and much, much more. There's also a blog.
posted by dersins at 11:36 AM PST - 36 comments

Created "by fans for fans", the 40-minute Lord Of The Rings fan film The Hunt For Gollum, is not your average amateur fan-made production. "Adapted from elements of the appendices" and featuring some impressive production values, it debuts online May 3rd, and is also being screened at the Sci-Fi London convention. Check out the First and second trailers.
posted by namewithoutwords at 10:07 AM PST - 79 comments

Tony wants to know, is it Ghostbusters 2?
posted by piratebowling at 9:40 AM PST - 62 comments

On August 7, 1979, under cover of darkness, artist Kit Williams took a jeweled, 18-karat gold pendant in the shape of hare and buried it near the monument to Catherine of Aragon in Ampthill Park near Bedford, England. Clues to its location were hidden the text and artwork of his book Masquerade. The armchair treasure hunt sparked a worldwide craze. The end was disappointing. But 30 years later, the quest is being commemorated with a new hunt in the Cotswolds. (previously) [more inside]
posted by Joe Beese at 9:09 AM PST - 30 comments

Elphenden — elphen things from Sergei Tretiakov, 1967-2003. In between there were big cities, isolated islands, cannabis, oceans, pain and love...
posted by netbros at 8:42 AM PST - 7 comments

The American Hologram We suffer under a mass national hallucination. Americans, regardless of income or social position, now live in a culture entirely perceived inside a self-referential media hologram of a nation and world that does not exist. Our national reality is staged and held together by media, chiefly movie and television images. We live in a “theater state.”
posted by idixon at 8:36 AM PST - 191 comments

The Pulitzer (and Polk)-winning investigation (1,2) that dare not be uttered on TV. (previously)
posted by AceRock at 7:40 AM PST - 54 comments

Build a DIY non destructive book scanner for under $300. An open source OCR package. A gratis ebook creation tool. An open source ebook library management tool and reader. An open-source Linux distribution for eink-based devices. And many, many ebook readers.
posted by bigmusic at 7:27 AM PST - 83 comments

Interested in Soviet era spying by the KGB in the United States? Bummed that you cant get into the KGB archives? Well it turns out that someone copied all the good stuff already, and you can take a peek. [more inside]
posted by shothotbot at 6:14 AM PST - 6 comments

War of the Roses These are trashy, but fun, 3-8 minute radio segments in which suspected cheaters are tricked into revealing their dirty sinful business over the phone. Typically, the DJ posing as a local flower shop tells a suspect boyfriend he has won a free bouquet of roses; will he send the roses to his girlfriend or to the dreaded Other Woman? The girlfriend waits in silence to ambush him if he gives the wrong answer. Some are sad. Some are infuriating. Most, I'm ashamed to say, are pretty funny.
posted by dgaicun at 6:03 AM PST - 89 comments

Similar Images is a Google feature that allows you to search for images using pictures rather than words. So you can get images of vaguely similar pigs or somewhat similar houses or egglike shapes or hands or snowflakes.
posted by twoleftfeet at 10:05 PM PST - 43 comments

Dance! Rye Rye, Isis from Thunderheist, and RaTheMC are 3 burgeoning emcees that will have you up and on the floor, getting your groove on. [more inside]
posted by cashman at 9:42 PM PST - 10 comments

Wired's Mystery Issue, guest-edited by J.J. Abrams, is a quizzical amalgam of puzzling things both obvious and less obvious... apparently the print edition's misspelled words, irregular borders, and seemingly random placements of numbers are all part of the game too. While the "master puzzle" was recently solved, there are reportedly still some codes left to crack. [more inside]
posted by pokermonk at 7:23 PM PST - 27 comments

Yo Joe
posted by device55 at 7:10 PM PST - 67 comments

The AutoTuned News. Shawty.
posted by rxrfrx at 6:00 PM PST - 63 comments

On March 18, 39 licensed amateur radio operators were apprehended throughout Brazil for clandestine activities of telecommunication. This followed six months of investigations from local officials who received information from the US Department of Defense in regards to unauthorized use of Fleet Satellite Communications System. These geosynchronous satellites, also known as FLTSAT, were used by the U.S. Navy for UHF radio communications between ships, submarines, airplanes and ground stations. These satellites are simple repeaters with no authentication or control over what they retransmit. But the illicit satellite use was not limited to those experimenting with radio systems. Truck drivers love the birds because they provide better range and sound than ham radios. Rogue loggers in the Amazon use the satellites to transmit coded warnings when authorities threaten to close in. Drug dealers and organized criminal factions use them to coordinate operations. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 5:43 PM PST - 27 comments

During a vacation in Ireland this past February, I bought an album of music by Shaun Davey, called "Beal Tuinne". I hadn't heard a single cut (but you can!), but a gent at the CD table at the Seamus Begley concert said it was the best Irish music CD in a decade. [more inside]
posted by dbmcd at 4:28 PM PST - 33 comments

An oldie, but apropros for Earth Day. Join Penn & Teller in banning the nefarious Dihydrogen Monoxide!
posted by grapefruitmoon at 4:26 PM PST - 60 comments

Worst Film of the Century ... a very bad move, (slavc) --- is set to open soon. Can anyone explain how these things happen? Anyone?
posted by shockingbluamp at 4:07 PM PST - 86 comments

Astronomers searching for amino acids in space have discovered something unexpected -- the center of our galaxy tastes like raspberries and smells like rum. [more inside]
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 3:55 PM PST - 41 comments

17 years ago, On Wednesday, April 22, 1992, the 461-year old city of Guadalajara, Mexico, experienced a series of ten massive explosions occurring in the heart of the downtown Reforma district. The blasts measured 7.1 and 7.0 on the Richter scale at the University of Mexico in Mexico City some 200 miles away. The disastrous series of sewer gasoline explosions in Guadalajara, though not caused by a terrorist attack, demonstrate the potential impact of a well-planned and executed terrorist attack using a city’s sewer lines. At least 200 people where killed. [more inside]
posted by dirty lies at 2:46 PM PST - 15 comments

"Throwing the octopus is easy. More difficult is concealing the eight-legged creature until the toss is at hand, a skill that requires determination, luck and the ability to walk normally with 4 pounds of slimy cephalopod stuffed down your pants." [more inside]
posted by ocherdraco at 1:17 PM PST - 96 comments

subprime. Beautiful animation about the US housing market.
posted by uncle harold at 12:41 PM PST - 29 comments

To celebrate its 40th birthday, PBS has loaded - and continues to load - tons of content into its new, slick, Coverflow-ish on-demand site. Full episodes of American Experience, American Masters, Frontline, Great Performances, Masterpiece Theater, Nature, Nova, the NewsHour and a bunch more are now online.
posted by jbickers at 11:41 AM PST - 44 comments

By high school, her name was cool to many. "They were like, 'Oh yeah. Man, I wish I had your name. I love that. I'm going to name my kid after you.' I hear that so much and I go, Lord, please don't do that to that child." --Marijuana Pepsi Jackson [via] [more inside]
posted by jaimev at 9:06 AM PST - 175 comments

"Everyman His Own Historian" is the annual address Carl Becker, President of the American Historical Association, delivered on December 29, 1931. It's probably the best thing I've ever read about history, and I thought I'd share it. It's long, but full of lively examples; I'll never forget the image of twenty tons of coal sliding dustily through Mr. Everyman's cellar window. (Via Slawkenbergius's Tales, the brilliant blog of MeFi's own nasreddin.)
posted by languagehat at 9:04 AM PST - 15 comments

Slime Molds Show Surprising Degree of Intelligence - A creature with no brain can learn from and even anticipate events. (via)
posted by kliuless at 8:55 AM PST - 59 comments

Joe Palca, a science correspondent for NPR's Morning Edition, was meditating on the best way to convey the magnitude of the world's largest known prime number, 2^43112609-1. He contacted H&FJ at Typography.com to discuss the implications of typesetting a number with more than twelve million digits. Crunching of numbers and fonts ensued.
posted by netbros at 8:27 AM PST - 20 comments

How to Build: A simple washtub bass. Some variations (on a crazily made webpage). A cookie tin banjo. (Previously) A cigar box guitar, and a cigar box ukulele. A fancy cigar box uke. (Kathy Marsushita's whole amateur luthier projects page is worth checking out, as is this gallery of cool cigar box ukes.)
posted by OmieWise at 7:25 AM PST - 22 comments

You can't buy a CycleKart and, even if you could, the racers wouldn't let you participate. You have to build your CycleKart. It's one of the many reasons this is a very cool hobby.
posted by Tom-B at 6:43 AM PST - 35 comments

Topology and Geometry Software by Jeff Weeks.
posted by Eideteker at 6:15 AM PST - 5 comments

In September 1969, Simon & Schuster was preparing to publish Irving Wallace's The Seven Minutes, a novel about the obscenity trial of a fictitious book of the same name by the fictitious author J.J. Jadway. Maurice Girodias, head of the erotica and avant garde literature publishing house the Olympia Press had a clever idea: what if I publish Jadway's book? [more inside]
posted by Horace Rumpole at 5:44 AM PST - 16 comments

Crestwood is the "best-run town in America" because it's "run like a business".

"Our budget is $2 million dollars a year while a town of similar size, with 12,000 people, might have a budget of $10 million["], said City Director Frank Gassmere. Added Mayor Stranczek: "Folks are happy here and I intend to keep them that way."

Taxes are so low, property tax payers get rebates! Privatizing local government works brilliantly!As long as you didn't drink the cheap, cheap municipal water -- for the last twenty years.
posted by orthogonality at 11:28 PM PST - 99 comments

Alone Among the Ghosts is an essay from The Nation by Marcela Valdez about Roberto Bolaño's 2666. She interviews journalist Sergio González Rodríguez, who has written extensively about the murders of women in Ciudad Juárez which is the black hole Bolaño's novel orbits around. The journalist was Bolaño's correspondent and main source of information about the femicides. The best English language article about the epidemic of violence in Ciudad Juárez I have read is Max Blumenthal's 2002 Salon article. The website No Angel Came is a good resource for more info on the subject, including a continually updated section with links to articles about the killings. The site's most arresting section is the list of every woman killed in Ciudad Juárez from 1993 to 2006. The epidemic of violence against women in Ciudad Juárez continues.
posted by Kattullus at 7:31 PM PST - 26 comments

The Merkel brothers are the grandsons of steam car makers and sons of an African art collector, and each have carried forward the love of collecting and an interest in cars from the previous generations. Henry Merkel is a recognized White expert, who continues to share knowledge of his family's productions and his knowledge of White steam cars has been published. Ben Merkel focused on collecting Checkered Cabs, and has has a love for peaceful rural junkyards. The youngest grandson of Walter White is Tom Merkel, and his love for collecting old cars outstrips his brothers by miles (print view). Somewhere in the Cuyama Valley, just outside of Los Padres National Forest land is his "car garden," which is also where the snowman that once adorned Santa Claus Lane now resides. His other love is 91+ year old cabin, which he indicates is "Santa Barbara's oldest cabin!" and a "Folk Art Magic Museum!" on the signs around the property, but which the Forest Service wants to tear down. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 5:10 PM PST - 6 comments

The Philippine Comics Art Museum. 1940's to the present.
posted by tellurian at 5:10 PM PST - 8 comments

Recipe Puppy, a new Recipe Search Engine [via mefi projects] A recipe search engine that lets you search for recipes by ingredients. Simply put in the ingredients you have and the type of food you want, and the search engine will return the recipes you are closest to being able to make. You can also specify ingredients you don't have, and ingredients that absolutely must be included in the recipe. [more inside]
posted by yuletide at 4:17 PM PST - 41 comments

Demetri Martin cast in Steven Soderbergh's Moneyball. An adaptation of Michael Lewis' controversial and influential 2003 book Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, the film will begin shooting in June and will star Brad Pitt as Oakland Athletics' General Manager Billy Beane, Martin as Beane's then-assistant GM Paul DePodesta, and former major leaguers Scott Hatteberg and David Justice as themselves. [more inside]
posted by ORthey at 4:07 PM PST - 47 comments

A little over two weeks into the season, Major League Baseball has already seen four near no-hitters. Meanwhile, Mitchell High School senior Patrick Schuster has thrown four in a row.
posted by SpiffyRob at 2:44 PM PST - 52 comments

It is apparent to me that Faith does have a brain, despite what the doctors have said. Even though it is generally believed that anencephalic babies are blind, deaf, and cannot feel touch or think... I don't believe that. Not at all. So little is known about the human brain and the only one who really knows what's going on is God. I truly believe that Faith can think and can feel my touch and hear my voice. I can't prove it but I feel like I just know. [images may be disturbing]
posted by Joe Beese at 2:11 PM PST - 251 comments

How delicious is the Beyond The Valley of the Dolls Tarot Deck? Even the man who wrote the movie gave the deck two thumbs up. [more inside]
posted by hermitosis at 2:09 PM PST - 21 comments

Profiles. Google's answer to control what comes up when people Google you. A brief listing of four profiles appears at the bottom of name search result pages. [more inside]
posted by cashman at 1:32 PM PST - 42 comments

The Georgia Guidestones - Monumental Instructions for the Post-Apocalypse.
posted by Artw at 1:24 PM PST - 38 comments

Brain Gain: The underground world of “neuroenhancing” drugs. [Via]
posted by homunculus at 1:15 PM PST - 40 comments

Bill Moyers Journal, April 17, 2009 From crime beat reporter for the BALTIMORE SUN to award-winning screenwriter of HBO's critically-acclaimed The Wire, David Simon talks with Bill Moyers about inner-city crime and politics, storytelling and the future of journalism today. Sorry for the one link post.
posted by dougzilla at 1:01 PM PST - 23 comments

It's a simple story about a responsible owl, trying to raise a curious (human) son and a geeky (human) daughter in their giant treehouse while dealing with his longtime bear buddy (and honey researcher), Steve. Though it debuted, humbly enough, in the Cracked.com forums, Benjamin Driscoll's drolly sweet comic Daisy Owl soon gained a loyal following, earning a regular feature there (courtesy of David Wong) and routinely making the front pages of sites like Digg and Reddit. In March 2009, Driscoll went pro, quitting his job to work on the comic full-time and making Daisy Owl one of the few self-sufficient webcomics on the net. Its quirky, character-driven humor, focused mainly on children, friendship, and families, has earned more than a few comparisons to Calvin and Hobbes, as well as plenty of fan art. Highlights: Basement - Honey - Parenting - Shampoo - Skittle on the Moon - Nightmare - Movie Night - Thrift Store - Classic Dad - Wallpapers
posted by Rhaomi at 11:50 AM PST - 22 comments

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have recently unveiled new methods to Twitter from your brain. It may not be as efficient or pragmatic as using your phone, but there's pretty cool potential in this kind of technology.
posted by jon_hansen at 10:50 AM PST - 33 comments

Sidi or Siddi is a "community of the descendants of African slaves and seamen, the ancestors of the Sidis came to India and Pakistan through sea trade with East Africa and the Persian Gulf around the 12th century." The slave trade between India and Africa predates the more infamous transatlantic slave trade by at least six centuries. They have a rich history which included controlling the only fort never to fall against the efforts of the British, Dutch and the Mughals. They have now, however, fallen into hard times . [more inside]
posted by Lucubrator at 9:06 AM PST - 10 comments

Wrong Cards. Some of these are tailor-made for MetaFilter. Some are probably offensive. Some I can even imagine sending to people I know. Which probably negates their mission of being wrong for every occasion, but I guess they can't be wrong all the time.
posted by jacquilynne at 9:00 AM PST - 76 comments

What are writers reading? An eclectic mix of authors answer the perennial question. [more inside]
posted by mattbucher at 8:13 AM PST - 10 comments

