MetaFilter

Walking on Water: How Water Striders and Meniscus climbing insects use surface tension to walk on water.
posted by dhruva at 11:48 PM PST - 16 comments

Videofilter: A music video _[via]
posted by delmoi at 11:22 PM PST - 34 comments

Left wing Australian Blogger / TV writer Ms Fits receives some very interesting fan mail asking for advice. Definitely NSFW if the title didn't give that away. Ms Fits is known for her work as a writer on Neighbours, her short lived TV series Last Man Standing, her blog, and her long running arguments with right-wing columnist Andrew Bolt.
posted by jonathanstrange at 9:03 PM PST - 16 comments

David Pogue is the rudest man alive! "My wife and I were excited to receive, as [a] very generous Christmas present from a relative, a Magellan RoadMate 300." He then goes on to absolutely obliterate the gift, *on the New York Times website*, for 20 paragraphs, after which he demands, "For the gift-giver: Do your research. Read the customer reviews. Beware outdated products on store shelves." It's a gift! Learn some tact dude.
posted by JPowers at 8:26 PM PST - 63 comments

How to Buy a $450K Home for $750K - Yes, its true. Low and behold, all the conditions have been met, and it is indeed possible to buy houses for 50% above their market value.
posted by H. Roark at 7:31 PM PST - 56 comments

"If Miller had his way, America would be nothing but one big fiesta for illegal aliens and homosexuals." [mp3; indirect link] We've discussed his TV ad, but Vernon Robinson's new radio ad takes it to the next level, with shocked gasps, a cheesy voiceover artist, and Mariachi music. Mr. Robinson says he's never done any negative campaigning. [via]
posted by kirkaracha at 7:20 PM PST - 47 comments

Rebellion: John Horse and the Black Seminoles, First Black Rebels to Beat American Slavery. "Rebellion is a Web documentary that explores the inspiring, true, and largely unknown story of John Horse and the Black Seminoles, a community of free blacks and fugitive slaves who in 1838 became the first black rebels to defeat American slavery." This visually arresting site is a treasure trove of information about the Seminoles, early Florida history, and a largely unrecognized (and successful!) slave rebellion that may have been the largest in American history. The site includes interactive maps, arresting images, and a thorough history of the rebellion. Too bad the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma expelled all its black members in 1990.
posted by LarryC at 6:29 PM PST - 13 comments

Wanna Fanta? Don'tuwanna wanna Fanta? You don't support the Jews do you? Once the U.S. entered World War II in 1941, German Coca-Cola head Max Keith (pronounced Kite) was no longer able to get Coca-Cola syrup and so invented Fanta out of cheese by-products and apple cider for the Nazis. According to Snopes who went with a report prepared by an investigator commissioned by Coca-Cola to examine Max Keith's actions, it was all quite noble. Of course that doesn't address what was happening before the war. But in all fairness that the Coca- Cola only in rare instances directly endorsed the Nazis.
posted by Smedleyman at 5:42 PM PST - 54 comments

Aboriginal Australia — AIATSIS's map of aboriginal tribes. For some context, AusAnthrop's " Tribal and language database" can be quite useful. (via Savage Minds).
posted by jefgodesky at 2:07 PM PST - 18 comments

The MGB Experience : "Why do people purchase Little British Cars (LBCs)? More specifically, of the many vehicles consumers have to choose from, why would anyone purchase an old, unreliable, slow LBC, namely a MG? Is there a logical explanation for owning an automobile that last landed on American soil from the British manufacturer in 1980?" MGB Tech Tips from Motorhead and mgcars.org.uk. And don't forget the britishcarforum for all your LBC (Little British Car) sickness needs.
posted by spock at 1:33 PM PST - 70 comments

The Pirate Bay has been shut down.
posted by Mean Mr. Bucket at 12:05 PM PST - 86 comments

Fuck law.
posted by dios at 10:52 AM PST - 66 comments

Forum: The Pros and Cons of Director Liability. [more inside]
posted by monju_bosatsu at 10:51 AM PST - 4 comments

This is not resolved! I was depressed that night. I was worried that my girlfriend would leave me. I wanted to kill myself. Whenever I am unhappy, I would call the Samaritans to talk to them in order to reduce the stress. But while I was talking, the passenger behind me tapped my shoulder to tell me not to talk!
posted by klue at 10:45 AM PST - 44 comments

A new video game from the people behind the Left Behind christian themed novels. It's definitely not the typical faire normally seen in christian publishing.
posted by Dr. Twist at 9:57 AM PST - 48 comments

'The crowd was chanting "We want Boris" as he limbered up, waving his arms like a slightly rusty blond helicopter. The cheers grew and the cry of "Boris, Boris" became irresistible.': [text, video]. Boris Johnson, blogger. Boris Johnson, British MP for Henley-on-Thames. Boris Johnson, sozzled buffoon and proud of it. Boris Johnson, the man who made it cool to be Conservative?
posted by hoverboards don't work on water at 9:49 AM PST - 26 comments

Tommy Emmanuel , CGP. Master of fingerstyle guitar. Captain of covers. Alpha and Omega of originals. After watching these videos, you'll have few questions as to why recording and touring partner Chet Atkins bestowed upon Tommy the title "Certified Guitar Player." (pdf)
posted by The White Hat at 9:32 AM PST - 15 comments

Music video gems and reviews from the spandex era. It's called trashfan although not all of it is trash (Springsteen). But some stuff definitely deserves to be there (Shalamar? Colonel Abrams? Pepsi & Sherley? Eew). And yes, I used to have Junior's "Mmmmmmama used to say" 45 rpm. And you know you liked it too!
posted by keepoutofreach at 9:22 AM PST - 11 comments

Watch political ideologies emerge and shift over hundreds of years. ANIMATE is an amazing Java app that lets you track graphically the ideological position of all the representatives to the US Congress, European Parliament, or the UN over every roll call vote in history. The really interesting part is that the application uses DW-NOMINATE data that maps the ideology of representatives, and is pretty good at predicting voting patterns. Voteworld is a related Java application that is a little less dramatic, but allows you to really dig into the data (to access DW-NOMINATE data in Voteworld, click the little orange sphere icon in the application).