Communities of and for foodies. Foodbuzz is about dining out, cooking at home, discovering a new flavor, drooling over a food blog, or swapping recipes. Check out Today's Top 9, a daily feature. Chowhound is the community for Chow.com. Dozens of boards enable you to drill down to local favorites, like this request for live crawfish in Virginia. Both communities have very active memberships.
posted by netbros at 8:01 AM PST - 32 comments

NASA's Cassini spacecraft went to Saturn and all it got were these awesome pictures.
posted by Saturn XXIII at 7:56 AM PST - 68 comments

Thomas Allen's pulp pop-up photography. Allen takes the pulpiest of pulp fiction cover art and restages and redefines it through photography. (book). More pulp: Eclectic Pulp. Lesbian Pulp (maybe NSFW). The George Kelley Paperback and Pulp Fiction Collection. Even Canadian Pulp. (previously)
posted by HumanComplex at 6:11 AM PST - 21 comments

The Gorillaz documentary Bananaz has premiered online and can be viewed in full on Babelgum. [more inside]
posted by slimepuppy at 4:18 AM PST - 17 comments

Neil Barofsky, who helped prosecute the REFCO case, and who was appointed by the previous administration in late November to serve as Special Inspector General for TARP (more on him here and here), has released a report that claims TARP and related bailout programs are inherently vulnerable to fraud--and that there are at least 20 bailout/fraud investigations currently underway. The report comes on the heels of rumors that bailout money may convert to equity stakes: a move that may signal a change in current policy (but don't mention the n-word) .
posted by ornate insect at 11:23 PM PST - 20 comments

Ever wondered where the remotest place in the world is? Short answer according to New Scientist: the Tibetan Plateau. Lots of cool maps showing transport times and methods. [more inside]
posted by Joe in Australia at 9:26 PM PST - 60 comments

We've had quite a few lovely posts over the years about people on bikes and skateboards and all these fine new sports that those crazy kids are in to these days, whether it's charging it, huckin' or riding in all its myriad of forms. New, yeah? Here's your great-great-granddad showing you what for with some barspins and suchlike novelties on a heavy old fixie. Stick around for the full-pipe attempt at the end. Directed and filmed by Thomas Edison.
posted by loquacious at 7:58 PM PST - 63 comments

Inspired by the Natural Method of Georges Hébert and trained in Parkour, Frenchman Erwan Le Corre has developed his own curious brand of back-to-nature physical fitness training called MovNat. As this awesome/humorous video shows, MovNat basically consists of running around in the woods, climbing trees, jumping over and under obstacles, swimming, and moving heavy objects. [more inside]
posted by subpixel at 7:40 PM PST - 24 comments

It's finally happened: After a decade of struggle with MTV over royalty fees and the belief that there would be no market for it, The State is finally being released on DVD on July 19th, 2009. Until then, you can watch streaming video (albeit chopped up in an irritating way) of the episodes from MTV's site, via Hulu, and compare differences such as the soundalike placed in for The Breeders' "Cannonball" in this famous sketch.
posted by Navelgazer at 6:02 PM PST - 80 comments

The Graduate University for Advanced Studies, casually referred to as Sōkendai (a contraction of Sōgō kenkyū daigakuin daigaku), was founded in 1988 as the 96th national university in Japan. Amongst other things, it is home to the Soken Taxa Web Server which in turn hosts the first online Japanese Ant Color Image Database that currently lists 273 species of ant, the Illustrated Guide of Marine Mammals and the Marine Mammals Stranding DataBase, the Mammalian Crania Photographic Archive that currently includes 704 specimens, the Morning Glories Database that covers the many mutants of Ipomoea nil, closely related species and interspecific hybrids, the Makino Herbarium Database, which is named after the pioneering Japanese botanist, Tomitaro Makino, and the Japanese Bees Image Database.
posted by filthy light thief at 4:49 PM PST - 5 comments

Space-based Solar Power beamed down to earth sounds pretty far out, but the technology is further along than many suppose, the sun never sets in space, and space is a Saudi Arabia of unlimited energy for the nation with the technology to harness it. PG&E (California) in conjunction with SolarEn has announced a 200MW space solar project to be up by 2016.
posted by stbalbach at 3:38 PM PST - 86 comments

Buddy Cole on (1) Love at First Sight, (2) Racism, (3) Dinosaurs, (4) Being Canadian, (5) Finding Love and (6) Outing Celebrities.
posted by ericb at 3:36 PM PST - 34 comments

Etsy has a YouTube channel where they have all kinds of profiles of their users and how-to guides. My two favorite series are the Process series (e.g. New Books with Old Materials & Tin Toys) and Handmade Portraits (e.g. Armor Guitars & Wood Mosaics). In the description of each video there is a link to the corresponding entry on Etsy's blog, The Storque. The blogposts have more information on the users and sometimes further links and videos. [via Work in Progress]
posted by Kattullus at 2:01 PM PST - 5 comments

The New York Times discovers the significance of today's date. [more inside]
posted by Joe Beese at 1:57 PM PST - 60 comments

Bike Parkour. Exactly what it says on the tin.
posted by By The Grace of God at 1:42 PM PST - 89 comments

There's something in the sea... and it has a big drill for an arm.
posted by Artw at 1:17 PM PST - 74 comments

This is a fun little atheistic distraction: The interactive Blind Watchmaker applet demonstrates how random mutation followed by non-random selection can lead to interesting, complex forms. The Blind Watchmaker algorithm was conceived by Richard Dawkins and is described in his book of the same name. The resultant forms (which can begin to look like plants and bugs) are called "biomorphs," visual representations of a set of genes. [more inside]
posted by technically yours at 1:01 PM PST - 34 comments

Intended Consequences. It is estimated that 20,000 children were born as the result of rape during the 1994 Rwandan Genocide that claimed the lives of over 800,000 Tutsis. Many of these women also contracted HIV/AIDS as a result. Not only do the mothers have to live with memories of this incredibly horrible event, but they along with their children are shunned by other Tutsi survivors. [more inside]
posted by itchylick at 12:28 PM PST - 19 comments

Soldiers' Stress: What Doctors Get Wrong About PTSD. A growing number of experts insist that the concept of post-traumatic stress disorder is itself disordered and that soldiers are suffering as a result.
posted by lullaby at 12:19 PM PST - 34 comments

Put your hands together for the animated ministry epileptic seizures of K & K Mime. Not over the top enough for you? How about ICCM (come for the Flash intro, stick around for the voice of God warning you about the IRS). Or how about Evangel Cathedral.net, feel free to skip the intro and enjoy the floor show, or Drum & Bass Ministries? All are the divinely inspired creative work of Sharper FX.com.
posted by furtive at 12:08 PM PST - 21 comments

Sodnomdarjaa Khaltarkhuu never expected to be a metaphor for the far-reaching impacts of the financial downturn.
posted by Pants! at 12:04 PM PST - 5 comments

Who's Your Daddy? Atlantic Monthly staff writer Caitlin Flanagan considers the impact of father-daughter relationships and once again opines about the emotional inner life of adolescent girls. Building off Alec Baldwin's much-publicized voicemail invective to his 11 year-old daughter, Flanagan concludes that apart from the celebrity personages, the Baldwin feud embodied all the classic traits of filial love between men and their little girls: "amorous engagement, maternal jealousy, and paternal protectiveness."
posted by zoomorphic at 12:02 PM PST - 49 comments

With all of the economic strife in the world, the funeral industry is still going strong. There is a niche for all budgets these days, including the availability of coffins at Costco. [more inside]
posted by grapefruitmoon at 11:31 AM PST - 55 comments

Monologuist Mike Daisey has a beef with the way theater is made in the United States: . He's made that beef the substance of one of his monologues, How Theater Failed America. Now, Todd Olson, Producing Artistic Director (scroll down for bio) at the American Stage Theatre Company in St. Petersburg, Florida, has beef with Daisey, too. Olson says: balance my budget, wretched actor miscreant; Daisey says: bring it. [more inside]
posted by ocherdraco at 11:11 AM PST - 50 comments

US Pole Dance Championships 2009 (no nudity, but possibly NSFW) It’s significant to understand that pole dancing is not stripping. This misconception prevents pole dancing from becoming something every woman should be able to enjoy. Pole dancing is a sensual athletic dance form that demands coordination, flexibility and physical strength. Like the Jane Fonda workout combined with Cirque du Soleil.
posted by ColdChef at 11:11 AM PST - 48 comments

Epic threads gathered from the nether reaches of the Internet.: www.LegendaryThread.com. [more inside]
posted by sidr at 11:09 AM PST - 43 comments

Like iScribble and Oekaki before it, DoInk.com is a place for people to create collaborative artwork online. The difference? It's for animation. [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi at 10:28 AM PST - 2 comments

Oracle to acquire Sun for $7.4 billion. This gives Oracle, among other things, Solaris, MySQL, Java and OpenOffice, and means that Oracle is now a hardware manufacturer rather than a reseller. [more inside]
posted by ardgedee at 10:17 AM PST - 60 comments

Riding the Wall of Death. "My name is Sam. I ride a 1931 101 Indian Scout motorcycle on the side of a 90 degrees (straight up & down) wooden barrel board wall." Also, lions. And ladies and lions.
posted by dersins at 10:02 AM PST - 16 comments

Welcome to Sarien.net, the portal for reliving the classic Sierra On-Line adventure games. With its focus on instant fun and a unique multiplayer experience, Sarien.net hopes to win new gamers' hearts and promote the adventure game genre. Available currently: Leisure Suit Larry 1, Police Quest 1, and Space Quest 1.
posted by spec80 at 9:31 AM PST - 55 comments

121 different versions of The Saint James Infirmary Blues *more*. Via Blake Leyh of The Wire and The Ten Thousand Things who does his own haunting, Tom Waits tinged version of the song here.
posted by vronsky at 9:10 AM PST - 35 comments

Disturbing Strokes [more inside]
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 8:48 AM PST - 51 comments

"Smells Like Sloop John B", a mashup of Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and the Beach Boys' "Sloop John B".
posted by rageagainsttherobots at 8:35 AM PST - 35 comments

Photo essay of East Germany. Karlheinz Jardner traveled through East Germany to catch some things on film which he thought were on the verge of vanishing forever. (via) [more inside]
posted by jquinby at 8:04 AM PST - 17 comments

The globe’s networked ecologies of food, water, energy, and waste have established new infrastructures and forms of urbanism. While these ecologies exist at the service of our contemporary lifestyles, they have typically remained hidden from view and from the public conscience. Infranet Lab is studying the shifting / changing conditions. [more inside]
posted by netbros at 7:47 AM PST - 2 comments

Wiretap Recorded Rep. Harman Promising to Intervene for AIPAC (via Greenwald and TPM)
posted by i_am_a_Jedi at 7:44 AM PST - 52 comments

"At Stanford University two sales representatives from Nike were watching the athletics team practise. Part of their job was to gather feedback from the company's sponsored runners about which shoes they preferred. Unfortunately, it was proving difficult that day as the runners all seemed to prefer... nothing" - from Christopher McDougall's forthcoming book "Born to Run" which looks at the story the growth of the $20 billion running shoe industry. Starting form Bill Bowerman's Cortez in 1972 onwards runners have seen a steady flow of innovations to improve performance and reduce injury rates. Only it would appear they may not work. By way of contrast the book includes coverage of the Mexican Tarahumara tribe who run ultramarathons with shoes made from car tyres on their feet.
posted by rongorongo at 7:44 AM PST - 38 comments

Eagle Cam in Sutton, Oklahoma. Only one egg (out of three laid) has hatched this year, but the single eaglet is doing well, and both parents are keeping a close eye on his (her?) progress. Live during the day, and the day's tape is replayed at night, Oklahoma time, for folks tuning in late. warning - can be addictive. Previously, in Maine.
posted by yhbc at 7:14 AM PST - 15 comments

Depending on which side of the Irish Sea you live, the HPV jab is either a killer that shouldn't be given to young women or it's a necessary and life saving vaccination. Layscience.net exposes the disturbingly awful cynicism of The Daily Mail. (via badscience.net)
posted by seanyboy at 6:54 AM PST - 28 comments

"Miss Annie Oakley sends us a note from London, England, Sept. 21 [1887], 'Your little banjo you made for me (The American Princess) has attracted considerable attention here and given satisfaction.'"
S.S. Stewart, one of the premier American banjo makers of the last decades of the 19th century, also published a newsletter filled with bombast, testimonials, and banjo sheet music. You can see some of Stewart's banjos at Bill's Banjos. You can also read Stewart's banjo novel Black Hercules, or The adventures of a banjo player.
posted by OmieWise at 5:05 AM PST - 9 comments

The Cartography of Recession. Act I, The Collapse: Slate's interactive map of vanishing jobs by county, The Fed's maps of subprime mortgages, USA Today's housing bubble maps, Gini coefficients by state, budget deficits and foreclosures from CNN. Act II, Intervention: The data of Stimuluswatch, mapped, and expected job gains by state, while newspapers and the auto industry die. Act III, the Future: A terrific interactive map from the Atlantic (and accompanying article) hints at the future, showing the evolving patterns of population flows (also see the amazing New York Times immigration map), innovation, and income by city over time.
posted by blahblahblah at 9:30 PM PST - 23 comments

Letters to the President- and his responses. The story of the President's mailman. A peek inside the White House mail room.
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 9:19 PM PST - 34 comments

Making Something New Everyday ; a blog where old-time MeFite Alison tries to make something new everyday. With over 100 projects posted so far, there's plenty for you to gawk at, such as a Robot Tea Cup and Saucer, a Color Perfect Pitch Tester, a Hidden Chamber Hamburger, Capacitor Bugs, Accidentally Gay Cardinals, a Fibonacci Petticoat, Marzipan Birds and Laptop and, erm... poop (possibly NSFW). Something for everyone, then! [via mefi projects]
posted by Effigy2000 at 8:49 PM PST - 19 comments

Queen Bohemian Rhapsody Old School Computer Remix
posted by finite at 8:09 PM PST - 20 comments

Sex 102 with Kara Sutra: The things you wish you'd learned in Sex Ed - a series of funny videos on everything from vibrators to the 2-minute man. She'll amuse and even reassure you that your tingly bits are happy.
posted by kldickson at 6:50 PM PST - 65 comments

Synchronous Objects - Exploring choreographic structures using objects and data, creating stunning visualisations. [flash]
posted by tellurian at 5:21 PM PST - 10 comments

An Oregon School for Troubled Teens Is Under Scrutiny (TIME) - Allegations at of abuse at the facility have been made for decades, and now it is being investigated by the state for the second time. Of course, abuse at private residential facilities for troubled teenagers is nothing new, but some female students at this school claim there was an additional, cruel twist: [more inside]
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 1:05 PM PST - 76 comments

J. G. Ballard, 1930-2009 [more inside]
posted by carter at 12:11 PM PST - 122 comments

The World Digital Library is set to open on the 21st of April, but appears to be operating as of now. Coral Cache
posted by djgh at 11:34 AM PST - 6 comments

Ting-Yi Oei is an assistant principal in Virginia who was indicted for possession of child pornography. Today, he describes his year-long fight against the charges, which ended in dismissal.
posted by palliser at 7:26 AM PST - 59 comments

Next Nature is the nature caused by human culture. The technological world has become so intricate and uncontrollable that it has become a nature of its own. Scientific research into nanotechnology, genetic manipulation, ambient intelligence, tissue engineering... all of these young research fields radically interfere with our sense of what is ‘natural’. Here's a visual introduction into next nature. [more inside]
posted by netbros at 7:12 AM PST - 13 comments

Off road vehicle gets a tire inflated without a pump (SLYT) 23 seconds of "huh?".
posted by zerobyproxy at 7:07 AM PST - 46 comments

Steve's Story: Since 1994 Steve Eves has been dreaming of something big. He is about to have his day. On April 25th at Higgs Farm in Maryland. Steve Eves will launch the largest model rocket ever, a 1/10 scale model of the Saturn V that sent men to the moon. The launch will be open to the public.
posted by jefeweiss at 6:53 AM PST - 45 comments

4,500 additional pages omitted from Flaubert's 500-page Madame Bovary have been released online (in French). "The site – www.bovary.fr – contains not only the published text and images of the barely legible manuscripts but interactive controls which allow the reader to re-instate passages corrected or cut by Flaubert or his publishers." It took "between three and 10 hours to decipher a single page of Flaubert's writing," done mostly by volunteers from around the world.
posted by stbalbach at 6:35 AM PST - 39 comments

Why Minds are Not Like Computers: an in-depth analysis.
posted by jon_hansen at 6:35 AM PST - 91 comments

Jon Kabat-Zinn’s mindfulness presentation at Google. JON KABAT-ZINN, PH.D., is founding Executive Director of the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. He is also the founding director of its renowned Stress Reduction Clinic and Professor of Medicine emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. He teaches mindfulness and Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) in various venues around the world.
posted by RussHy at 6:18 AM PST - 12 comments

The new monetary standard: Copper.
posted by bigmusic at 12:30 AM PST - 50 comments

3600 VHS Video Covers Not sure what it all means. Pretty awesome, though. (I Netflix'd this one, though, and it's not nearly as good as it should be. One eye good, two eyes bad!)
posted by incomple at 10:38 PM PST - 64 comments

Carousel is one incredible, continuous two-minute tracking shot of the deadly and eternal fight between cops and clowns [high definition versions here with additional interactive features]. Directed by Adam Berg, apparently 90% of the amazing stunts were captured in-camera.
posted by blahblahblah at 8:59 PM PST - 21 comments

Before RiffTrax (and, of course, after Mystery Science Theater 3000), Mike Nelson, Kevin Murphy and Bill Corbett worked on a failed DVD MST-like movie mocking project called The Film Crew. Publisher Shout! Factory has made all four episodes available for viewing in their entirety, over five hours of video, on YouTube.
Giant of Marathon (with Steve Reeves) - Killers From Space - Wild Women of Wongo - Hollywood After Dark
posted by JHarris at 3:30 PM PST - 38 comments

World War, the original , not the sequel, was thought to be the end of war. It was an unfortunate prequel. Verdun
posted by Mblue at 2:49 PM PST - 37 comments

Seekingarrangement.com is a website for would-be sugar daddies and sugar babies (no, not the candy). It claims 300,000 registered users. Here's a New York Times article from last week about the site (and a Globe and Mail article from '07).
posted by box at 12:41 PM PST - 61 comments

Microkhan is a terrific, eclectic blog by Brendan Koerner. If he had only introduced me to WEFUNK's weekly show he would have earned my gratitude (previously). Other recent posts which have caught my eye: Why does Lehman bros. own the rights to enough yellowcake to make an atomic bomb? The existence of the sport of Unlimited Hydroplaning. Musings on the suicide rate in Montana. America's abandoned polar radar stations. Convict love tokens from Australia. Photographer Harald Finster. The 1898 book about the experience of the British in Afganistan The Rising on the North Western Frontier. Via. [more inside]
posted by shothotbot at 10:01 AM PST - 6 comments

Blood Falls - The iron rich red liquid gushing from a buried Antarctica lake shows how life may have existed on a snowball Earth, or on Europa.
posted by Artw at 9:15 AM PST - 52 comments

My First Dictionary 50s schoolbook style drawings and definitions, with a twist.
posted by Outlawyr at 7:44 AM PST - 44 comments

Women losing their shoes, mostly high heels, appear to be a common theme in movies and TV serials... This list one is the first, consisting of what I term “Prime” shoe loss scenes... [more inside]
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 7:27 AM PST - 50 comments

Eskil Rønningsbakken: handstand on stacked chairs on top of Kjeragbolten; handstand on a trapeze suspended from a hot-air balloon; balancing on a bike with no hands on a platform on the edge of Trollveggen. [more inside]
posted by marsha56 at 7:24 AM PST - 12 comments

It was a Dark and Silly night -- a cartoon written by Neil Gaman and drawn by Gahan Wilson. [more inside]
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 10:38 PM PST - 29 comments

New music service We Are Hunted aims to create charts of emerging music tracks. They aggregate the buzz from social networks, forums, music blogs, torrents, P2P networks and Twitter. In the artists section you can comment about what you're hearing.
posted by netbros at 10:38 PM PST - 15 comments

Metaphysics in a Time of Terrorism. (via)
posted by Dumsnill at 8:25 PM PST - 37 comments

Remember Gemcraft? They made moar.
posted by juv3nal at 7:50 PM PST - 31 comments

The art of Justin Gibbens. Gibbens imitates the conventions of 18th and 19th century zoological illustration and traditional Chinese fine-line painting to make images of curious creatures and beautiful beasts. [Via]
posted by homunculus at 5:28 PM PST - 9 comments

Everybody's hugging up the big monkey man. Seriously, everybody.
posted by LSK at 4:33 PM PST - 34 comments

All things yoni - "yOni is a women's circle in cyberspace. a place to honour, empower, share, support and celebrate all that is woman." Might be considered NSFW (vulva-themed handicrafts)
posted by UbuRoivas at 3:59 PM PST - 66 comments

The sentence is a lonely place. "The sentence, with its narrow typographical confines, is a lonely place, the loneliest place for a writer, and the temptation for the writer to get out of one sentence as soon as possible and get going on the next sentence is entirely understandable. In fact, the conditions in just about any sentence soon enough become (shall we admit it?) claustrophobic, inhospitable, even hellish. But too often our habitual and hasty breaking away from one sentence to another results in sentences that remain undeveloped parcels of literary real estate, sentences that do not feel fully inhabitated and settled in by language. So many of the sentences we confront in books and magazines look unfinished and provisional, and start to go to pieces as soon as we gawk at and stare into them. They don’t hold up. Their diction is often not just spare and stark but bare and miserly."
posted by plexi at 2:27 PM PST - 41 comments

The Torture Colony. In a remote part of Chile, an evil German evangelist built a utopia whose members helped the Pinochet regime perform its foulest deeds... [i]nvestigations by Amnesty International and the governments of Chile, Germany, and France, as well as the testimony of former colonos who, over the years, managed to escape the colony, have revealed evidence of terrible crimes: child molestation, forced labor, weapons trafficking, money laundering, kidnapping, torture, and murder. It may sound like the farfetched plot of Saw VII (or something out of Kafka) but it's horrifyingly true. [Previously]
posted by dersins at 1:28 PM PST - 36 comments

"Angiogenesis is critical for tumors to grow beyond a few millimeters, and for cancer to metastasize to other parts of the body. Cancer cells use the blood vessels as conduits to other areas of the body, where a single cell can set up camp and begin forming a new tumor. Stop angiogenesis, and you stop cancer." (via) [more inside]
posted by monospace at 12:36 PM PST - 34 comments

For Their Own Good. "They were screwed-up kids, sent to the reform school in Marianna for smoking, fighting, stealing cars or worse. The Florida School for Boys -- that'd straighten them out." A well-written and heartbreaking feature from the St Pete Times. Includes an extensive list of supporting news links (going back to 1932) and a gallery of portraits by Edmund D. Fountain.
posted by grabbingsand at 12:34 PM PST - 37 comments

Noodling, catfisting, grabbling, graveling, hogging, dogging, gurgling, tickling, stumping: all these words mean the same thing--catching big, honkin' catfish with your bare hands!
posted by not_on_display at 12:32 PM PST - 18 comments

The Year of Led Zeppelin: A (completed) quest to listen to every Led Zeppelin concert in a year
posted by Joe Beese at 11:56 AM PST - 51 comments

Father Luis Barrios, Episcopalian priest, full professor and academic chair at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, was sent to federal prison five weeks ago, after being convicted of trespassing. He was arrested in November for pushing a wheelchair-bound Vietnam veteran about one mile past the gates of the Fort Benning military base in Georgia. Fort Benning is the home of The School of the Americas also known as "School for Dictators", "School of Assassins", and "Nursery of Death Squads". SOAW campaigns to close this School which has the distinction of providing murderers for Latin American Regimes.
posted by adamvasco at 10:27 AM PST - 48 comments

Wild Wonders of Europe "wants to show that Europe really is not about just highways and cities. But today, many seem to know more about nature in Africa or in America, than in Europe, because that is what’s on TV. The European natural wonders are still very little known to the World. We want to change that." 58 nature photographers are working on the project, and there are 29 galleries representing 16 countries thus far, with more to come. [via]
posted by cog_nate at 10:17 AM PST - 14 comments

Biffy Beans is kind of a hippy dippy chick. But she makes the stationary nerds drool. Oh sure, there's reviews of Journals, Fountain Pens, Inks. But she also draws the occasional Mandala.
posted by tylerfulltilt at 9:50 AM PST - 34 comments

Fifty photographers you should know from Hongkiat, range from the abstract underwater marine life of Nicholas Samaras, to the heavily finished concert scenes of David Lindsey Wade, to the horrific Birds of Lyndon Wayne, to the staged Hollywood scenes of Alex Prager, to the 100 meter picture "We're All Gonna Die", plus a lot of interesting fashion and commercial art. Be warned, lots of portfolios use flash, with UIs ranging from interesting to the annoying.
posted by blahblahblah at 9:28 AM PST - 18 comments

The International Coalition of Sites of Conscience is a directory of historic sites that interpret themes related to ethical, political, and social issues worldwide.
posted by Miko at 8:48 AM PST - 5 comments

"We used to find teeth in the yard. We used to find wigs, glasses, guns. Everything we found in the yard…nobody came back for them, though." May Timpano describes her life in the house under the rollercoaster where she and her boyfriend, rollercoaster operator Fred Moran, lived for 36 years in the former Kensington Hotel which had the Thunderbolt rollercoaster built around it in 1925. The house -- the model for Alvy Singer's childhood home in Annie Hall -- burned in 1991 and the roller coaster was razed in 2000.
posted by jessamyn at 8:48 AM PST - 15 comments

"A young mother is injured and her three month old baby killed by shell fragments as she breastfeeds the child in the government declared no fire zone. Parents hide their children in roughly dug bunkers to escape LTTE press gangs who comb the no-fire zone for conscripts. A woman loses her husband to sniper fire and the toddler he was carrying too drowns when they attempt to wade across a lagoon to escape the no-fire zone. A father is shot in the head by LTTE members as he attempted to flee with his family." - The University Teachers for Human Rights (Jaffna) discuss the situation in Vanni, Sri Lanka, in their 47th information bulletin.
posted by chunking express at 8:35 AM PST - 25 comments

Make Believe you're in a jungle movie. Watch the frozen baby elephants mammoths go by. The beat world is groovy. [more inside]
posted by Science! at 7:48 AM PST - 9 comments

Friday Flash Frustration: Their cute little faces ask for the impossible. Get them to the other side. (via)
posted by DU at 7:48 AM PST - 54 comments

"It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains." Jane Austen, who last year, along with her sisters, engaged in the deadly earnest fight against "unmentionables" in Seth Grahame-Smith's work, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, has sadly fallen prey once more, this time to aliens. Coming next year to a theater near you, from Elton John's Rocket Pictures.
posted by misha at 6:49 AM PST - 39 comments

The Wire - David Simon's original pitch and series bible. "At the end of thirteen episodes, the viewer - who has been lured all this way by a well-constructed police show - is not the simple gratification of hearing handcuffs click. Instead the conclusion is something Euripides or O'Neill might recognize: an America at every level at war with itself." [Previously.] (via)
posted by Electric Dragon at 4:15 AM PST - 42 comments

"It used to be only movies, now even verdicts are out before the official release." Peter Sunde of the Pirate Bay manages a little black humour after hearing word of the trial judgement. 1 year in prison and a 30m Kronor fine (£2.4m). Streaming press conference to be held today at friday at 13.00 swedish time (GMT+1 / CET). Get your pirate phrases at the ready.
posted by numberstation at 3:25 AM PST - 138 comments

Ex Vivo Lung. Watch it breathing.
posted by orthogonality at 1:46 AM PST - 32 comments

Offensive Tea Party signs
posted by 5imian at 12:59 AM PST - 190 comments

Japanese snow monkeys in Yamanouchi have developed a neat trick - they bathe in the region's hot springs. Here's another gallery. There's even a webcam! [more inside]
posted by Joe in Australia at 12:34 AM PST - 23 comments

"What is it that certain people say or do during a job interview that makes them stand out? Why do some people struggle to find work, while others land a job in no time? I wanted to know, and the only way to find out was to experience the interview from the other side of the table." 22 tips, with video, at How To Nail An Interview.
posted by ShawnStruck at 10:22 PM PST - 64 comments

Last night, Elizabeth Warren visited John Stewart's Daily Show for a lengthy interview: Interview Part One and Interview Part Two. Warren, tapped last November to head congressional oversight of TARP (she has been mentioned before on the blue here and here), is a Harvard Law Professor with a strong interest in economic history (see here and here for more).
posted by ornate insect at 9:34 PM PST - 30 comments

The Brick Testament (previously: 1, 2, 3), created in 2001 by the Reverend Brendan Powell Smith, has just reached The Book of Revelations.
posted by Marisa Stole the Precious Thing at 7:03 PM PST - 18 comments

Commodore Frank Bainimarama has engineered a coup on top of a coup in sacking the judiciary, suspending the constitution, controlling the press, quashing dissent and taking over the central bank pdf press release. With no reportage of the takeover or criticism of the junta allowed, and with local journalists arrested and foreign correspondents expelled, how is the Fiji’s story being told? Bloggers have taken to the task, but are undertaking huge risks.
posted by mattoxic at 5:35 PM PST - 25 comments

Iraq air raids hit mostly women and children. "Air strikes and artillery barrages have taken a heavy toll among the most vulnerable of the Iraqi people, with children and women forming a disproportionate number of the dead. Analysis carried out for the research group Iraq Body Count (IBC) found that 39 per cent of those killed in air raids by the US-led coalition were children and 46 per cent were women. Fatalities caused by mortars, used by American and Iraqi government forces as well as insurgents, were 42 per cent children and 44 per cent women."
posted by homunculus at 5:20 PM PST - 21 comments

Torture Memos Released

As we explained in the Section 2340A Memorandum, "pain and suffering" as used in Section 2340 is best understood as a single concept, not distinct concepts of "pain" as distinguished from "suffering"... The waterboard, which inflicts no pain or actual harm whatsoever, does not, in our view inflict "severe pain or suffering". Even if one were to parse the statute more finely to treat "suffering" as a distinct concept, the waterboard could not be said to inflict severe sufering. The waterboard is simply a controlled acute episode, lacking the connotation of a protracted period of time generally given to suffering.