On the US side:"There are two major lessons to take away from ANIMATE. First, over time, you see less and less motion of individual legislators, particularly after the Civil War. This shows the stabilization of the American political system. Second, after the Civil War you will see the major party clusters growing further apart until the turn of the century, then come together and overlap, and beginning in the 1970s draw apart again. That is, throughout most of the twentieth century, political divisions blurred but in the last quarter one sees the polarization of American politics."
posted by blahblahblah at 8:59 AM PST - 15 comments

Former Marine disarms 5 attackers They were teenagers, but still, 5 on 1, and two of them were armed? That's one well-trained Marine...
posted by tadellin at 8:43 AM PST - 112 comments

Waiting For Plastic. Down again. Been down so long, someone started a weblog about it. It's not the first time. Who knows if this is the last? [via]
posted by airguitar at 8:37 AM PST - 40 comments

The State of the Union Visualizer(java applet) examines changes in the language of the State of the Union address over the past 200 years (Similar to The State of the Union Parsing Tool).
posted by The Radish at 7:31 AM PST - 10 comments

Photos from the production of Paul Thomas Anderson's next film, There Will Be Blood. Based on the Upton Sinclair novel Oil!, Anderson's film is being shot near Marfa, Texas.
posted by mattbucher at 7:27 AM PST - 23 comments

This is perhaps the greatest video in the history of music.
posted by sgt.serenity at 7:13 AM PST - 129 comments

Guitar Virtuosity with feeling and sophistication... I forgot just how good a guitarist Allan Holdsworth is. A similar player is Scott Henderson, who these days is much more in touch with his blues/funk roots. His outside playing is delicious. Notice how they both build up their solos instead of starting off with all guns blazing with nowhere to go.
posted by BobsterLobster at 5:49 AM PST - 28 comments

The World Challenge aims to find individuals or groups from around the world who have shown enterprise and innovation at a grass roots level. It could be you or someone you know. ( via bbc)
posted by adamvasco at 3:42 AM PST - 5 comments

Tyger [a short movie]. The poem.
posted by tellurian at 12:50 AM PST - 15 comments

Harry Reid accepted free boxing tickets from the Nevada Athletic Commission says John Solomon of the AP. Solomon implies that Reid might have gotten himself into an ethical dilemma as the NAC opposes the creation of a federal boxing commission, something the Senate was considering at the time. The article also tosses in some digs at Reid by repeating the claim that Reid is involved in the Abramoff scandal.

However, Media Matters points out that Reid did not act in the NAC's favor and instead allowed the passage of legislation that would create a federal commission, in opposition to the giftgiver's wishes. This is not the first time Solomon has attacked Reid. Politics/News-filter
posted by papakwanz at 12:49 AM PST - 33 comments

Brad, Angelina, and the rise of 'celebrity colonialism' [via A&L Daily]
posted by bukharin at 12:17 AM PST - 85 comments

1. Discover image of Christ on your food
2. Alert the media
3. ???
4. Profit.
posted by jonson at 10:55 PM PST - 31 comments

Starlight: a meditation. From the always excellent 3QD.
posted by lalochezia at 9:10 PM PST - 13 comments

Photos by Richard Seaman. The macro nature ones are my favorite. Check out beetles, spiders, and moths.
posted by danb at 9:06 PM PST - 21 comments

Find your next favourite author or, use the literature map to see how authors relate.
posted by jacquilynne at 8:44 PM PST - 26 comments

NewsFilter: Kerry Pressing Swift Boat Case Long After Loss
posted by delmoi at 7:52 PM PST - 103 comments

Neighbors driving you nuts blasting the latest Kathleen Turner Overdrive or Debussy? Fight back with the complete Pierrot Lunaire! Impress your friends by leaving a copy of the manuscript* printed on artificially aged paper out on your coffee table!** Defy your friends! Confound your enemies! Bestride your ancestors! And, best of all, tell Bach to shove his clavier up his well-tempered ass!†

* in German, obviously; babelfish
** coffee table not included
† more is inside!
posted by Eideteker at 7:10 PM PST - 32 comments

You just made $300 Million (well, you in the "We The People..." sense). The Air Transportation Stabilization Board (ATSB) was authorized by Congress shortly after the 9/11 attacks. It was critized by the Bush administration and some members of Congress as a risky bailout of major airlines, offering to guarantee up to $10B in loans. However, only $1.6B in loans were actually guaranteed under this program. And now, as their work wraps up, the American taxpayer stands to see an extra $300M in the coffers of the US Treasury.
posted by SirOmega at 5:37 PM PST - 20 comments

The Movie Binge. 85 major motion pictures will be released in the US this summer. These guys will watch them all.
posted by staggernation at 2:01 PM PST - 61 comments

Len Lye: New Zealander Len Lye was a restless maverick - a pioneer of films without cameras (drawing directly onto the celluloid) and kinetic art (CD available through Atoll, sound samples here and here), and he was also quite handy with poems and inks. More about his Windwand and recently installed Waterwhirler on Flickr. Coralised open directory of short Waterwhirler movies here.
posted by nylon at 11:47 AM PST - 7 comments

Since the 1930s, only 16 teams have held the World Cup Trophy. In 10 days, the 2006 World Cup will begin. Pick your team, pick your jersey, then find your time.

Once the teams have all gone home, more than just the balls will have changed. The world will be saying goodbye to one of the greatest players of our generation. And this time its for real.
Here is a little something to put you in the mood (youtube).
posted by RobertFrost at 10:42 AM PST - 148 comments

Why Tolerate Religion? Brian Leiter's new paper on the philosophical and legal justifications for toleration of religion. From the abstract: Religious toleration has long been the paradigm of the liberal ideal of toleration of group differences, as reflected in both the constitutions of the major Western democracies and in the theoretical literature explaining and justifying these practices. While the historical reasons for the special “pride of place” accorded religious toleration are familiar, what is surprising is that no one has been able to articulate a credible principled argument for tolerating religion qua religion: that is, an argument that would explain why, as a matter of moral or other principle, we ought to accord special legal and moral treatment to religious practices. There are, to be sure, principled arguments for why the state ought to tolerate a plethora of private choices, commitments, and practices of its citizenry, but none of these single out religion for anything like the special treatment it is accorded in, for example, American and Canadian constitutional law. So why tolerate religion? Not because of anything that has to do with it being religion as such - or so this paper argues.
posted by monju_bosatsu at 10:41 AM PST - 124 comments

Hikaru dorodango is a recent craze in Japanese school yards. Apparently it's an absorbing task, one that anyone can pick up. There are even competing, previously undisclosed techniques.
posted by ancientgower at 10:29 AM PST - 40 comments

No one's talking about "government lawyers and regulators engineer[ing] the future of the Internet," except, well, you, Mike. Craig Newmark debates with Mike McCurry over "net neutrality". Meanwhile, Hands Off the Internet seems to be a deceptively clever name for an organization sponsored by big telecoms.
posted by thisisdrew at 10:24 AM PST - 18 comments

This Week in God Salon interviews Karen Armstrong, a British ex-nun who has used her religious search to write several books on the subject. Her focus is not merely on Catholicism, but extends to many religions, including Islam.
posted by grapefruitmoon at 9:47 AM PST - 27 comments

Although paper sculptures have been discussed on the Blue before, you might also want to check out Calvin Nicholls (click on the gallery or portfolio links), who was profiled in the latest issue of Somerset Studio magazine. Here's another guy who creates people sculptures out of paper. There are many other artists out there who make sculptures from paper. Museums sometimes have exhibitions of their work. Check them out in person if you get a chance. Some of the sculptures are unbelievable.
posted by cass at 9:39 AM PST - 3 comments