Ambinder breaks it down, Greenwald rants.
posted by empath at 4:49 PM PST - 170 comments

A giant robotic beetle (YT) built in Japan by a man in his garage -- and it works. [more inside]
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 4:38 PM PST - 19 comments

1930s dogs in clothes - (SLYT)
posted by Artw at 1:38 PM PST - 26 comments

Your business card is CRAP! (SLYT)(via).
posted by ND¢ at 1:29 PM PST - 119 comments

The Go Team might have done it first. But nobody wreaks havoc in a Pac-Man suit like the French!
posted by manosthf at 12:57 PM PST - 33 comments

Tough times call for a new kind of super-mascot. Faster than a charging bull, able to scale tall mountains without the need for oxygen tanks, or even during quiet family moments EneMan is there. Still, there are some places he shouldn't go. More lawsuits cake, anyone?
posted by Ogre Lawless at 12:08 PM PST - 18 comments

London police are now deleting tourists' photos because "photographing anything to do with transport is strictly forbidden."
posted by plexi at 11:55 AM PST - 84 comments

"Hot Cougar Sex!" Since the term was first coined, "cougar" has become something of a cultural phenomenon: it's been applied to Samantha on "Sex and the City" and actress Demi Moore, and sometimes shares territory with that other recently-ubiquitous label for sexualized older women: MILFs. Some women have embraced the term as empowering, but as a new reality show debuts, others show why it's less than appealing.
posted by ocherdraco at 11:49 AM PST - 181 comments

Brain Researchers Open Door to Editing Memory : spotless minds might be closer than we think.
posted by grapefruitmoon at 11:26 AM PST - 20 comments

The Tuk Tuk is coming to America.
posted by gman at 11:18 AM PST - 51 comments

Demon Denim. Feeding off a earlier column in the WSJ by Daniel Akst, who wrote, "no fabric has ever been so insidiously effective at undermining national discipline," conservative columnist George Will takes up the (denim-free) banner in the crusade to rid America of "the plague of that ubiquitous fabric, which is symptomatic of deep disorders in the national psyche."
posted by Liver at 10:44 AM PST - 155 comments

"The Cleveland Tourism Board gave me 14 million dollars about 8 months ago to make a promotional video to bring people to Cleveland. As usual, I waited till the last minute and I ended up having to shoot and edit it in about an hour yesterday afternoon. I probably should have invested more time."
posted by dhammond at 10:43 AM PST - 48 comments

Ok, it's an advert but it's a 'directed by Chris Cunningham' advert... [more inside]
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 10:04 AM PST - 32 comments

Honeybees are very important players in our web-o-life; 80% of modern crop pollination depends on them. For the last 4 or 5 years, however, they have been dying off in huge numbers from an affliction known as Colony Collapse Disorder. After much fretting and hard work, scientists may have found a cure.
posted by Benny Andajetz at 9:39 AM PST - 47 comments

"Everything begins with complex cladograms I scribble down on large sheets of paper. Before any pictures, these family trees serve as the 'backbone' of the project; allowing me to develop the relationships among different animals and derive ideas from one another." Welcome to the beautiful nonexistent world of Snaiad. Inhabitants include Titanoformes, Cardiocetes, Sprogophidians, and Blumbomeniforms. There are also maps and a timeline. Fantastic speculative zoology from Nemo Ramjet.
posted by HumanComplex at 8:50 AM PST - 22 comments

The Changing Racial Dynamics of the War on Drugs. The Sentencing Project has just released a report (pdf) finding that, for the first time in 20 years, the number of Black Americans in state prison for drug offenses has fallen. Between 1999 and 2005, the number of White drug offenders in state prisons rose about 43 percent, while the number of Black offenders declined by 22 percent. One cause may be a rise in the use of drug courts, which are locally administered programs that divert offenders into treatment rather than incarceration. The Sentencing Project has a recent report (pdf) on this issue as well.
posted by lunit at 8:11 AM PST - 32 comments

Long before there was Adult Swim, there was Cartoon Planet, an odd little show that showed Turner-owned cartoons with surreal vignettes featuring Space Ghost, Zorak and Brak in-between. Soon the old cartoons were dropped in favor of more strangeness from SG and his crew, ostensibly in the form of an afterschool special with regular features like mailbag, story time and educational bits like Learning to Talk Italian. Over time, the sketches got odder and odder. [more inside]
posted by jbickers at 7:58 AM PST - 71 comments

[MLYT] Peter Schiff gives a talk to the Western Regional Mortgage Bankers Association, describing exactly the ongoing economic meltdown. (Part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8). The catch? The talk was given in 2006. Listening to his bullish counterpart in parts 6-8 is a real scream. [more inside]
posted by valkyryn at 7:48 AM PST - 23 comments

Blago to face "fun and comedic challenges" in a reluctant celeb reality show Thank God for Rod Blagojevich. The Energizer buny of political buffoonery. This must have been what he was referring to when he quoted Tennyson in that press conference. Cuz it surely didn't make sense then.
posted by njbradburn at 7:03 AM PST - 28 comments

I can build DNA / I can be a big star (previously) (via the filter)
posted by shadytrees at 6:55 AM PST - 5 comments

Is it "a momentary blip on the inevitable decline of a dying format" or "the onset of an extended revival that will see the record outlive its arch-nemesis the CD?" Last year more people bought vinyl LPs than in any year since Nielsen started keeping track in 1991, nearly doubling sales from the year before. Turntable sales rebounded sharply in 2006. This Saturday, coordinated with the 2nd international Record Store Day, dozens of artists and labels are releasing exclusive vinyl versions of unreleased tracks, rare 7" reissues, remasters and new songs, solely to participating stores. Here's the full list (most with cover art here). [more inside]
posted by mediareport at 6:31 AM PST - 87 comments

Brad Elterman's gallery of (mostly) celebrity photos from the 1970s, including Robert Plant, Matt Dillon, and the tale of Jackie O and the tape. Some shots may be NSFW. [via]
posted by Combustible Edison Lighthouse at 6:28 AM PST - 20 comments

Former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage: -

"They Tortured" "Maybe I should have Resigned".

It is not certain whether this interview will be aired in the US because cable and satellite providers have declined to work with Al Jazeera English.
The interview was conducted by Avi Lewis for his program "Fault Lines".
posted by adamvasco at 3:56 AM PST - 73 comments

Are times of recession good or bad for the contemporary art market and artists? "Affordable" is becoming a leitmotif: there are events, international fairs, as well as various galleries. Some collectors and artists are sharing survival tips and tricks; and there are plenty of special offers to be had: Josh Poehlein - screenshot collages, free ; Shepard Fairey - "Obey Eye" screen print, 18 x 24 inches, signed and numbered, at a random time on April 21st: $45.00 ; Michel Gondry - your portrait, signed: $19.95 (allow 6 to 8 weeks for delivery); 'Damien Hirst' - "For the love of Paris" postcard, 10.5 x 14.8 cm, signed and sent: € 1,80 ; Banksy - original, freely usable, high-quality jpg files: free.
posted by progosk at 3:29 AM PST - 31 comments

Paper Cuts tracks U.S. newspaper layoffs and buyouts. Roughly 24,000 jobs lost in 2008-09. It includes all newspaper jobs, from editor to ad rep, reporter to marketing, copy editor to pressman, design to carrier, and anyone else who works for a newspaper. Mapped papers that have closed or stopped publishing a print edition.
posted by netbros at 10:19 PM PST - 24 comments

The Singing Nerd is a guy who likes to write, play, and record songs about the things that he likes and then post music videos on Youtube. Most of these songs are about nerdy things, such as The Ballad of Catan, a song simply entitled Chess! and a song about Role Playing. But there's also songs about things we can all relate to, like Fast Food Commercials, A Trip To Las Vegas and... um... Pirates?. Hmmm. Anyway, check out the rest of his songs here.
posted by Effigy2000 at 9:35 PM PST - 7 comments

Voting for the Time 100, Time Magazine's list of the world's most influential people in government, science, technology and the arts, has taken a bizarre turn. Rather than the expected dance-off between Stephen Colbert and Korean pop star Rain, the top spot is currently occupied by moot, the owner and operator of 4chan. Hear Time's own take on it, and then, learn who hacked the vote.
posted by CrunchyFrog at 8:37 PM PST - 43 comments

Exploding Squirrels (but in a humane way), using the Rodenator Pro. In a related story, Rush Limbaugh learns a new word. Video.
posted by LeLiLo at 8:29 PM PST - 38 comments

Mere days after asserting his state's "sovereignty" from an "oppressive" Federal government, Governor Rick Perry stands before an angry crowd at Austin City Hall and announces that Texas may once again secede from the Union. "There's a lot of different scenarios," Perry said. "We've got a great union. There's absolutely no reason to dissolve it. But if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, you know, who knows what might come out of that. But Texas is a very unique place, and we're a pretty independent lot to boot." [more inside]
posted by Avenger at 7:05 PM PST - 305 comments

1) American Apparel uses stills from Annie Hall in an ad campaign. 2) Woody Allen sues American Apparel for $10M+. 3) American Apparel stays classy.
posted by Sys Rq at 5:14 PM PST - 117 comments

BigBrotherFilter: Estimates place the number of CCTV cameras in the UK at 4.2 million, but how can these images all possibly be watched? Researches in Turkey have an answer: an eye-gaze tracking system placed on the CCTV operators themselves which can "then automatically produces a summary of the CCTV video sequences they have missed during their shift". [more inside]
posted by tybeet at 4:14 PM PST - 32 comments

WE WANT OUR MONEY BACK BRITNEY SPEARS [more inside]
posted by KokuRyu at 4:08 PM PST - 66 comments

Daaaamn.
posted by xmutex at 2:14 PM PST - 79 comments

The spoken-word poetry (and music) of Sarah Kay: "B". "Hand Me Downs". "Not Just Another Math Problem". "Scaffolding". [more inside]
posted by dolca at 12:51 PM PST - 26 comments

Given recent economic woes, in conjunction with ecological, national security, and community issues regarding food production, does Japan have an interesting idea? [more inside]
posted by barrett caulk at 12:16 PM PST - 25 comments

Real-Life Mirror's Edge. (SLYT)
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 12:02 PM PST - 40 comments

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, one of the founders of queer theory, died on April 12th, 2009. Sedgwick was known not only for her groundbreaking academic publications, but also for her candid humanism. And surprisingly to some, she was married for 40 years to Hal Sedgwick, but they only saw each other on weekends.
posted by hpliferaft at 11:19 AM PST - 37 comments

Meet financial advisor Mike Morgan. He started an anti-Goldman Sachs website to examine "what part Goldman Sachs and their executives played in the current Global Economic Crisis." The investment bank and its lawyers told him to cease and desist. So Morgan sued Goldman (pdf). The response has been overwhelming. Morgan is now organizing volunteers to go after the other banksters. Want to help? There's a webinar scheduled tonight.
posted by up in the old hotel at 9:59 AM PST - 40 comments

A public television program about finding jobs. This isn't the expected roundtable of flabby retraining advice from consultants pimping their own firms. It's 30-second elevator pitches and happy landings. Read a news article about it. (via The Mediavore.)
posted by Mo Nickels at 9:59 AM PST - 3 comments

What's your NPR name? [more inside]
posted by Potomac Avenue at 9:52 AM PST - 277 comments

"Cochon 555 is a culinary event featuring 5 chefs, 5 pigs, and 5 winemakers in a friendly competition for a cause. Each chef will prepare a 70 pound heritage pig from head to toe for 200 enthusiasts." (flash site) [more inside]
posted by mkb at 9:11 AM PST - 18 comments

Kari Ferrell is on Salt Lake City's Most Wanted List. Apparently Ms. Ferrell has moved from Utah to New York and has been hanging out with the hipsters in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Within the space of a half-hour, Ms. Ferrell was peppering him with questions about his sexual history—how many women he’d slept with and so on. “She was coming on to me, and I was super into it for the first part of it,” he said. “I realized I could have fun after work—but then I was like, ‘Let me check this girl out.’”
posted by R. Mutt at 8:56 AM PST - 147 comments

Child labor in Bangladesh
posted by Joe Beese at 8:51 AM PST - 26 comments

If the 8-bit Tarot isn't low-tech enough for you, the Aecletic Mini Tarot Deck makes it look downright HD in comparison! May induce flashbacks of Taboo: The Sixth Sense, the NES' infamous Tarot simulator.
posted by hermitosis at 7:55 AM PST - 19 comments

Theodore Gray, author of the new book Theo Gray's Mad Science, has a personal collection of thousands of samples of elements [previously on MetaFilter]. In his Popular Science column, he has smelted his own titanium and dissolved aluminum. Now, he cuts through steel with bacon.
posted by Eater at 6:48 AM PST - 31 comments

The Atlantic takes a look at the American Class System: a look at Paul Fussell's Class 25 years later. Of particular interest is the movement of Class 'X' from outside the system to the core of the status-obsessed center. [more inside]
posted by leotrotsky at 6:16 AM PST - 154 comments

20 years ago today, a crush of fans at the Leppings Lane entrance of Sheffield Wednesday's Hillsborough Stadium killed 96 people, among them the cousin of current Liverpool player Steven Gerrard (who has the dubious honour of being the youngest victim). Coming just 4 years after the Heysel stadium disaster, which killed 39 people and was officially blamed on Liverpool fans, and almost two decades of hooligan violence, the most obvious or convenient conclusion was that history had repeated itself. [more inside]
posted by MuffinMan at 5:25 AM PST - 61 comments

Dig out your old Singer sewing machines from the attic and sell them to somebody in Saudi Arabia for a fortune on account of the red mercury they contain. Red mercury allows nuclear bombs to be constructed without the need for plutonium [previously]. Red mercury came originally from Russia. Or from the Nazis. Red mercury was invented to lure terrorists in sting operations. It is a medicine for treating impotency. Red mercury will bring long life. It is cinnabar. It is mercury iodide. It is Lithium 6. It is a Bose Einstein Condensate. It is a ballotechnic mercury compound. It is a codeword. It's a game. It costs $300,000 per kilo.
posted by rongorongo at 3:48 AM PST - 46 comments

"What" ain't no rendering engine I ever heard of! They support CSS3 in "What"?!
posted by slater at 12:58 AM PST - 37 comments

Roadside Architecture. "I have been passionate about commercial architecture and roadside related things all my life. I grew up in California but New York City has been my home since 1980. I started this website in 2000 simply as a way to organize my own photos. Since then, it has become a bit of an obsession and grown to well over 1,000 pages." flickr. blog. [more inside]
posted by mwhybark at 11:38 PM PST - 11 comments

The Digital Library of Slovenia has (among other things) music [like this] [previously], posters [like this] and photographs [like this].
posted by tellurian at 10:12 PM PST - 12 comments

"Not until I put them there." David Antin worked in a wide range of innovative modes until landing in the early 1970s on what he calls the talk poem. Antin speaks extemporaneously and then transcribes his talks using only space as punctuation. The implications of positioning these works as poetry are, of course, part of the point.
posted by roll truck roll at 10:11 PM PST - 15 comments

This weekend marks the U.S. premiere of the new HBO film Grey Gardens (starring Drew Barrymore as Little Edie and Jessica Lange as Big Edie) -- promo [video | 02:01] || 'Inside Grey Garden' [video | 03:33]. The film is based on the 1975 documentary filmed by the Maysles brothers, depicting the "true story of Mrs. Edith Bouvier Beale and her daughter Edie, the aunt and first cousin of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis....[who] live[d] in a world of their own behind the towering privets that surround[ed] their decaying 28-room East Hampton mansion known as 'Grey Gardens.'" [more inside]
posted by ericb at 9:49 PM PST - 47 comments

"Normally subcultures in Australia are taken from other countries and just reproduced here. Sharps or sharpies are an Australian specific subculture, developed in Australian specific conditions." Sharpies were members of suburban youth gangs in Australia mainly from the 1960s to 1980s, particularly in Melbourne, but also in Sydney and Perth to a lesser extent. "Everybody was in a gang. Everybody. Every second street there was a gang. Um -- there was like you were either in a gang or you were the victim." The time of the sharpies is part of Melbourne folklore. Forget JFK. Where were you when Frankston erupted after the AC/DC concert in 1977? While the violence was legendary, so were the fashion and the music. Lobby Loyde and the Coloured Balls, Buster Brown, Skyhooks, Fat Daddy, Hush. And nobody danced like the sharpies (which resembles skanking of some sort). Anyone over forty who grew up in Melbourne has at least one story to tell about the sharpies (PDF). Some stories are about gang leaders with missing teeth and shit-eating grins, while others look back with some sort of fondness.
posted by filthy light thief at 9:35 PM PST - 23 comments

The Wriston Art Center Galleries Digital Collection at Lawrence University has over 1500 images of various artworks, focusing especially on prints & printmaking and ancient coins. All can be viewed in extremely high resolution (click "export image" above the artwork). Here are a few I particularly like: Beginning of Winter (Japanese woodcut), Rising Sun (Paul Klee painting), From Distant Lands (watercolor), Three Kings (Jacques Villon engraving), Untitled I (netting) and Noble Lady and Prince (Japanese woodcut).
posted by Kattullus at 9:12 PM PST - 4 comments

...you're gonna need a Dick Armey. SLYT.
posted by emjaybee at 9:03 PM PST - 48 comments

If society fell apart this afternoon I’d be willing to bet you’d die. You’ve spent your life learning how to ‘cut and paste’ or how to master E. Honda’s Hundred Handslap in Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo, but when the world comes crashing down and you’re hungry, you’ll be eating crunchy Ramen noodles and wondering how your own pee tastes. Lets face it. You’d die. This blog is to help those plan for their escape from the collapsing rubble of our society." Survive the Apocalypse.
posted by netbros at 9:01 PM PST - 58 comments

NYT article 4/12/09 Interesting article about the Dead on the eve of their tour. Bonus: link on the sidebar that shows reader photos. Find your friends. Or not.
posted by mnb64 at 8:29 PM PST - 25 comments

Is the west thwarting Arab plans for reform? Few Muslims now invest much hope in the democratic western powers (essentially the US, Britain and France) that back the rulers who oppress them, even if, against the odds, they still admire “western” values, science and culture. There is no endemic or intrinsic conflict between Christians and Muslims. Rather, the root of the problem is that a majority of Muslims is convinced that the west – interested only in a stability based on regional strongmen, the security of Israel and cheap oil – is engaged in a war against Islam and is bent on denying them the freedoms it claims for itself. That is why it is so self-defeating to collude in tyranny as ostensibly a lesser evil than political Islam. [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 6:54 PM PST - 29 comments

The philosopher Marjorie Grene died last month at the age of 98. Author of over 30 books, pioneer in the philosophy of biology and one of the first interpreters of existentialism, Grene was an iconoclastic thinker fondly remembered by many. Her contributions span the whole of philosophy, and her long career began with a bachelor's in zoology from Wellesley; from there she studied with Whitehead and C.I. Lewis at Harvard, with Jaspers and Heidegger in Germany in the 1930s, and alongside Carnap, Hempel, and Polyani in Chicago. Hence she was one of the few modern philosophers who was as conversant in existentialism as she was in logical positivism.
posted by ornate insect at 5:14 PM PST - 10 comments

What's In The Box? (SLYT) (Via) [more inside]
posted by 3.2.3 at 4:54 PM PST - 58 comments

Wes Anderson: The Substance of Style. A video essay in five parts by Matt Zoller Seitz. (Links go to the text of the essay; click on the embedded video to view.) [via]
posted by Horace Rumpole at 4:37 PM PST - 33 comments

Youtube singing sensation Miranda branches out into music videos. Single Ladies, Genie in a Bottle, Dancing Queen. Want to sing like Miranda? Of course you do. Lucky for you, she gives singing lessons.
posted by minifigs at 3:07 PM PST - 75 comments

Dick Cavett conjures up the great Slydini. Part 1., Part 2. "It was like seeing a man walk up a wall. Nothing prepared you for it. Right at the start, a solid, heavy silver dollar, held before my eyes, vanished into thinnest air. And by no method I knew of. Certainly no sleeves. The two hours flew too quickly."
posted by Xurando at 3:03 PM PST - 20 comments

Perhaps the greatest country baritone since George Jones is confined to a wheelchair by muscular dystrophy and has a day job at a nuclear power plant. [more inside]
posted by BitterOldPunk at 2:17 PM PST - 28 comments

Susan Boyle , a big surprise on Britain's Got Talent . Miss Boyle astonished the judges at the auditions for ITV1 show with her rendition of I Dreamed A Dream from Les Miserables. [more inside]
posted by otherwordlyglow at 12:59 PM PST - 191 comments

137 Uncomfortable Plot Summaries of a wide variety of movies, TV series and even a couple books, from varying points of view (whatever is the most uncomfortable). A treasure trove of pop culture redefinition.
posted by wendell at 12:06 PM PST - 421 comments

Two Christian ministries, Hookers for Jesus and JC's Girls aim to "save" Las Vegas sex workers from their professions by introducing them to Christianity. [more inside]
posted by zarq at 11:50 AM PST - 33 comments

Scarygirl. Flash platformer/adventure game with absolutely staggering production values and art. The intro sequence is awesome.
posted by juv3nal at 11:49 AM PST - 39 comments

After two years of work of collecting, scanning, and tagging, the Government Comics Collection at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln library has gone live. This digital collection features "comic books affiliated with state and federal U.S. government agencies, as well as the UN and the EU (and a couple from Canada and one from Ghana)" and includes comics and art by Will Eisner, Scott Adams, Hank Ketcham ("Dennis the Menace Takes a Poke at Poison"), and more. [more inside]
posted by Tesseractive at 11:23 AM PST - 7 comments

Peanuts Roasted A blog devoted to going through all of Peanuts' 49-year-plus comic archives, from beginning to end, and linking to the more interesting strips. [via mefi projects] [more inside]
posted by KokuRyu at 10:57 AM PST - 23 comments

Surgeons find fir tree growing inside patients lung. Of course, this isn't the first time objects have found their way into the human body. Nail in skull. Paintbrush in skull. Towel behind lung. Potato in Vagina.
posted by Lutoslawski at 10:42 AM PST - 52 comments

Photos: The 10,000 Year Clock. [Via]
posted by homunculus at 9:55 AM PST - 48 comments

Hand signals are used to transmit instructions from a spotter on the ground to the crane operator high above. Here is a poster illustrating those hand signals, courtesy of the California Crane School. Feel free to post it at your job site, or to have any of the images tattooed onto your forearms.
posted by mudpuppie at 9:43 AM PST - 30 comments

Six Years after the murder of Lana Clarkson, Phil Spector has been found guilty. (previously) [more inside]
posted by orville sash at 8:26 AM PST - 97 comments

Thousands of dolphins block Somali pirates
posted by hermitosis at 7:35 AM PST - 78 comments

Perhaps the test didn't work out and you need to retire the replicant. [more inside]
posted by P.o.B. at 6:52 AM PST - 52 comments

Know Your Meme (mlyt) [more inside]
posted by hypersloth at 6:43 AM PST - 29 comments

Harvard Sociologist Robert Samson, known for his work challenging the Broken Window hypothesis (previously on Metafilter), has a number of publications on neighborhoods, race and immigration, crime, and spatial dynamics posted publicly online. Here are just a few recent publications (all pdfs):

*Moving to Inequality: Neighborhood Effects and Experiences Meet Social Structure
*Durable effects of concentrated disadvantage on verbal ability of African American children
*Rethinking crime and immigration
*Neighborhood Selection and the Social Reproduction of Concentrated Racial Inequality
*"After School" Chicago: Space and the City

posted by lunit at 6:38 AM PST - 21 comments

To go, or not to go? that is the question;--/Whether 'tis better for my views to suffer/The ease and quiet of yon hated rival,/Or to take arms against the haughty people,/And by invading end them? The Napoleonic Wars, in word, image and map, at the European Library. [more inside]
posted by OmieWise at 6:26 AM PST - 7 comments

Last week was International Trombone Week. But what is a trombone? Can you recognize the many types of trombone? [more inside]
posted by winna at 8:36 PM PST - 63 comments

Sorting Algorithm Animations.
posted by signal at 8:35 PM PST - 51 comments

Happy birthday, Mr. Jefferson! Thomas Jefferson, the 3rd US president, was born on this day in 1743 (actually, April 2nd, but then the calendar changed in 1752). Certainly celebrations and examinations of his leadership and politics and philosophy and inventions are warranted, but-damn, that man was amazing with a drafting compass. TJ's greatest hits: Monticello, Poplar Forest, The University
posted by njbradburn at 7:08 PM PST - 23 comments

Gorgeous pictures of snow rollers. [more inside]
posted by Joe in Australia at 5:47 PM PST - 33 comments

Artist Stephen R. Bissette dissects the making of Saga of the Swamp Thing #20, the first American comics appearance of writer Alan Moore (um...previously), in a series of blog posts that feature much original artwork (by Bissette and others), as well as a sampling of Moore's apparently absolutely ginormous script for the issue. (Warning: Parts of Bissette's site are NSFW.) Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 5:16 PM PST - 14 comments

In the event that you have accidentally swallowed the Higgs boson...
posted by Zero Gravitas at 4:49 PM PST - 48 comments

My date with Willy Pickton. Robert Pickton that is, Canada's most prolific serial killer.
posted by GuyZero at 4:19 PM PST - 30 comments

Mark "The Bird" Fidrych RIP. They really do come in threes. In '76, Bird was the word. Fidrych captivated baseball fans with his antics, talking to the ball, patting the mound, running off to talk to everyone. The Bird 1954-2009.
posted by caddis at 3:56 PM PST - 39 comments

Sunday, February 28, 1993. A new word -- Internet -- makes its first appearance in The New York Times.
posted by william_boot at 3:38 PM PST - 44 comments

Bad Crazy in Internet Space

There is a jagged fissure of insanity which runs through the heart of the EVE playerbase, a kind of feverish bad crazy that you simply don't find in other online games. Oh, sure, everyone knows a tale or two about the Starcraft player who stayed awake for 50 hours and died from exhaustion because he wouldn't stop gaming, or the legions of relatively mundane overweight basement-dwelling nerds that populate the other MMOs that have a lack of perspective that comes from playing in virtual worlds too much. Some people like to point to South Korea's Starcraft tournaments as a sign of abnormality, but sporting leagues are a 'healthy' expression of hobby activity by most standards. No, if you want utter madness, you have to look to EVE.

The Mitanni, head of the Goonswarm Intelligence Agency, tells some tales from the dark underbelly of Eve Online. (previously)
posted by empath at 3:17 PM PST - 109 comments

Mike Tyson's Intergalactic Power Punch ROM (for NES) released. (Via.)
posted by Prospero at 2:25 PM PST - 28 comments

RIP: Marilyn Chambers, star of the first widely distributed hard core porn film, "Behind the Green Door. NSFW
posted by Xurando at 2:22 PM PST - 53 comments

Neil Young has a new album out. Ever innovative, Neil has written his new album about his electric car. [via]
posted by peewinkle at 1:13 PM PST - 42 comments

Wynton Marsalis waxes poetic (and music) at the Kennedy Center about art, freedom, jazz, the minstrel shows of yesterday and today, Walt Whitman, American history, the similarities between the Battle Hymn of the Republic and the Mickey Mouse Club March, rock and roll, and how it all ties together. [more inside]
posted by Ndwright at 12:59 PM PST - 30 comments

Hall of Fame member, Phillies broadcaster, and NFL Films announcer Harry Kalas passed away today. At least he got to make his World Series victory call.
posted by SansPoint at 12:20 PM PST - 26 comments

How (and Why) Athletes Go Broke [more inside]
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 10:42 AM PST - 130 comments

Richard Renaldi is doing some pretty wonderful photography. For several years, he’s been using a large format 8x10 camera (with the hood and everything), profiling people in ways that feel both intimate and authentic. His first book, “Figure and Ground,” is a collection of portraits and landscapes that capture, with a quiet intensity, a diverse cross-section of the country. His newest book, “Fall River Boys,” is a sort of chronicle of a decaying American town, and the (mostly) young inhabitants who are either unable or unwilling to leave. (He and his partner even launched their own press to get it published.) [more inside]
posted by mapalm at 9:36 AM PST - 8 comments

Name Your Tale. Submit a title, and and one of the authors of Name Your Tale will write a 100-word short story based on the submitted title. For example, "Andrew Received Cancer."[via mefi projects]
posted by dersins at 9:02 AM PST - 22 comments

Dork Yearbook - vintage tech pr0n, now with thicker glasses and footsier pajamas!
posted by carsonb at 8:42 AM PST - 16 comments

Criterion Collection box art for video games.
posted by geoff. at 8:31 AM PST - 25 comments

Here's a wonderful and visually creative document (complete with a curious and elaborate musical soundtrack and voices of actual barkers) of one full day in the life of Coney Island USA 1952. A fascinating glimpse of a bygone era! See also: Coney Island of the 1940s, and this color amateur film (with some surprisingly arty shots), Springtime at Coney Island 1944.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 7:47 AM PST - 12 comments

Stop motion with wolf and pig. [SLYT]
posted by defenestration at 6:23 AM PST - 37 comments

The separation of the ownership of a business from its management is one of the defining characteristics of the modern capitalist system. But ongoing failures of corporate governance, particularly in banking, have called into question these structures. Is there a better way? Secretive UK private bank C. Hoare & Co. has a solution that works for those customers it chooses to accept. [more inside]
posted by Mutant at 5:22 AM PST - 49 comments

In 1975, Greek film executive Daniel Bourla completed work on his sole directorial effort, The Noah. Inspiration for the film stemmed from a meeting Bourla had with scenarist Carl Foreman, in which Bourla observed that “if one really had something to say in a film, he could do it with one man and a fly in a room”. Bourla wrote a postapocalyptic script about the last man to survive a nuclear war. [more inside]
posted by pxe2000 at 5:06 AM PST - 5 comments

Kinda sutra - a charmingly animated short in which people talk about childhood misconceptions about sex and childbirth. More on childhood sex misconceptions from Dan Savage 1, 2, 3. (pretty tame clip, but possibly NSFW) [more inside]
posted by madamjujujive at 4:14 AM PST - 55 comments

"What began as a defensive movement by local fishermen has evolved into a complex amalgamation of banditry, organized crime, freebooting, and insurgency targeting all types of vessels from fishing trawlers to oil tankers." Somali pirates holding an American captain hostage were killed during a rescue yesterday. The lack of effective governance in Somalia allows massive vessels from Europe and Asia to decimate the local fish population, which may have forced Somali fisherman into piracy. Other ships use the Somali coast as a toxic waste dump. [previously]
posted by benzenedream at 2:56 AM PST - 180 comments

The Guardian has taken the unusual step of publishing the same article in English & in Italian because the Italian media will not tell the truth about Berlusconi. The tainted clown that heads Italy has accused newspapers and television stations of slandering him and damaging the country’s reputation by highlighting his alleged faux pas.
Silvio's Shadow an interesting article from the Colombia Journal of Review cached archives shows how Berlusconi uses Journalism as a political weapon. [more inside]
posted by adamvasco at 2:40 AM PST - 48 comments

A Psychologist Analyzes the Increasing Pervasiveness of Snark. From the Psychology Today blog site comes this article about snark, Gawker, and David Denby's definitions of "snark" versus "Satire." [more inside]
posted by crazyray at 9:43 PM PST - 48 comments

Get your Daily Dose of '80s kitsch.
posted by idiopath at 9:15 PM PST - 17 comments

Behold the Cosmic Hand of Destruction.
posted by homunculus at 8:10 PM PST - 45 comments