Are Canadians changing parliament? It seems that the minority government Conservative Party has introduced legislation to set fixed four year election dates, the third week in October. Some people seem to think it can work, and others don't. Evidently I fit into a minority position as I can't see the benefit of having a year long election runnup.
posted by pezdacanuck at 9:18 AM PST - 40 comments

"The theories and opinions of the German philosopher Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno (1903-1969) on popular music and the culture industry are still highly influential in the domain of media studies. His thoughts about these subjects were very critical, pessimistic even. Adorno analysed the workings of the culture industry in terms of 'standardization' and used the concept of 'pseudo-individualization' to describe its effects on the listeners.
posted by j-urb at 8:49 AM PST - 14 comments

World War II Posters from the large collection at the Northwestern University Library.
posted by Gamblor at 8:34 AM PST - 18 comments

The dog's nuts of the periodic table.
posted by ozomatli at 8:22 AM PST - 41 comments

Vote Yes on Proposition 12? As in proposing a 12-year-old. Dutch pedophiles form a political party (English Wiki link)
Of course, they are not a one-idea party. They also favor "consensual sex between animals and humans".
posted by FeldBum at 7:59 AM PST - 43 comments

In Memoriam and in Protest --why not use an online deathmatch as a pedestal for speaking out against a war? Artist/Professor uses US Govt-developed America's Army (...placing Soldiering front and center within popular culture and showcasing the roles training, teamwork and technology play in the Army. ... ) as protest and art space. DeLappe's homepage (and jpgs) here
posted by amberglow at 7:11 AM PST - 130 comments

This will burn those summer calories. You need to watch this to the end. They are amazing!
posted by annieb at 7:01 AM PST - 101 comments

400 FREEWARES Direct links I just wish it was categorised.
posted by rinkjustice at 6:40 AM PST - 18 comments

Hungover this morning? Here's why.
posted by Mean Mr. Bucket at 6:21 AM PST - 13 comments

Megayacht ... ing
posted by magullo at 4:48 AM PST - 26 comments

For you: Amazing video of indoor precision musically choreographed aerobatic RC airplane flying. (From YouTube, of course.)
posted by loquacious at 1:47 AM PST - 50 comments

There's a myspace page for Q Lazzarus but you know she didn't create it herself. One of the biggest mysteries of modern Hollywood, how a singer could get a song on "Silence of the Lambs" but not appear on its soundtrack album, and a song on "Philadelphia" but not appear on its soundtrack album. And drop off the face of the earth. The mystery? In the age where one-hit wonders will to suffer any indignity to make a comeback attempt, Q Lazzarus disappeared. She's nowhere to be found. Maybe she's driving a taxi again.
posted by surplus at 12:41 AM PST - 26 comments

Bob Keller's Jazz Page "Welcome to my jazz page. It contains stuff to which I want to refer and to which I refer my students." Yes, it's just a single page of links, but wow what single page of links. An amazing jazz resource.
posted by jdroth at 8:08 PM PST - 24 comments

Dan Goodsell (of the unbelieveably great - and previously linked - Tick Tock Toys) has been keeping a blog for the last six months or so covering a variety of subjects (including his webcartoon, Mr Toast), but largely focused on U.S. pop culture ephemera of the 50's though the 70's, with a ton of great stuff.
posted by jonson at 6:45 PM PST - 5 comments

[nytimesfilter] Why is the New York Times obsessed with doom metal? For a newspaper that gives perfunctory (at best) coverage to non-classical, non-top-40 music, the publication of two articles about one marginal subgenre of indie rock seems incredibly conspiratorial.
posted by stemlot at 6:43 PM PST - 55 comments

Ice pictures. Not pictures of ice, rather pictures taken with a lens made out of ice. Alternatively you could use the bottom of a beer bottle
posted by Mitheral at 5:25 PM PST - 20 comments

On May 14th, 1967, the new British pop group The Pink Floyd makes one of their first ever TV appearances. Despite a stellar performance of the song Astronomy Domine, the pretentious host of the show, Hans Keller, has nothing good to say about the band. During the interview (youtube, performance comes first, interview starts about 5:50 in. transcript here.), he chastises the band for their "continuous repetition", "terribly loud" volume, and their "proportionately a bit boring" sound.

However, it seems that all Hans' show will ever be remembered for is this single interview. Pink Floyd, on the other hand.. Well, we all know what happened to them. Syd Barrett, on the other hand, was not so lucky.
posted by Afroblanco at 4:25 PM PST - 66 comments

at
posted by dg at 3:18 PM PST - 68 comments

«The silent queen of all that is snowy and pure» (.pdf) I will never forget the first time I saw Giovanni Pastrone’s extraordinary Cabiria... I wasn’t quite prepared for the sheer scope and beauty of this film. And I was completely unprepared for having my sense of film history re-aligned. There are so many elements that we took for granted as American inventions – the long-form historical epic, the moving camera, diffused light. Suddenly, here they were in a picture made two years before Griffith’s Birth of a Nation. -- Martin Scorsese
It was the first film to be over three hours long, the first to use a moving camera, the first to cost 20 times the average cost of a motion picture; Pastrone took several elephants and hundreds of extras to the Alps, in the dead of winter, to film scenes that only lasted a couple of minutes onscreen. He hired an ex-dockworker and turned him into one of the first action movie heroes, Maciste. And, he also created the first international marketing campaign of the history of cinema. The Americans were so impressed that Cabiria became the first film to be ever shown on White House grounds. Last week, at the Cannes Film Festival, a beautiful, painstakingly restored version of this forgotten masterpiece has just been shown to the public.
posted by matteo at 1:40 PM PST - 13 comments

Robertson Says He Leg-Pressed 2,000 Pounds. I think I'll wait for the YouTube link before passing judgment, lest I be judged...NewsFilter, of course.
posted by pax digita at 11:11 AM PST - 84 comments

Howard French - Asia photos Photos from across Asia by Howard French, who works for the New York Times. Includes many photos of the 'Disappearing Shanghai' that is being obliterated by the city's relentless urbanization.
posted by carter at 10:29 AM PST - 6 comments

Econ 101. A collection of links to videos about economics for those who want to learn more about the dismal science.
posted by srboisvert at 9:47 AM PST - 9 comments

Brit comedian Rob Newman presents his 'History of Oil'.
posted by piscatorius at 9:27 AM PST - 63 comments

"History doesn't just repeat itself , apparently: It remixes like a DJ." The story of Tringo, once a pass-time in the online virtual world Second Life, and now a cartridge for Gameboy Advance. (Via)
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 8:50 AM PST - 17 comments

Fantastic photographs taken and developed on the island of Tinian during WW2, now scanned and restored. There are some bodies and nudity/nude art, so it's potentially NSFW.
posted by WinnipegDragon at 8:14 AM PST - 51 comments

Geek tracks down identity thieves via luck and persistence. What should you do?
posted by roue at 7:00 AM PST - 25 comments

Veteran actor Paul Gleason, who played Principal Richard "Dick" Vernon of The Breakfast Club and who acted in over 120 films television shows, died Saturday of lung cancer at age 67.
posted by QuestionableSwami at 6:03 AM PST - 46 comments

The Supreme Court ruled a week ago that police may enter a private home without a warrant to break up a fight. Does this have any bearing on the War On Terror? Some people think so.
posted by EarBucket at 3:56 AM PST - 49 comments

The UK has released the secret UFO files held by the Ministry of Defence under the Freedom of Information Act.

Their conclusion: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena exist but should no longer be monitored.

US UFO files here and Russian spottings discussed here

Time to break out the foil hats!
posted by dogsbody at 2:28 AM PST - 29 comments

He created Space Ghost, The Herculoids and made Saturdays worth getting up for with his Super Friends. In addition, he was a prolific comics artist. Comics great Alex Toth is dead at 77.
posted by DonnieSticks at 12:39 AM PST - 36 comments

Project Nekton — Take Mt. Everest, add a mile to the top, and turn it upside down. That's how far oceanic explorers Jacques Piccard and USN Lt. Donald Walsh descended on January 23, 1960 into the Pacific's Challenger Deep, the lowest spot in Earth's oceans. Their submersible, the second-generation bathyscape Trieste, was designed by Swiss balloonist Auguste Piccard (Jacques' father) and built in Italy. This underwater balloon was buoyed by 70 tons of gasoline, ballasted by nine tons of steel shot, and dangled a cramped, six-foot diameter, 14 ton observation gondola underneath it [more Trieste photos here]. It took Piccard and Walsh nearly five hours to touch bottom 35,800 feet down in the Mariana Trench. Their unique voyage still stands 46 years later: no one has gone back—except by ROV—and more people have landed on the Moon.
posted by cenoxo at 11:06 PM PST - 28 comments

June 6, 2006 (6/6/06) is the National Day of Slayer and the rules are simple: Listen to Slayer at full blast in your car. Listen to Slayer at full blast in your home. Listen to Slayer at full blast at your place of employment. Listen to Slayer at full blast in any public place you prefer. DO NOT use headphones! The objective of this day is for everyone within earshot to understand that it is the National Day of Slayer. National holidays in America aren't just about celebrating; they're about forcing it upon non-participants.
posted by mathowie at 8:42 PM PST - 94 comments

Union Boycotts Israel. Delegates to the Canadian Union of Public Employees Ontario convention voted overwhelmingly to support a boycott of Israel products, part of the The Wall Must Fall campaign. (TWMF Pamphlet in PDF form.)
posted by five fresh fish at 7:16 PM PST - 78 comments

Sternest Meanings: A fancy schmancy bot that takes what you say and returns a darn good anagram. "Shaky catacombs enchant fatty. Anyway thunderous star. Roman and ga-ga road." My conversations with bots always end up with me cussing and/or crying.
posted by bjork24 at 6:57 PM PST - 15 comments

What happens when you build your biceps up to 28 inches? Greg Valentino, the "most hated man in bodybuilding" could curl 300 pounds. Then his biceps popped (youtube). Another interview with the good Mr. Valentino.
posted by Rumple at 6:33 PM PST - 77 comments

A few years ago, this seemingly shy kid sat in his bedroom and recorded Pachelbel's Canon in D major. Recently, he recorded a different rendition. He's more confident and learning how to become a performer. Lest you think it's simply mimic, here's Beto (no offence dude...keep on practicing), a bit better by Indrek (notice no chords...is that Bill Gates?). Want a lesson? Here's one on a sweeping technique. JerryC's "official site" and "unofficial site". So who is JerryC? Someone to keep our eye on, eh?
posted by sluglicker at 5:18 PM PST - 104 comments

"CarLoft works like this: you drive the car into a modified industrial elevator, the CarLift. (Nearly all German luxury vehicles fit; only the massive Mercedes Maybach, priced at half a million euros, is too much car to lift.) A computer-controlled transponder recognizes the car and knows to which floor it should be delivered automatically." -- Metropolis Magazine has more. I don't drive but if I did and I lived in an apartment, I'd want a CarLoft -- being able to drive you car to your front door, five stories up. That's classy.
posted by feelinglistless at 4:21 PM PST - 29 comments

It is important to take the current political situation [NYT] in Iran in context. Shirin Ebadi and Azar Nafisi are two women who have written memoirs (Iran Awakening and Reading Lolita in Tehran, respectively) dealing with being a woman in the world's only theocracy. (bugmenot) Individual Iranians both commend and disagree with their portrayal of Iran to Western audiences.
posted by grapefruitmoon at 3:56 PM PST - 12 comments

Sous La Mer . Underwater nudes by Alberich Mathews. Webs of light. [via]
posted by nickyskye at 12:58 PM PST - 18 comments

This is not resolved! When a young man on a double decker bus in Hong Kong asked an older man to lower his voice whilst talking on the phone, the young man invariably became the receiving end of a torrent of half coherent phrase and insults about his mother. Naturally, you can watch it unfolding here since the entire event was captured by another passenger with his cell phone.

This video has become one of the most viewed clips on youtube, spawning remixes, rap, reenactments, new school yard sayings, and yes, t-shirts. And they say youtube is just a site for narcissistic kids and tv show clips. NSFW if you have co-workers who can understand Cantonese. And it's not the subtitle's fault, this guy really does rant off for a bit.
posted by phyrewerx at 12:18 PM PST - 96 comments

Irrepressible.info is a new campaign by Amnesty International and The Observer to fight internet censorship. One way to help is by publishing censored material from other websites onto your own.
posted by homunculus at 10:20 AM PST - 15 comments

Newsfilter: the Children of Guantanamo The 'IoS' reveals today that more than 60 of the detainees of the US camp were under 18 at the time of their capture, some as young as 14
posted by j.p. Hung at 6:36 AM PST - 38 comments

Baking tutorials are fun. Would you prefer a wood-fired bread baking course? This set has recipes to go along with the delicious looking pictures, and here is a virtual tour through a chocolate factory. Poetry your fancy? Here is a set of haikus soley dedicated to Spam™, and other cooking poems here. Want to make your own sausages? (NSFW, or dog lovers) How about Sushi? Make your own flowers out of vegetables. But don't forget to have fun.
posted by a. at 2:31 AM PST - 9 comments

Newsfilter: Members of Iraq's tennis team shot "for wearing shorts." Being an Iraqi athlete is no easier than before. Just ask members of the Iraqi Taekwondo squad. More.
posted by bardic at 1:24 AM PST - 48 comments

The US and Canadian national anthems as delivered this week in Edmonton, Ontario. [youtube video]
posted by tsarfan at 11:45 PM PST - 66 comments

O'Reilly and Associates apologize about threats to keep an Irish non-profit from stealing O'Reilly's "Web 2.0" service mark. The usually-forgiving blogosphere cabal is not amused.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 9:01 PM PST - 37 comments

Philippe Guillerm is a woodworker whose art is comprised of various classical string instruments in whimsical, almost anthropomorphized positions
posted by jonson at 8:07 PM PST - 7 comments