April 13th is Seamus Heaney's 70th birthday, and to celebrate, the Irish press have honored him in many ways. A Catholic from Northern Ireland, his early poems reflected his upbringing on a farm, but his later poems (and time in the States) spoke powerfully of 'the Troubles.' I thought he deserved a mention in the Blue. [more inside]
posted by dbmcd at 8:06 PM PST - 13 comments

"What is on the minds of the unsettled citizens of an upset nation in the middle of the cruelest month of the year? We need only look to the Peeps to see." The Washington Post's third (no, rly) annual Peeps Show. (Previously.) [more inside]
posted by arachnid at 6:01 PM PST - 19 comments

These strange alien structures are among the seeds and pollen conserved at the Kew Millennium Seed Bank
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 5:58 PM PST - 9 comments

Capoeira Fighter 3. A fantastic Flash fighting game. Jayisgames review
posted by dolca at 3:14 PM PST - 15 comments

IF YOU DON'T LOVE CILANTRO WITH ALL YOUR HEART I WILL FIGHT YOU. Finally, the internet is in balance.
posted by youarenothere at 2:03 PM PST - 137 comments

Within the last few hours, a trend on Twitter has emerged in response to Amazon's removing the sales ranking of books they consider to have "adult content," which also keeps those books from appearing in search results. However, while seeming to unilaterally de-list any books with gay themes and characters, many books with adult heterosexual content were left untouched. [more inside]
posted by TochterAusElysium at 1:57 PM PST - 305 comments

"Darling Divas" by Colby Katz. [Click on "Multimedia", then click on "Darling Divas". May be NSFW.]
posted by Joe Beese at 10:33 AM PST - 31 comments

The First Dog is here!
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 10:29 AM PST - 65 comments

How old is too old to be breastfed? [more inside]
posted by gman at 9:55 AM PST - 174 comments

Polio: A Virus’ Struggle is a Graphic Novella by James Weldon. When we eradicate a disease, do we ever think about how it may effect the disease? Learn all about the history of Poliomyelitis, as he tells his story to the group.
posted by vertigo25 at 9:15 AM PST - 16 comments

"Josh and Nina are two friends. Every day, they each take a photo. Operating under a pact of absolute secrecy, neither knows what the other is working on. Each morning, they post their photos on Minty Forest side by side." Despite the diversity of their subjects the individual days often have consistency, consonance, coincidence, congruence or discord.
posted by Mitheral at 8:12 AM PST - 13 comments

Cooking with Dog is a fantastic Japanese cooking show on YouTube - but don't worry, they don't actually cook dogs. It's just that in Japan, an internet cooking show comprised of short videos of simple Japanese recipes just wouldn't be interesting unless it was narrated by a talking poodle. Katsudon / Oden / Gyudon
posted by billysumday at 7:11 AM PST - 26 comments

The Paris-Roubaix is about to start. With an average of two punctures and one prang per competitor this a an exciting bike race.
posted by tellurian at 5:31 AM PST - 60 comments

Last night Joss Whedon received a Lifetime Achievement Award in Cultural Humanism at Harvard, taking the opportunity to talk about religion and education (somewhat rough video), as well as taking questions about Dollhouse, his probably-soon-to-be-cancelled not-all-to-be-shown show. I wonder how these guys are doing.
posted by Artw at 10:59 PM PST - 105 comments

The World of 100 -- 20 Posters by Toby Ng (via Daily Dish and Made in England) [more inside]
posted by fourcheesemac at 10:05 PM PST - 9 comments

A snapshot from a sexist 1970's children's book for your perusal. Many have seen this and insisted it must be a hoax. But is it? Sociological Images says not so fast.
posted by crazyray at 9:11 PM PST - 149 comments

Around Cape Horn - if you've ever wished for an authentic glimpse into the bygone era of the majestic age of sailing, this is it - a rare 1929 true adventure film about sailing a four-masted commercial barque around the Cape Horn during a huge gale. It was shot with a hand-cranked camera by Captain Irving Johnson who offers a spirited narration. 36 minutes, B&W
posted by madamjujujive at 8:28 PM PST - 28 comments

Disability and Employment in Argentina: The Right to Be Exploited?
posted by aniola at 8:25 PM PST - 7 comments

Play the life simulator. [more inside]
posted by idiopath at 6:26 PM PST - 34 comments

Gallery 1988 (previously on MetaFilter) presents Television reconsidered, deconstructed, reconstructed, reimagined and just had too much fun with, the usual subjects and a few surprises and much much more (after a word from our sponsor) in "Idiot Box". (Everything with titles & credits at that last link) (via)
posted by wendell at 5:59 PM PST - 4 comments

Magpie wants to roost in your twitter feed. (via Jon Lebkowsky , who has an opinion)
posted by Pants! at 5:33 PM PST - 39 comments

20 movies which make you wish you'd gone to college from UK flim critic Jo Berry. [more inside]
posted by needled at 4:59 PM PST - 61 comments

"Americans talk about institutions that are 'too big to fail.' In parts of Europe, it's more apt to speak of those 'too big to be saved.'" Last Man Standing by Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution fame.
posted by wittgenstein at 4:33 PM PST - 5 comments

1/40 scale IJN Yamato in Lego. [more inside]
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 3:28 PM PST - 25 comments

Sundance and Isabella Rosselini present season two of Green Porno. Most definitely NSFW. Previously.
posted by miss lynnster at 11:57 AM PST - 49 comments

On the subject of returning British television classics.. Doctor Who returns tonight for the first of four specials to be aired this year in lieu of a proper series. British MeFites watch David Tenant run through the sand as I type this while others wait anxiously for other means of viewership to become available. [more inside]
posted by mediocre at 11:14 AM PST - 47 comments

In 2000, the British Film Institute voted Fawlty Towers number 1 on its list of the 100 Greatest British Television Programmes. Perhaps an even greater tribute, numerous real-life lodgings have named themselves after it. Next month, Connie Booth - now a practicing psychotherapist in London - will break a 30 year silence about the show for a televised special. [more inside]
posted by Joe Beese at 10:28 AM PST - 79 comments

To Degree or Not to Degree? President Obama will get an honorary degree from Notre Dame but not Arizona State University during commencement ceremonies this year. ASU finds the first black American president's "body of work" insufficient. The East Valley Tribune disagrees. And some enterprising ASU students have found a way to profit from Obama's appearance at their commencement. [more inside]
posted by etaoin at 9:55 AM PST - 67 comments

Zombie Sushi Bar: A clip from the 1998 Hong Kong Horror-Comedy classic "Bio Zombie" (Sun faa Sau si) shows our intrepid heroine trying to blend in at a Undead Sushi Bar with delightfully disgusting results. NSFS (Not Safe For Squeamish) [more inside]
posted by The Whelk at 9:06 AM PST - 29 comments

For the last 50 years, grammar and style have been learned from The Elements of Style. That's not necessarily a good thing.
posted by jacquilynne at 8:53 AM PST - 117 comments

A native of Barcelona, Spain, Adriana Lopez Sanfeliu moved to New York in 2002 to pursue a career in photography. Adriana has been capturing the lives of young Puerto Rican women and their families in Spanish Harlem, NYC. There is a hardness that characterizes Life on the Block. [more inside]
posted by netbros at 8:40 AM PST - 6 comments

The classic British comedy sf series Red Dwarf returns for three episodes. [more inside]
posted by Guy_Inamonkeysuit at 8:10 AM PST - 49 comments

Hang this in your time machine.
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 3:24 AM PST - 65 comments

The secret, social lives of bacteria. "Bonnie Bassler discovered that bacteria 'talk' to each other, using a chemical language that lets them coordinate defense and mount attacks. The find has stunning implications for medicine, industry -- and our understanding of ourselves." [Via]
posted by homunculus at 9:15 PM PST - 52 comments

Royal Uproar? It started with the question of whether President Obama would bow (yt) to Queen Elizabeth. Then, during the G20 Summit, President Obama appeared to bow before King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. While some appreciate the gesture, conservatives are outraged. But the White House denies that there was any bow at all. What do you think about the greeting (yt)? Could it have been something else?
posted by Slap Factory at 8:35 PM PST - 83 comments

Star Wars Influence Map. Thank God Jar Jar Binks led to nowhere . . .
posted by jwakawaka at 8:30 PM PST - 22 comments

In Bendito Machine, shadow people exploit shadow machines for their shadow enjoyment. Shadow death (justice?) is brought about in shadowly humorous ways. [Previously, but now with its own site and more installments (I, II, III).]
posted by pokermonk at 7:51 PM PST - 4 comments

Take the world's hottest peppers, rub them in your eyes and then eat 51 of them in world record attempt. Mere mortals blanch at one or two (language in this last link unsurprisingly NSFW).
posted by caddis at 7:32 PM PST - 42 comments

Climate Denial Crock of the Week (YT). Especially good: I Love the 70's! and Mars Attacks!
posted by Pater Aletheias at 4:58 PM PST - 43 comments

Conjugal Harmony : "Normally you wouldn't think an arsonist would be good at sex. Boy was I ever wrong!" [slightly NSFW]
posted by desjardins at 4:45 PM PST - 43 comments

Why Do We Cheat? - The right, wrong, and why of videogame cheating. Go into virtually any gamer's forum, and you'll see the subject of using cheats and game hacks can stir quite a hornet's nest, particularly in online gaming. But even those using cheats in offline games, not wagering against or directly competing with anyone else, will draw the ire from others in the community, possibly because there are different types of players - that is, the difference between what Penny Arcade's Tycho once described as "people who play games in order to excel at them, and those who play games as a conduit to fantasy".
posted by Marisa Stole the Precious Thing at 4:17 PM PST - 54 comments

You probably think you know what cybernetics means, you are probably wrong. Has the field of cybernetics been discredited, or just mostly forgotten? It has been variously described as the science of communication and control, the art of defensible metaphors, and used in pop culture as a root word for cyborg. [more inside]
posted by idiopath at 12:57 PM PST - 49 comments

Thirty years of community fundraising, flawless makeup, genderbending, and hysterically offensive names: the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence are celebrating their 30th anniversary in San Francisco this weekend with parties, library exhibits, an art show, and their usual over-the-top Easter celebration. [more inside]
posted by gingerbeer at 12:47 PM PST - 18 comments

In the midst of increasing concern over dependence on URL shorteners, Digg perversely manifests one worst-case scenario, the DiggBar. Put your favorite website's URL into the Digg Bar, Digg provides a shortened version of the URL, handy for use in Twitter and other tiny media. What's the downside? Well, these days any link you follow from Digg has Digg's branding wrapped around it. Hey presto, Google suddenly looks like Digg property. [more inside]
posted by ardgedee at 12:45 PM PST - 82 comments

"Tweenbots are robots that navigate the city by the help of the people they meet." [more inside]
posted by dirtdirt at 11:51 AM PST - 41 comments

In Our Own Backyard: Resisting Nazi Propaganda In Southern California 1933 - 1945, a digital exhibition from the Oviatt Library at Cal State Northridge. "The Nazi Propaganda period, 1933 to 1945, chronicles a crucial twelve years in American history. This exhibit's story about the local threat to American ideals demonstrates how European events reached across the ocean and affected people in Southern California -- in our own backyard." Magazines, pamphlets, newspapers, stickers and more. [more inside]
posted by dersins at 11:26 AM PST - 32 comments

A group of middle-school-aged self-proclaimed nerds from Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, who won the New York City FIRST Lego League Robotics Championship with their motorized robot called Thingamajig are embarking on a trip to the Robotics World Festival in Atlanta. After a lack of funds nearly scuttled their journey, they've been bailed out by British vacuum cleaner exec James Dyson, and have been given the kind of sendoff most young nerds can only dream of: an all-school nerd-cheering pep rally.
posted by ocherdraco at 11:09 AM PST - 52 comments

The Local food movement's celebration over the white house garden was short lived. The White House has receive a letter from the Mid America CropLife Association, expressing disappointment that Obamas planted an organic garden. "As you go about planning and planting the White House garden, we respectfully encourage you to recognize the role conventional agriculture plays in the U.S in feeding the ever-increasing population, contributing to the U.S. economy and providing a safe and economical food supply. America's farmers understand crop protection technologies are supported by sound scientific research and innovation."
posted by Xurando at 11:05 AM PST - 97 comments

The US Postal Service announces a series of Simpsons stamps to be released on May 7. [more inside]
posted by 1f2frfbf at 10:32 AM PST - 59 comments

The Passion. A play on Twitter. Brought to you by Trinity Church. [Via]
posted by djgh at 10:12 AM PST - 83 comments

We've gotten all stupid over the Kogi taco truck. [more inside]
posted by univac at 7:02 AM PST - 114 comments

Wednesday, a woman jumped from the top tier of the Queens Center Mall, leaving by the railing a distraught companion, her purse, and her shoes. At first glance it would seem a spontaneous, strange thing to do, but it was most likely a premeditated action to show her intent. Workers on the Golden Gate Bridge use shoes as a clue of somebody about to jump, and Japan has long known that people who end their life leave their shoes behind. Age has little to do with it, and method seems irrelevant, so the common bond seems to be that taking off your shoes is the second-to-the-last decision some people make in their lives.
posted by AzraelBrown at 6:19 AM PST - 124 comments

This Ain't Flint [more inside]
posted by various at 6:02 AM PST - 78 comments

Anna Russell's marviously classic digest of The Ring of the Nibelungs. Part 1. Part 2. Part 3 (~1/2 hour of YT links)
posted by edgeways at 11:56 PM PST - 12 comments

Vintage alien landscapes by Kazuaki Saito
posted by Artw at 11:09 PM PST - 8 comments

Supernatural, best known for his battles with (MC) Juice and his appearances on the Wake-Up Show, freestyle raps the entire lineup (8:33) of this year's Rock the Bells (Hip Hop) Festival as they sit behind him, leaving rap legend Krs-1 saying "That's the essence of emceeing...I'm just floored." [more inside]
posted by cashman at 10:09 PM PST - 63 comments

Ted Neeley has made an entire career of playing Jesus in Jesus Christ Superstar. He starred in the movie back in 1973, and is currently on tour, still playing Jesus at age 65, almost twice the age of the historical Jesus when he died. Like the character he portrays, Neeley has quite the following, but some wonder if he's too old to play Jesus.
posted by JustKeepSwimming at 9:59 PM PST - 69 comments

What It Costs provides information on the costs associated with a wide variety of services and concepts. Whether you want to know the price range of practical activities — such as what it costs to replace a kitchen countertop, building a nuclear aircraft carrier — or are interested in unusual articles — such as the cost to build Fenway Park, being cryogenically frozen or cleaning up a murder scene — you will find all this and much more.
posted by netbros at 9:22 PM PST - 24 comments

Last night in San Jose and San Carlos, fiber optic communication cables were deliberately cut, knocking out landlines, cell phone, 911 and internet for several California counties. AT&T is offering a $100,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction for those responsible “for the vandalism incidents.” [more inside]
posted by 445supermag at 8:55 PM PST - 51 comments

Tonight in the MetaFilter Lecture Series, "Health through Nutrition: Its Prevention and Cure" by Brother Theodore Gottlieb (1906-2001), stand-up tragedian. [more inside]
posted by not_on_display at 8:51 PM PST - 8 comments

Steam Powered iPod Charger What more is there to say?
posted by MuadDib at 7:19 PM PST - 43 comments

Adam Curtis on the rise of "Oh Dearism" in television news. [SLYT, Via]
posted by homunculus at 7:18 PM PST - 41 comments

"Once upon a time there was a game that nobody ever played, sitting on the floor in the back room of an empty arcade. The game was full of life and strife, mega-monsters and robot fights. We Are The Strange was the title. Now meet the players who live inside, idle." The story of filmmaker M dot Strange and his solo indie masterpiece, We Are The Strange. [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi at 7:15 PM PST - 5 comments