Graduates of the "school of hard knocks" flunk real life. A study from the University of Leicester says that, contrary to popular expectation, unpleasant and traumatic life experiences don't make people suspicious and shrewd -- quite the opposite. Many people who've had a tough life actually turn out more gullible and easily swayed:

"This is because the person may have learned to distrust their actions, judgments and decisions due to the fact that the majority of the time their actions have been perceived to invite negative consequences"

The counter-intuitiveness of this finding fascinates me. Wait. Maybe I shouldn't be taking it at face value...
posted by AmbroseChapel at 4:28 PM PST - 50 comments

My Life in France by Julia Child (discussed here, and here) has been published posthumously with the assistance of Alex Prud'homme.
posted by grapefruitmoon at 3:43 PM PST - 10 comments

Newsfilter: More than 100 arrests at Moscow gay protest. Upon others, German MP Volker Beck, Oscar Wilde's grandson and Paris mayor's representatives were injured by a mob of fashist thugs and christian-orthodox fundamentalists at Moscow's first gay pride march, and then arrested by the police. In fraternal unity the violence was called upon by the orthodox church, Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov, the grand mufti of Russia’s Muslims, and Russia’s chief rabbi. Read this article by Peter Thatchell on UK Gay News for a first hand account of the events, and for background information Doug Irland's blog and Scott Long's Moscow diary, published by the Washington Blade.
posted by kolophon at 3:13 PM PST - 54 comments

Timeline of Trends and Events (1750 to 2100). Large image, lots of info. Via digg
posted by sourwookie at 1:44 PM PST - 49 comments

Bendito Machine - An excellent animated short exploring societal conflict. [flash]
posted by icosahedral at 10:39 AM PST - 21 comments

Would you leave a dying man to reach the top of Everest? Mark Inglis, who lost both legs in a climbing accident years ago, triumphantly scaled Mt. Everest earlier this month. About two and a half hours into the climb, they passed David Sharp, a climber on his way down who was clearly in distress and only hours from death. Inglis and his team left him there and continued to the summit and, as expected, David Sharp died.

Everest pioneer Sir Edmund Hillary is displeased, and this fellow is lucky the group that found him decided his "weak attributes of life" were enough for an effort at rescue.
posted by thirteenkiller at 9:53 AM PST - 208 comments

PCWorld magazine lists the top 25 worst tech products of all time. via /.
posted by Afroblanco at 8:55 AM PST - 40 comments

Oblivion Domino Day. Some fun from The Elder Scrolls.
posted by Mean Mr. Bucket at 8:25 AM PST - 24 comments

For the would-be recording buffs: understanding compression. A three-part series which explains the workings and uses of compressors, limiters, expanders, and gates. Plus some thoughts on the modern epidemic of overcompression from the listener's perspective.
posted by ludwig_van at 7:35 AM PST - 39 comments

Utopian Pharmacology. Can safe, sustainable analogues of MDMA (link to 1914 German patent) be developed? There is an urgent need for non-neurotoxic empathogens and entactogens suitable for lifelong use. Alas no single "magic bullet" yet exists that replicates the subjective effects of MDMA on a long-term basis. Hence most of us are doomed to display the quasi-psychopathic indifference to each other characteristic of the MDMA-naïve state.
posted by three blind mice at 1:29 AM PST - 44 comments

Freelance spying. How and why Rita got into the counterterrorism business, running and publishing SITE, where she and her researchers mine online sources for intelligence, which they translate and send out by e-mail to a list of about a hundred subscribers.
posted by semmi at 12:10 AM PST - 12 comments

Darth Vader calls the Emperor. From Adult Swim, Darth Vader calls Emperor Palpatine to break some bad news. Laughter ensues.
posted by Trinkers at 9:27 PM PST - 37 comments

Why aren't there any indie video games: "Indie rock fans may prefer somewhat muddy sound over some lushly orchestrated, producer-massaged score; indie film fans may prefer quirky, low-budget titles over big-budget special FX extravaganzas; but in gaming, we have no indie aesthetic, no group of people (of any size at least) who prize independent vision and creativity over production values."
posted by JPowers at 9:20 PM PST - 29 comments

Top 7 flickr groups for techies. I especially liked electronporn
posted by delmoi at 8:32 PM PST - 7 comments

Justin's Rattlesnake Bite is the true story of one man's adventures in surgery after being surprised by a rattlesnake which bit the palm of his left hand. The story makes for grim reading, but the pictures are very much worse. pics may be NSFW
posted by jonson at 6:14 PM PST - 54 comments

Toddlerpedes (see the rest of the gallery here) are just one part of the Underground Australian Toy Art Collective, which is just one part of the Underground Australian Surreal Art Collective. Admittedly, some of the art is underground for a reason, but you might find something you like. Kim Evan's gallery is pretty neat. So is Julian Treweeke's and Kuba Fiedorowicz's. Some art is NSFW.
posted by arcticwoman at 5:47 PM PST - 4 comments

Alexander von Humboldt was a German naturalist, botanist and explorer. His discoveries were many, and as such various animals and geographic features are named after him (even on the moon and elsewhere). His writings inspired many, and many foundations and scholarships exist with his name. One of those he inspired, with great tales of the American frontier (PDF) and Humboldt's oft-used word "Lebensraum", was Adolf Hitler (no link needed). That may have been an influencing factor for the creation of the outdoors-oriented Hitler Youth, and even pushed Adolf into expanding to the vast unpopulated expanses of Russia, via Poland, of course.
posted by Kickstart70 at 5:11 PM PST - 8 comments

www.bookofcool.com [flash]. A cool idea for cool tricks.
posted by movilla at 5:01 PM PST - 4 comments

A recent diet book offers a new, easy, work free way to lose weight. Big surprise. However, the technique and the way it was "discovered" raise some interesting questions. Is it so simple and safe to play at "hacking" the body, and is a physician's self experimentation really entirely trustworthy?
posted by BrodieShadeTree at 4:44 PM PST - 15 comments

Today, George Washington University's National Security Archive has published online the most comprehensive collection of memoranda of conversations (memcons) involving Henry Kissinger.