The Supreme Court of Canada has ruled that a search of your trash doesn't violate your privacy. This decision is in line with that of the United States. [more inside]
posted by Lemurrhea at 4:00 PM PST - 79 comments

Chinese is a rather difficult language. That's why Rep. Betty Brown (R), of Texas, suggests that Asians change their names to something "that’s easier for Americans to deal with." Via.
posted by Ms. Informed at 2:08 PM PST - 232 comments

Malt Madness. Malt Maniacs. Whisky Fun.
posted by Joe Beese at 1:38 PM PST - 22 comments

This was fake. This is not. “Peanuts, my retired racer greyhound, didn’t participate at all. Instead, I did downward-facing dog while he ate the most treats he’s ever had in a 60-minute period.”
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 1:22 PM PST - 61 comments

The mysteries of Area 51 revealed!
posted by mudpuppie at 11:19 AM PST - 56 comments

Dave Arneson joins Gary Gygax in the Happy Hunting Grounds. Arneson helped develop the original Dungeons and Dragons and was the man who introduced Gygax to the concept of roleplaying. Surely, it's a sad day in Blackmoor.
posted by robocop is bleeding at 9:42 AM PST - 138 comments

Michael Bay has never made a flash game, but if he did, it would probably be Robot Dinosaurs That Shoot Beams When They Roar. [more inside]
posted by Krrrlson at 9:42 AM PST - 46 comments

Four hours after his start against Oakland, his first time beginning the year with a major league team, Los Angeles Angels pitcher Nick Adenhart was killed in a hit and run by a van speeding through a red light.
posted by setanor at 9:20 AM PST - 61 comments

It's the wrong time of year for Street View to come to the Ether City
Google Street View is in Winnipeg this week, and some of us are absolutely appalled by this idea - but not for the reasons you may think. Winnipeg has several beautiful seasons ...but early spring isn't one of them. We're having a flood, the streets are f - i - l - t - h - y and the city lies exhausted from a long winter. It's the wrong time of year for Google Street View to come for a visit...
posted by sporb at 9:11 AM PST - 45 comments

Summer's coming! The tried-and-true food growing tool of the aspiring urban agriculturalist: self-irrigating planters. Make or buy one of these things and vegetable container gardening is a breeze. [more inside]
posted by aniola at 8:55 AM PST - 13 comments

3D laser scanning offers a fly-through view of the Eighth Wonder of the World. Carved directly into volcanic bedrock, the churches of Lalibela were built during the Zagwe Dynasty (1137-1270). YouTube video of the church and local villagers.
posted by desjardins at 8:37 AM PST - 11 comments

David JC MacKay's "Sustainable Energy -- Without the Hot Air" is available from his website for free download. Lots of numbers without being too heavy. (via)
posted by greensweater at 8:35 AM PST - 12 comments

"If you’re ever looking for a warning sign that you’re on the wrong side of an argument, suing Medecins Sans Frontieres is probably a pretty good clue." Science journalist and blogger Ben Goldacre has released the missing chapter of his book, Bad Science, telling the story of Matthias Rath, vitamins and the AIDS crisis in South Africa. [Previously. Also.]
posted by xchmp at 8:11 AM PST - 40 comments

Tenzin Bob Thurman became a Tibetan monk at age 24. He's a professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist studies at Columbia University, the first American ordained by the Dalai Lama. Here is his TED talk. If you are really interested in Tibetan Buddhism, check out his many podcasts.
posted by RussHy at 7:50 AM PST - 28 comments

The Case Against Homework. Does assigning fifty math problems accomplish any more than assigning five? Is memorizing word lists the best way to increase vocabulary—especially when it takes away from reading time? And what is the real purpose behind those devilish dioramas? Sara Bennett wants to stop homework. Here she explains why (pdf).
posted by lunit at 7:50 AM PST - 180 comments

Free Verse [more inside]
posted by Potomac Avenue at 7:34 AM PST - 7 comments

Meet Justin Nickels , the 22-year-old grocery store cashier and college student who was just elected Mayor of Manitowoc, WI by a margin of 15 votes.
posted by hermitosis at 6:35 AM PST - 36 comments

Taser use in law enforcement has been under increased scrutiny in recent years, especially following the death of Robert Dziekanski in a Vancouver airport last year after being Tasered by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (previously). Now the CBC and Canadian Press have sifted through over 5,000 incident reports to create a RCMP Taser use database, tracking use of tasers by Canada's federal law enforcement by province, incident, year or stuns used. [more inside]
posted by Shepherd at 6:11 AM PST - 36 comments

Picher, Oklahoma was part of a major lead mining area in the central US until the middle of the last century, when the mines closed down. It is now the epicenter of the Tar Creek Superfund site. Residents live among mountains of mine tailings known as chat. Heavy metal poisoning is endemic in the area. With fits and starts, things do begin to get done about it, but only very slowly. To add insult to injury, Picher was struck by an EF-4 tornado on May 10th, 2008. The residents are finally suing over the long in coming buyout plan. Shockingly, the buyout plan was put into place with urgency not because of the lead, zinc, and cadmium poisoning, but because the mines are in danger of caving in. There is still word on when the mountains of debris will be removed, or the acid mine drainage stopped. Despite attempts to prevent further contamination in the 1980s and 90s, the waste is still poisoning local creeks and wildlife.
posted by wierdo at 3:16 AM PST - 15 comments

Ten principles for a Black Swan-proof world By Nassim Nicholas Taleb in FT.
posted by jouke at 12:36 AM PST - 49 comments

Is Silicon Valley a systemic risk? Treasury decides to treat venture capitalists like hedge funds The Obama administration wants to regulate venture capital firms to prevent systemic risks. Silicon Valley residents are scratching their heads and asking: What risks? The rest of us should ask why Washington is targeting a jewel of the American economy that had nothing to do with the housing bubble.
posted by thedailygrowl at 11:02 PM PST - 45 comments

MateMaster. Flash chess problems ranging from "mate in 1" to the fiendish "mate in 6." (via JiG)
posted by juv3nal at 9:05 PM PST - 42 comments

Famed band Devo (mostly famous in the outside world for Top 20 hit Whip It) has a new album, due fall 2009. [more inside]
posted by LSK at 9:04 PM PST - 54 comments

Real-time mugshots from Tampa Bay. [more inside]
posted by joe vrrr at 8:23 PM PST - 101 comments

One-flipper turtle gets Ninja suit to help it swim [more inside]
posted by UbuRoivas at 4:04 PM PST - 43 comments

Hear (and see) Billy Bob Thornton go off on radio. Mr Thornton and the Boxcutters were the featured guest for the first half-hour of CBC Radio's "Q with Jian Ghomeshi". The host made the unpardonable sin of referring to Mr Thornton's other vocations. Cringe-worthy radio ensues. Shades of Joaquin Phoenix? [more inside]
posted by Artful Codger at 3:12 PM PST - 193 comments

Disney made one movie, and they've been tracing it ever since.
posted by Zambrano at 1:45 PM PST - 96 comments

The New York Evening Graphic was published by Bernarr Macfadden, body builder, health crusader, and prolific author (Strong Eyes [1901], How Success is Won [1904], and Brain Energy [1906] to name a few of his hundred titles). [more inside]
posted by starman at 1:45 PM PST - 5 comments

Los Colorados, Ukrainian Polka Band, Plays Katy Perry's Hot 'n' Cold.
posted by stresstwig at 1:10 PM PST - 16 comments

Oh noes, those gay newlyweds are causing Biblical rainstorms!! An ominous new TV ad by the National Organization for Marriage -- who helped pass Prop. 8 in California -- features a "rainbow coalition" of folks to warn America that marriage equality advocates want to "take away" your "freedom" by pushing the issue "far beyond same-sex couples." Unfortunately for NOM, the profound seriousness of this threat has been undermined by a leak of audition reels for the ad.
posted by digaman at 12:46 PM PST - 189 comments

Metafilter is certainly no stranger to music mashups, or even live music mashups, but a few artists are taking things a step further with live music and video mashups. Not prerecorded mashups of live music and video, but live performances of DJs (often calling themselves "VJs") mashing up music and video together on the fly. [more inside]
posted by Grimp0teuthis at 12:42 PM PST - 14 comments

Once every month, Jews bless the moon. Once every 28 years, they bless the sun! This custom dates back to the Talmud, but is also found in other sacred Jewish texts, such as The New York Times. Sometimes, there are misunderstandings. [pdf] Previously reserved to a pious handful of observant Jews, it's on the mainstream media radar this time around, possibly because of its environmental implications. Here's an interesting depiction of the ritual in modern American history, which explicitly deals with its connection to solar power.
posted by ericbop at 12:41 PM PST - 16 comments

The Average Man's Tax Dollars from thetoiletpaper.com
posted by blue_beetle at 12:04 PM PST - 40 comments

New York Mets pitcher Johan Santana has an individual handshake ritual for every player on his team.
posted by SpiffyRob at 11:36 AM PST - 38 comments

In May 1995, the American government's Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) made an attempt to disrupt the supply chain of methamphetamine precursors, such as pseudoephedrine, by shutting down two major suppliers of the precursors under authority granted by the Domestic Chemical Diversion Control Act. Was it successful? Only temporarily, according to new research by Carlos Dobkin and Nancy Nicosia. (via)
posted by Pants! at 11:29 AM PST - 46 comments

From the International Committee of the Red Cross ICRC Report on the Treatment of Fourteen "High Value Detainees" in CIA Custody - This is the report in its entirety. [pdf]

From Mark Danner: US Torture: Voices from the Black Sites and The Red Cross Torture Report: What It Means [more inside]
posted by y2karl at 10:32 AM PST - 59 comments

William Gass's personal library. The photos accompany this article by Gass about his love of books -- specifically about collecting them over his life and "living in a library." [more inside]
posted by mattbucher at 10:27 AM PST - 21 comments

At GDC this year, Heather Chaplin to game developers: "You're a bunch of f***ing adolescents." Chaplin, co-author of the book Smartbomb, spoke at the Game Developers Conference during a panel called the Rant Session. [more inside]
posted by shmegegge at 10:17 AM PST - 248 comments

Falling blocks? Check. Pipes? Check. Irritating faux steel drum soundtrack? Check. It's Connecto 2. [warnings: flash, music, risk of addiction]
posted by le morte de bea arthur at 9:45 AM PST - 5 comments

New Video Game Consists Solely Of Shooting People Point-Blank In The Face. (via)
posted by gleuschk at 9:42 AM PST - 30 comments

Cops Hate Knives
posted by manosthf at 9:21 AM PST - 65 comments

Graffiti Project in Kenya Slums — more than a year after he took the original pictures, French photo artist JR has returned to Kibera, Kenya. He was reunited with the women who had accepted to be part of his WOMEN project at the end of 2007 (previously). 2000 square meters of Kibera slum rooftops have been covered with photos of their eyes and faces. Most of the women will have their own photos on their own rooftop and the material used is water resistant so that the photo itself will protect the fragile houses in the heavy rain season. They are on view from the railway line that passes above them, and will be visible for Google Earth. (via Africa.Visual_Media)
posted by netbros at 9:10 AM PST - 11 comments

Jared Diamond on the Evolution of Religions. (SLYT)
posted by Artw at 8:34 AM PST - 45 comments

Look around you. On the train platform, at the bus stop, in the car pool lane: these days someone there is probably faking it, maintaining a job routine without having a job to go to.
posted by plexi at 8:21 AM PST - 48 comments

According to an article posted in today's Wall Street Journal, the electricity grid in the U.S. has been compromised by foreign spies, leaving it vulnerable to disruption. Last year, the CIA acknowledged that the system had been compromised and that the goal had been extortion. In response, the Federal Electric Regulatory Commission issued new cybersecurity specs for the power grid, to which companies such as GE have begun responding. But could it be that the new security efforts are motivated by government officials who stand to gain by this attempt at drastically increasing government control over the Internet? [more inside]
posted by Roach at 8:20 AM PST - 29 comments

An interesting article / biography of Alexander Hamilton has appeared in the current issue of City Journal. Authored by neo-con darling Myron Magnet the article avoids some of the harsher criticisms of Hamilton, but does address his weakness for young women.
posted by Lame_username at 7:28 AM PST - 12 comments

Stuff Accountants Like -- As the US tax return deadline approaches, take an inside and humorous look at the professionals who you either love, hate, or whose revenue recognition principles you may blame for the mortgage crisis. Or maybe, perhaps, pity?
posted by CPAGirl at 6:56 AM PST - 10 comments

Thought you guys might want to try this Pepsi Blue Bumptop Thingy. Like a real desk? You decide. Previouslah [more inside]
posted by chuckdarwin at 5:17 AM PST - 36 comments

In the Netherlands somebody has removed an ATM card skimmer and examined it in detail. This site is in Dutch only, but appears to show high resolution photos of an ATM card skimmer with integrated PIN-capturing video camera.
posted by thewalrus at 2:48 AM PST - 55 comments

What's a soda lover to do when Passover Coke has, well, passed over? Find other cane sugar sodas, of course! [more inside]
posted by Saydur at 2:44 AM PST - 32 comments

The Berkutchi is a falconer who hunts with the Golden Eagle [more inside]
posted by hortense at 12:35 AM PST - 19 comments

David Goode bronze sculpture
posted by various at 11:22 PM PST - 11 comments

Following the 5 April parliamentary election results in the Republic of Moldova, in which the Partidul Comuniștilor din Republica Moldova won nearly 50% of the vote, thousands of young people began a series of protests largely organized through Twitter, text messaging, and FaceBook. The protests quickly reached a boiling point early today, when Parliament was stormed. Much of the coverage in the European press is limited to Romanian-language reporting. Some of the most compelling imagery and video clips, however, speak for themselves. [more inside]
posted by vkxmai at 9:24 PM PST - 44 comments

Photographs of lost luggage.

IT’S A LITTLE ODD BUT NOT AS ODD AS STAMP COLLECTING
posted by twoleftfeet at 8:37 PM PST - 13 comments

The PhilSci Archive is an electronic archive for preprints in the philosophy of science. The goal of the Archive is to promote communication in the field by the rapid dissemination of new work.
posted by aniola at 8:15 PM PST - 4 comments

Tree of Bees? Hills that move? A reflective humorous post about living in Southern California via mockable.org
posted by will wait 4 tanjents at 7:55 PM PST - 63 comments

General Motors Corp. and Segway announced a new vehicle prototype today "that could change the way we move around in cities." Project P.U.M.A. (Personal Urban Mobility and Accessibility) is an electrically powered, two-seat vehicle with two wheels. Photo gallery. Video 1, Video 2, Video 3.
posted by stbalbach at 6:24 PM PST - 109 comments

Looping, live: David Ford, Imogen Heap, KT Tunstall x2, Dub FX, Ed Alleyne-Johnson
posted by flatluigi at 6:14 PM PST - 50 comments

On April Fools Day 2009, the James Randi Educational Foundation announced the Pigasus Awards for 2008 for the worst in pseudoscientific irrationality. The Scientist award was given to Dr. Colin A. Ross for his claims that he can shoot electromagnetic energy beams from his eyes. The Funding Organization award went to Walt Ruloff and his co-producers for bankrolling the Intelligent Design documentary, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. The Media award went to cable channels such as Comedy Central that still run ads for Enzyte even though the company's owner is now serving a 25-year sentence for fraud. The Perfomer award was typically awarded in the past to cheesy psychics such as Uri Geller or Sylvia Browne, but this year the (dis)honor goes to actress/spokesmodel Jenny McCarthy for her antivaccination activism, a stance that inspired the Jenny McCarthy Body Count. Finally, a new award for "most persistent refusal to face reality" was presented to infomercial pitchman Kevin Trudeau, who continues selling his books on "natural cures" despite a judge slapping him with a $37 million fine for false claims.
posted by jonp72 at 5:54 PM PST - 77 comments

'Either way, he doesn't have authority over this child anymore. She sued him because she doesn't respect his rules. It's very hard to raise a child who is the boss.' A Quebec father who was taken to court by his 12-year-old daughter after he grounded her in June 2008 has lost his appeal. _via
posted by bitteroldman at 4:42 PM PST - 61 comments

One man died on the day of the G20 protests in London. He wasn't a protester, wasn't a police officer. Ian Tomlinson was a 47 year old newspaper seller trying to get home, who collapsed and died of heart failure. Three minutes before he collapsed and died, this happened. [more inside]
posted by reynir at 1:50 PM PST - 168 comments

I, for one, welcome our new sigle link youtube post overlords!
posted by joelf at 1:46 PM PST - 66 comments

Today has turned into a real-life nightmare. I wish I could wake up. This nightmare started 9 months ago and has been recurring ever since.