Revealed in the collection is the fact that "Kissinger quietly acknowledged to China in 1972 that Washington could accept a communist takeover of South Vietnam if that evolved after a withdrawal of U.S. troops - even as the war to drive back the Communists dragged on with mounting deaths....[He] told Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai: 'If we can live with a communist government in China, we ought to be able to accept it in Indochina.' ...[His] comments appear to lend credence to the 'decent interval' theory posed by some historians who said the United States was prepared to see Communists take over Saigon, as long as that happened long enough after a U.S. troop departure to save face."
posted by ericb at 4:10 PM PST - 38 comments

Auden and Christianity "The notion that religious faith and serious thought are mutually exclusive categories always struck Auden as risible and unintelligible. But he would have bristled at an effort to separate out his religious beliefs and restate them as systematic propositions, or examine them independently or thematically, rather than see them as players in his rich and various inner symbolic drama."
posted by vronsky at 4:08 PM PST - 3 comments

Cheapovegas! Including tips and reports: Vegas on 19$ a Day, Porn Convention, Free Crap, Best Swimming (or how to sneak into it), and the new Hooter's Casino, to name just a few. Let Casino Boy show you the way to medium-risk, non-family fun!
posted by bardic at 3:50 PM PST - 9 comments

Websites as graphs - Metafilter as a graph (java app)
posted by puke & cry at 3:02 PM PST - 24 comments

Calvin and Hobbes
posted by afu at 1:49 PM PST - 53 comments

In 1875, Josiah Mason gave a gift to establish a college which was called the Mason Science College (now a part of the University of Birmingham). Within the terms of the gift to the institutuion, one of the stipulations was that classics not be taught. Of course at such an institution, the Founder Day's address was logically given by Thomas Henry Huxley on the place of Science in Education. Huxley preached the virtues of science and derisively dismissed all value in studying classics, and he wondered whether any rational person would choose to study classics over science. His conclusion was that the only people who would choose a study of classics are those like "that Levite of culture" Matthew Arnold. Arnold took the opportunity to respond to his friend. In his reply, Arnold acknowledged that nobody would expect him to engage Huxley in a debate about science, and though he wouldn't presume to take on Huxley in such a debate, he did want to mention something that struck him as he thumbed through a book of Huxley's friend. Arnold noted that he was struck by the idea that "our ancestor was a hairy quadruped furnished with a tail and pointed ears, probably arboreal in his habits." Arnold acknowledged that he isn't a scientist and therefore doesn't dispute such a claim, but he did want to point out that even if that were true, with regards to this good fellow, there must have been a necessity in him that inclined him to Greek. And would always incline him to Greek. After all, we got there, didn't we?
posted by dios at 12:25 PM PST - 27 comments

The Zobo! Spanish-American Chess Men! Where can you find these amazing products, including Sanitary Belt Pads the Toilet Mask, or a handy goat harness, at amazing, rockbottom prices? The Sears, Roebuck Catalog, of course. Everything you could need for the modern American family! They did houses (1, 2) even. Starting in 1888 and mostly selling watches, this venerable institution of consumerism spent its first 10 years rapidly growing and adding products, lasting for over 100 years before finally folding in 1993. The catalog still stands as a detailed historical document of what the average American would buy to get through life. They make a fun collector's item, too (1902 available on CD-ROM as well). [ This post inspired by the 1902 Sears, Roebuck Catalog blog. ]
posted by tweak at 12:18 PM PST - 11 comments

Hell and Back: "Deep in the Amazon jungle, writer Kira Salak [story on her homepage] tests ayahuasca, a shamanistic medicinal ritual, and finds a terrifying—but enlightening—world within." Interesting tale found via this interview with Charles Grob on the potential therapeutic uses of psychedelics. The legal status of ayahuasca in the US was recently discussed here.
posted by homunculus at 12:05 PM PST - 55 comments

"That goddamn bitch Dorothy Parker...You won't believe what she's done." Lillian Hellman and Dorothy Parker were best friends forever until Ms. Parker pissed Ms. Hellman off by leaving her estate to Martin Luther King, Jr., instead of to Ms. Hellman. Which might explain why Ms. Parker's remains went missing. [more inside; via]
posted by kirkaracha at 10:36 AM PST - 26 comments

Newsfilter: The US House Committee on the Judiciary today approved the Internet Freedom and Nondiscrimination Act (HR 5417) in a vote of 20-12, helping to improve the provision of equal network service regardless of who receives it, without added surcharges, along with other antitrust measures. Carriers like AT&T, Comcast and Verizon suggest no problem exists that requires this legislative solution, despite pushing their lobbyists hard to get Congress to enact opposing laws, and suggesting that prioritizing network traffic is required to develop newer products, such as high-definition video. Meanwhile, the FCC continues to encourage mergers while prices for telecommunications products continue to rise at rates manyfold higher than inflation, despite price gouging provisions enacted in the Telecommunications Act of 1996.
posted by Mr. Six at 10:16 AM PST - 13 comments

If you are going to sell a broken laptop on ebay, make sure you wipe the harddisk first (some photos NSFW)
posted by bluefin at 8:55 AM PST - 86 comments

“You are not to use electronic communication or even land lines when communicating.” Remember the Millennium Challenge '02 wargames (previously discussed here)? To refresh your memory, Lt. Gen. Paul Van Riper (ret.), playing the part of the enemy, sank half the American fleet using a host of unconventional tactics including using motorcycle messengers to avoid radio interception. The embarrassed Pentagon game masters restarted the game & forced Van Riper to use more conventional tactics that guaranteed a win by the Good Guys. Well it looks like the Iraqi insurgents have picked up a play from Van Riper's book. Flyers are being distributed throughout Iraq urging fighters to stop using cellphones, landline phones & the Internet for communications because the US Army is intercepting them & tracking down the rebel cells. Score one for open source warfare. [via]
posted by scalefree at 7:47 AM PST - 50 comments

This [youtube] is what happens when an "unemployed porn site user" and CARL MONDAY, CLEVELAND'S INVESTIGATIVE REPORTER meet at a local library. [via the always excellent Deadspin]
posted by docgonzo at 7:27 AM PST - 143 comments

Lost in translation. British Comedian Stewart Lee explores comedy in Germany and finds it stymied by the peculiarities of language and sentence construction. Mark Liberman at Language Log disagrees. And an extended essay by Josh Schonwald explores in greater depth how the German comedy scene is transitioning (PDF) from the more traditional kabernett to a burgeoning stand-up comedy scene, which is characterized by one observer as being in "the Bob Hope phase of comedy."
posted by madamjujujive at 4:13 AM PST - 72 comments

[Telecom] has used confusion as its chief marketing tool This quote from New Zealand's Telecom's CEO is used to set up this mashupof one of their advertisements. The original had kids praising the company; in this version they're saying they've been shafted. Telecom, naturally, has been trying ever since to get it off the internet - crying "Copyright!" (mirrors in the comments here)
posted by slightlybewildered at 2:19 AM PST - 7 comments

Indiana Jones and the Fountain of Youth A fan-made adventure game featuring a SCUMM-based system. A demo is available for download here.
posted by slater at 1:32 AM PST - 25 comments

The Apocalypse According to Mad Magazine? Basil Wolverton, best known for his work on early issues of Mad Magazine, was also a Minister in the Radio Church of God. This church, founded by Herbert Armstrong, father of Garner Ted, believed the Apocalypse would happen sometime in 1972, and Wolverton's illustrations were in pamphlets designed to alert the public to this fact. 1972 has passed, the church has splintered, and Herbert is long dead - but nonetheless he has a blog. As a bonus, you can view Basil's apocalypse in 3-d. Wolverton links via
posted by Rumple at 1:24 AM PST - 11 comments

A Fly Wearing Glasses
PopSci offers this cool gallery of high-magnification micro manufacturing coolness. Potentially NSFW if a mite at 50,000x could be construed as sexy.
posted by fenriq at 10:23 PM PST - 17 comments

Greensboro Truth & Reconciliation Commission releases its report. On Nov. 3, 1979, in Greensboro, N.C., Klansmen and Nazis fired on Communist Workers Party demonstrators, killing five and wounding 10. The gunmen, though captured on TV-news videotape, were acquitted of all charges in two criminal trials in the early 1980s. Two years ago, a Greensboro Truth & Reconciliation Commission was convened, following the South African model, to look into the case. It posted its report on its Web site earlier tonight, shedding some additional light on an incident that has divided the city for more than a quarter-century.
posted by lexalexander at 9:00 PM PST - 49 comments

Reggae and ska legend Desmond Dekker died today in London. In 1968, Dekker's song "Israelites", recorded with his band The Aces, became the first international hit by a Jamaican artist. According to his official site, the sixty-four-year old Dekker was still touring and booked to perform well into fall 2006.
posted by bcveen at 8:05 PM PST - 81 comments

The Wingdipper! A "specially designed dipping cup that allows Buffalo Wings to be evenly coated with dressing." Why do chickens hate it? Because "This innovative dipping cup design will only lead to more problems for the entire chicken community. In 2004, the average American consumed over 84 pounds of chicken. Already, Hooters sells 30 million pounds of wings every year! That's a whole lot of chicken." Crumb's right, I'm moving to France.
posted by JPowers at 7:35 PM PST - 38 comments

"We were forced to evacuate the remotely operated vehicle, 'Jason II,' several times to avoid getting it enveloped in volcanic clouds," said Bill Chadwick, ...one of the authors of the study. "But at other times, we could observe the eruption from only 10 feet away - something you could never do on land. So in some ways, we were able to see processes more clearly at the bottom of the ocean than we ever could on land. That was surprising." From KGW (bugmenot). Podcasts, videos, images, sounds, daily logs, and lots of information can be found on the project's website.
posted by pwb503 at 6:44 PM PST - 5 comments

MEDIA MISTAKES? Byron Calame, public editor of The New York Times, wrote a piece recently about how a faulty Page One story went unchallenged. He notes that despite a questionable premise, the story went uncorrected for a week, and even provoked a piece of art on the Times' op-ed page. Calame's piece gives us a tiny bit of insight into editorial mistakes and correction policies in the media, particularly when challenged from the outside. You get the sense of a behemoth bureaucracy in motion, difficult to head off, harder yet to correct. The Times itself collected some of its more ridiculous errors in its book Kill Duck Before Serving a few years ago. But less amusing is what law professor Eric Muller found. In early May, he heard Fox News' Judge Andrew Napolitano telling a story meant to illustrate how out of control the federal government's commerce-governing powers have become. Though Muller researched the supposed case Napolitano reported and found nothing in the legal archives, and asked Napolitano for more details, Napolitano has yet to respond.
posted by etaoin at 6:33 PM PST - 23 comments

Let's see if mefites like Jeff Cooper's list better than Heinlein's: What should a young male of 21 know, and what should he be able to do? There are no conclusive answers to those questions, but they are certainly worth asking. A young man should know how this country is run and how it got that way...A young man should be computer literate and, moreover, should know Hemingway from James Joyce. He should know how to drive a car well... He should know how to shoot well. He should know elementary geography, both worldwide and local. He should have a cursory knowledge of both zoology and botany. He should know the fundamentals of agriculture and corporate economy... He should know how to manage a motorcycle. He should be comfortable in at least one foreign language, more if appropriate to his background... These things should be accomplished before a son leaves his father's household.
posted by 445supermag at 5:24 PM PST - 69 comments

AIDS really did come from chimps in the 1950s --..."We're 25 years into this pandemic," Hahn said. "We don't have a cure. We don't have a vaccine. But we know where it came from. At least we can make a check mark on one of those." ... ...Identifying the source of the HIV pandemic is more than filling in a missing link in the disease's progression. ...
posted by amberglow at 5:00 PM PST - 24 comments

Republican-Approved Rock Music (NYT link). The National Review, the standard-bearing conservative rag founded by William F. Buckley (you know, Gore Vidal's good pal), has published a list of "Top 50 Conservative Rock Songs Of All Time" (NYT again -- not TNR). The explanations for the picks tend toward the obvious, if also occasionally nauseating. The top pick, and many of the others, are just this week's evidence of how irony is lost on much of conservative America.
posted by scatman at 4:03 PM PST - 114 comments

According to this article and a judge in Nebraska, short people have a different legal system than tall people.
posted by ashcan at 3:54 PM PST - 44 comments

TANGO'D! remember that awesome sony advert with all the bouncy balls in san francisco? well british drink firm tango have made an great parody of it. however, the residents of swansea north, where the ad was filmed, are not too happy. beautiful music provided by josé gonzalez (review) . [via]
posted by christy at 3:28 PM PST - 45 comments

Swarm shows you what websites people are visiting, right now. Although they appear to be migrating servers at the moment. And, in order for it to work as thought out, you do have to share some amount of your browsing activity (anonymously).
posted by allkindsoftime at 3:20 PM PST - 16 comments

Seperation of Power? (newsfilter) In a strange move, both the Rs and the Ds are livid that the FBI raided the congressional offices of Rep. William Jefferson, D-Louisiana, (who may have accepted substantial bribes). House speaker Hastert spoke directly with the president, so, The president steps in an orders the documents sealed as a cooling off period as congress demands this is a separation of Powers issue. Some predict it will go to the SCOTUS.
posted by edgeways at 2:06 PM PST - 54 comments

You can achieve dream control. Lucid dreaming has been discussed on MeFi before. LD4all is a site that I highly recommend, as it takes you step-by-step through the learning process; from remembering your dreams through gaining control and even into more esoteric subjects. As a researcher in the field, I'm interested in both the empirical views and those more artistic in nature.
posted by Eideteker at 1:26 PM PST - 36 comments

Toni Morrison's Beloved named best American novel of the last 25 years. Critic A.O. Scott writes an accompanying article. Some people do not agree. Like this person or this one. The judges. (Bugmenot login: I used veganporn/veganporn.)
posted by papakwanz at 12:23 PM PST - 129 comments

Get laughed out of your last biker ralley for not having any ink? Worried what the guys in the band will say when you show up in short sleeves? Fear not, my needle-fearing friend, salvation may be at hand. Then again, maybe not.
posted by Ogre Lawless at 12:02 PM PST - 30 comments

Something Wicked This Way Comes: Here's my nomination for the worst-sounding, worst-looking music that ever happened in the history of torture. I challenge anyone to come up with worse. Can any music known to human anguish be more repulsive than the best Italo Disco, specially when skillfully presented by an enthusiastic Greek web tycoon? I think not! And what's more, be on your guard, for there are ominous signs it's about to flare up again...
posted by MiguelCardoso at 11:46 AM PST - 42 comments

Stool transplants. How is it possible that this disgusting chestnut has not yet been discussed on MeFi?
posted by stemlot at 11:31 AM PST - 49 comments