Designer Jon Engle is being billed $18,000 by stockart.com. Some people are trying to save Jon. [more inside]
posted by wundermint at 1:14 PM PST - 212 comments

Happy 40th birthday, RFC 1!
posted by loquacious at 12:59 PM PST - 16 comments

Beyond even the outrageously broad "state secrets" privilege invented by the Bush administration and now embraced fully by the Obama administration, the Obama DOJ has now invented a brand new claim of government immunity, one which literally asserts that the U.S. Government is free to intercept all of your communications (calls, emails and the like) and -- even if what they're doing is blatantly illegal and they know it's illegal -- you are barred from suing them unless they "willfully disclose" to the public what they have learned. - Glenn Greenwald. [more inside]
posted by Joe Beese at 12:18 PM PST - 99 comments

8 Bit Waterslide -- In Real Life! [slyt]
posted by empath at 12:12 PM PST - 20 comments

Year of the Chicken Pot Pie, anyone? We're getting closer to David Foster Wallace's Year of the Whopper.
posted by jwakawaka at 11:08 AM PST - 27 comments

Sheepherders in Northern Nevada came largely from Basque country back in the day. They brought with them a tradition of making arborglyphs, carving text and images into living trees. You can see pictures of 175 Nevada arborglyphs here, 73 of which have companion videos showing a bit more of the surrounding. The unquestioned expert on Nevadan arborglyphs, Professor Joxe Mallea-Olaetxe, has written a great deal on the subject and in 2001 he wrote a good overview article in Forest History Today called Carving Out History: The Basque Aspens. Another good introductory article by journalist Emma Nichols in the Sacramento News & Review, Mystery of the Arborglyphs, with a focus on the more salacious arborglyphs. Basque Tree Carving: Legend in Nevada is an 18 minute documentary. Here is a video of Professor Mallea speaking about the arborglyphs and here is an interview with him. [all videos asx format]
posted by Kattullus at 9:42 AM PST - 14 comments

Today, the Vermont Legislature voted to override Gov. Jim Douglas' veto of a bill allowing same sex marriage, making Vermont the 4th state in the nation (and the second state this week) to legalize same sex marriage. Vermont is the first state to do it legislatively; it happened in the other three states via court ruling.
posted by booksherpa at 9:18 AM PST - 226 comments

The House passed H.R. 1256, the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act a few days ago. The bill would put regulation of tobacco under the jurisdiction of the F.D.A. Some are critical of this bill, pointing out that Philip Morris is behind it. But the bill does contain many positive elements. Manufacturers would be required to disclose product ingredients to the F.D.A. and marketing to children would be further restricted. [more inside]
posted by formless at 9:00 AM PST - 35 comments

The universe is unfolding as it should: from White Castle to House to ...the White House. Actor Kal Penn dramatically left his medical show last night (spoilers everywhere) to take a job in the Obama administration. He credits his interest in politics to his grandparents, who marched with Gandhi.
posted by CunningLinguist at 8:52 AM PST - 70 comments

SpaceCollective. Where forward thinking terrestrials exchange ideas and information about the state of the species, their planet and the universe, living the lives of science fiction today. A growing number of universities, architecture and design schools are conducting projects on this site. Hundreds of art treasures, educational videos and narratives are found in their galleries. Every SpaceCollective member is provided with a personal time capsule, preserving their contributions for the edification of each other as well as future times and beings.
posted by netbros at 8:49 AM PST - 5 comments

Voices and Visions explores -- through interviews, archival footage, and readings -- the lives and works of some of America’s greatest poets. Newsweek called the series "the most ambitious, most expensive and most accomplished series of films ever made about American poetry." Elizabeth Bishop 1::2::3 l T.S. Eliot 1::2::3::4 l Robert Frost 1::2::3 l Wallace Stevens 1::2 l William Carlos Williams 1::2 l Ezra Pound 1 l Langston Hughes 1::2 l Marianne Moore 1::2 l home
posted by vronsky at 8:48 AM PST - 8 comments

One for the fans. [A]t the Fantastic Fest Star Trek event at the Alamo Draughthouse Theater in Austin, Texas on Monday night. Star Trek filmmakers Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman and Damon Lindelof kicked things off by telling the crowd of around 200, that they would be seeing the Star Trek preview after Wrath of Khan. Two minutes in to the showing of TWOK, the film appeared to have ‘melted’ and the guys came back out on the stage and appeared to be stalling for time while the film was fixed…and then, wearing a ball cap, Leonard Nimoy came out in front of the audience holding a film can. Nimoy noted to the crowd that it just didn’t seem fair that people in Australia were the fist to see the film and asked them "wouldn’t you rather see the new movie?"
posted by caddis at 7:46 AM PST - 104 comments

Indeed, all three of Hitler’s prized leather whips were presents from high society ladies. : Christopher Clark reviews High Society in the Third Reich by Fabrice d’Almeida in the London Review Of Books.
posted by The Whelk at 7:33 AM PST - 24 comments

The Dark Side of Dubai. "Do-buy" was meant to be a Middle-Eastern Shangri-La, a glittering monument to Arab enterprise and western capitalism. But as hard times arrive in the city state that rose from the desert sands, an uglier story is emerging. [more inside]
posted by Rufus T. Firefly at 6:23 AM PST - 64 comments

The creators of the subservient chicken look back on how it all came to be. As seen on MetaFilter 5 years ago today.
posted by billyfleetwood at 1:54 AM PST - 33 comments

"The Lighter Side of Pain: What’s Up with Our Global Economy" with P.J. O'Rourke. The keynote talk at the annual Tom Wolfe Weekend Seminar at Washington & Lee University. Prefaced by some rambling remarks by Tom Wolfe '51 himself.
posted by inkyroom at 7:35 PM PST - 62 comments

Scar Necklaces. When people ask me what my necklace is, I simply say “It’s my scar.” There is something very powerful about celebrating something that to many is ugly, and should be forgotten.
posted by Hildegarde at 3:32 PM PST - 73 comments

I took the Filter Line from Baidu to Digg, and I passed Fark and 4chan on the way, but there was no MetaFilter stop!
posted by P.o.B. at 2:08 PM PST - 44 comments

We all know of the importance and impact that CBGB's had on the early East Coast punk scene. I could go and link to a bunch you tube videos, obituaries, and other assorted blogs about my favorite acts that had played there over the years. And while CBGB's is gone, why I don't I just let you take a virtual tour of the place.
posted by peewinkle at 1:42 PM PST - 45 comments

Papaya is an... indescribable video by Alexander Marcus. Is it satire? Is he even a real person? [more inside]
posted by Unicorn on the cob at 1:41 PM PST - 30 comments

The US Food and Drug Administration started regulating the labeling of food, beverages, and medicines after the passage of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act, and added food coloring and cosmetics with the 1938 Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act. They have just released a new website, the FDA Notices of Judgment Collection, 1906-1963, containing data from thousands of cases of mislabeled or misadvertised products and drugs, available in multiple forms (text, PDF, metadata XML, .TIF image, etc.), with searchable archives. Poking around in the data will yield information on cases ranging from misbranding methamphetamine tablets, to quack "Film-O-Sonic" devices, to bacteria-laden unproven abortifacients sold over the counter, to purported "4-way" cures for baldness, to hunks of radium sold for putting in your drinking water to "stimulate the sex organs" (judged against for stating an unproven use, not for actual danger of product). Organized by the FDA's history office, the new database is a fascinating resource for historians, public safety advocates, researchers, and librarians.
posted by Asparagirl at 1:26 PM PST - 27 comments

A visit to id Software, 1993. A must watch for anyone who's ever played Doom.
posted by WolfDaddy at 11:49 AM PST - 47 comments

Faded Dreams, Emptied in Emmons County and Memories in McIntosh County. Three flickr photo sets of (mostly) abandoned, crumbling farms, businesses and homes in rural North Dakota. [previously] [via]
posted by dersins at 11:15 AM PST - 20 comments

At least 150 dead, 1.500 injuried and 50.000 displaced by a magnitude 6.3 Richter scale earthquake that struck Abruzzo and center Italy at 01:32:42 UTC on April 6th.The damage is very severe, the little village of Onna, existing since at least year 1178, was completely destroyed and the city of L'Aquila (pop 70.000) was severly damaged. The city hospital was rendered 90% unusable, allegedly 50% of all of the city buildings are now considered unsafe. Hundreds of pictures have been sent on the internet by locals, while controversy ensues on a early warning by an italian scientist (indicted a few days ago for spreading rumors about an upcoming quake), who claims that his Radon gas detectors signaled an anomaly that may have been validated by a more extensive networks of detectors and may have saved lifes.
posted by elpapacito at 11:04 AM PST - 76 comments

Last year, Infoworld published their list of the 7 dirtiest jobs in IT. This year, they're back with 7 even dirtier jobs. [more inside]
posted by Afroblanco at 11:03 AM PST - 38 comments

Sophie Tucker, thought dead for four months, has been surviving alone by living off of feral goats on a deserted island.

Not the actress. She's still dead.
posted by miss lynnster at 10:14 AM PST - 50 comments

Flutter, a new company that is taking microblogging to the next level with 26-character limit. [SLYT]
posted by rageagainsttherobots at 9:32 AM PST - 65 comments

Last night's Wrestlemania XXV received mixed reviews [SPOILERS here and elsewhere] - though at least Mickey Rourke did participate. But there's agreement that future Hall of Famers The Undertaker and Shawn Michaels put on "a once-in-a-lifetime match". [WWE is getting any YouTube clips pulled, of course. So you'll need to either order the PPV or torrent it. But here is Michaels' famous entrance at Wrestlemania XII. And here is The Undertaker's impressive entrance at last year's Wrestlemania.] (previously)
posted by Joe Beese at 8:58 AM PST - 49 comments

"We're a demonstration project, if you would, of all the things that can go wrong at once." "You know Yolanda, I think most people watching this interview think to themselves that if they get cancer and they don't have health insurance that somebody’s going to take care of them," Pelley remarked. "No, no, there's nobody to take care of you," she said. [more inside]
posted by availablelight at 8:53 AM PST - 84 comments

Camera attached to dog
posted by doobiedoo at 7:46 AM PST - 39 comments

Are you entertaining guests for Easter dinner? Don't forget the dessert. Here are the 50 Best Dessert Recipes. Chocolate lovers in your family? No problem. The 50 Best Chocolate Desserts. Maybe you're partial to cake. Okay, Mom's Best Cake Recipes. Here's to yum.
posted by netbros at 7:26 AM PST - 17 comments

A bald, child-like creature dangles its legs from a chair as its shoulders rise and fall with rythmic breathing and its black eyes follow movements across the room. It's not human -- but it is paying attention. (via)
posted by Vamier at 7:09 AM PST - 75 comments

'Roy Of The Rovers' is back... The footballer* has returned to the newsagents in a one-off special. [more inside]
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 5:07 AM PST - 14 comments

LAND WALKER -Japanese Robot suit in SLYT format
posted by mattoxic at 12:01 AM PST - 32 comments

Rocks from Heaven “…A party of the inhabitants of the town of Casas Grandes, as a matter of curious speculation, commenced excavating in the old ruins there. One more fortunate than the others drifted into a large room, in the middle of which there appeared to be a kind of tomb made of adobe-brick. Curiosity led this bold knight of the crowbar to renew his excavations, he found a large mass of meteoric iron in the middle of the tomb, carefully and curiously wrapped with a kind of coarse linen.” [more inside]
posted by various at 9:23 PM PST - 21 comments

Should you find yourself wandering around the city of Leiden, the Netherlands sometime, you may notice some curious markings on the city's walls.

These Muurgedichten ("Wall Poems") adorn many of the town's streets (clickable map), and many English-language poets are represented: one John Keats, for instance, inside a bookshop; Dylan Thomas, E. E. Cummings, W.B. Yeats, some guy called William Shakespeare, or this ode to Charlie Parker by American William Waring Cuney. [more inside]
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane at 7:58 PM PST - 15 comments

Internal drama at Fox: longtime Hollywood columnist Roger Friedman fired - or not? - for posting a review on FoxNews.com of 20th Century Fox's "X-Men Origins: Wolverine," which leaked onto the internets April 1. He apparently liked it. But Fox is freaking out about the leak, more than a month before the theatre premiere, and the FBI has conducted raids. Speculation about what happened here.
posted by CunningLinguist at 7:42 PM PST - 45 comments

Animal Charm "Comprised of Jim Fetterley and Rich Bott, Animal Charm's tapes are mind-bendingly inventive experiments in uncanny, surreal montage that defy logical analysis. [Their work] is a tour de force of incongruous juxtapositions, startling dislocations and ingenious visual rhymes assembled from the banal detritus of late night TV." Edge TV::Slow Gin Soul Stallion::Baby Preacher Death Metal::CHANGE! CHANGE! CHANGE!::Computers Smart::A Cat Named Sloopy::Bearobics::Getting ready to use your VCR::Pet Programming::Cat and mouse game::Stuffing::Lightfoot fever::Squidcharm Crashes::more
posted by vronsky at 6:52 PM PST - 12 comments

Under Pennsylvanian state law, it's illegal to sell containers if the store owner "knows or should reasonably know" that the buyer intends to use them to package drugs. A confidential informant entered a convenience store to buy tiny ziplock bags at about 4:30 p.m. on Sept. 11, 2007. After making the purchase the Philadelphia PD Narcotics Field Unit raided the store for selling drug paraphernalia destroying the store's security system in the process and allegedly stealing money, batteries, cigarettes and food among other items. He's not the first one to make this complaint either.
posted by Talez at 6:24 PM PST - 73 comments

More brazen than Madoff? Former NYC hotshot attorney Marc Dreier (he of the now-defunct vanity firm), was arrested in Canada in late 2008, charged with spearheading an occasionally daring series of frauds. [more inside]
posted by Inspector.Gadget at 5:44 PM PST - 16 comments

What's the risk of deflation? No one knows for sure, but it cannot be ruled out--as first Japan, and now Switzerland are finding out. While Japan's troubles may sound familiar, Switzerland's situation is somewhat unique: beyond the question of its currency, the issue of tax havens has put its banks in a delicate position.
posted by ornate insect at 5:29 PM PST - 15 comments

Elwin Wilson burned crosses. He threw jack handles at kids. He hung black dolls in nooses. He threw eggs at men. He beat people up at bus stations - people who would one day become United States Congressmen. He lay in wait for the Freedom Riders in Rock Hill, SC ( more Freedom Rides video 1, 2). And now Elwin Wilson is apologizing for what he did.
posted by Addlepated at 3:25 PM PST - 247 comments