Modern contract law, which frames and defines our modern economy, is shaped by old and rather mundane disputes. Consider some of the seminal cases: Hadley v. Baxendale (1854); Hamer v. Sidway (1891); Carlill v. Carbolic Smoke Ball Co. (1892); Mills v. Wyman (1825). These cases, while minor in their actual factual footprint, still shape the world of contracts over a century later. (more about the cases inside)
posted by dios at 11:30 AM PST - 32 comments

Jedi schmedi! Do something useful, and smack your Mac! (In public, even.)
posted by eriko at 11:16 AM PST - 18 comments

Mr. Rogers before the Senate in 1969. [video; YouTube]
posted by Sticherbeast at 10:39 AM PST - 61 comments

Poulpe Pulps: A gallery of pulp and comic cover art featuring octopi. Via Slate, who just commissioned a few new pulp covers for classic books.
posted by staggernation at 10:28 AM PST - 6 comments

A bound-to-happen mix of technofetish and appreciation of package design: Unboxing.com is a blog that documents the pleasure of OOBE--the out-of-box experience. Via core77.com.
More here: 1 2 3
posted by hydrophonic at 8:43 AM PST - 21 comments

"The groom confesses he has had some difficulty finding a bride, but he is hopeful that 'this one will stay.'"
If you were a young man looking to settle down with a girl, what would you do? Let friends or family set you up? Try the bar scene? Match.com? If you lived in rural Kyrgyzstan, you might skip the courtship and just kidnap whatever girl catches your eye. This fascinating Frontline/World piece explores a strange but shockingly common practice. According to one study, more than a third of ethnic Kyrgyz women are married by kidnapping.
posted by justkevin at 8:40 AM PST - 35 comments

Postcards from the Edge
posted by yerfatma at 7:13 AM PST - 22 comments

Save the South Central Farm! (video) Sure, Daryl Hannah is a little nutty, but she got behind a good cause here, helping urban farmers in LA.
posted by usedwigs at 6:30 AM PST - 14 comments

Lennon Letter Sells £12,000. In 1971, a New York Times article accused the Beatles, and other white artists, of imitating and exploiting American black music in their early cover records. Lennon responded angrily, "Many kids were turned on to black music by us. It wasn't a rip off, it was a love-in."
posted by three blind mice at 3:06 AM PST - 71 comments

Rice cakes are one of the most fattening foods known to man, while ice cream is one of the least fattening. Though this appears illogical, it makes perfect Anthropological sense. Education is the key to controlling body fat. If we know which foods store in the fat cells and which ones do not, we can make educated food choices.

The glycemic index (GI) is a ranking of carbohydrates on a scale from 0 to 100 according to the extent to which they raise blood sugar levels after eating. Foods with a high GI are those which are rapidly digested and absorbed and result in marked fluctuations in blood sugar levels. Low-GI foods, by virtue of their slow digestion and absorption, produce gradual rises in blood sugar and insulin levels, and have proven benefits for health. There has been an explosion of books and diet plans based on the glycemic index, But while many popular diet books make it sound as if the glycemic index is an accepted theory, in truth, there are very real problems with this system. Some dieticians believe that a Satiety Index may be a better approach to reducing caloric intake whilst minimising cravings.
posted by talitha_kumi at 1:52 AM PST - 59 comments

Is this guy an awesome teacher or just crazy? Or maybe it goes hand in hand. Think back to the days of high school and college science classes. For most people, it probably wasn't chalkboards full of endless physics equations that got them interested in the sciences, but rather the crazy, cooky and awe-inspiring professors who do dramatic and unique demonstrations to get students interested. What makes a good teacher or professor? Is this teacher really reckless or is it a legit demonstration that benefits students?
posted by RockBandit at 12:04 AM PST - 63 comments

Here we are now, entertain us. An all-ukulele cover of "Smells Like Teen Spirit" from the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain. From their Web site, "Sugar Plum Fairy" [mp3]. But can UOGB hold a candle to "While My Ukulele Gently Weeps," discussed previously?
posted by BackwardsCity at 10:34 PM PST - 33 comments

Though not the first time golf has been played in space, Russian cosmonauts are still planning to go ahead with the world's longest drive (3-4 years in orbit) from the International Space Station, as sponsored by the golf company Element 21 [link is to a rather neat CGI video of the shot, in wmv format. Coral Cache version.] The only problem -- it might hit the space station with the force of a 6.5 ton truck moving at 60 mph, though others are more worried about what the stunt means for the space program.
posted by blahblahblah at 9:21 PM PST - 15 comments

Taylor Hicks wins American Idol.... It could be something worth talking about given how powerful the show has become: #1 show on television, contributed to over 30 million records (records -- yes records not itunes singles) sold, and a show where Queen, Rod Stewart, and, tonight, TAFKAP (or he could be Prince again) are clamoring to be on it. Moroever, some conventional wisdom seems to support that the show is not karaoeke-izing pop music and instead contributes to it surprisingly positively. While it might not lead to debates on metafiler, arguments as to what makes a good Idol can be seen here.
posted by skepticallypleased at 8:54 PM PST - 139 comments

Prime Minister Stephen Harper says he'll no longer give news conferences for the national media, after a dispute led a number of journalists to walk away from an event when he refused to take their questions.
posted by EarBucket at 5:52 PM PST - 89 comments

Defend DeLay (link to embedded video). Tom DeLay needs your help to fend off the rabid liberal media. He appreciates the fact that Stephen Colbert is doing his part by taking on Robert Greenwald, maker of the upcoming "The Big Buy: Tom Delay's Stolen Congress" and previously "Outfoxed." (via)
posted by bardic at 4:42 PM PST - 60 comments

President George W. Bush has bestowed on his intelligence czar, John Negroponte, broad authority, in the name of national security, to excuse publicly traded companies from their usual accounting and securities-disclosure obligations. Notice of the development came in a brief entry in the Federal Register, dated May 5, 2006, that was opaque to the untrained eye.
posted by Mean Mr. Bucket at 3:50 PM PST - 55 comments

I'm a huge fan of clever unintended uses for things, and loloroy's favorites reuses a page/interface I've seen hundreds of times before in a cute way. It may take a second to figure out, but should be worth it [via tmn].
posted by mathowie at 2:44 PM PST - 49 comments

Hercules uses eminent domain to keep out Wal-Mart (previously). Fueling the eminent domain fire, now WalMart finds itself on both sides of the debate.
posted by analogue at 2:15 PM PST - 32 comments

"Covers is dedicated to the appreciation of book cover design."
posted by dobbs at 1:36 PM PST - 16 comments

His 15 minutes are up but he must be regretting them now. His fans are rooting for him though.
posted by beno at 1:06 PM PST - 17 comments

The Wizard - a movie of nostalgia and product placement, is coming to dvd and this article has some great clips from the movie.
posted by nile_red at 12:14 PM PST - 36 comments

Richard Tomlinson is a former spy. Jailed under the Official Secrets Act in 1995 for publishing his memoirs, famed for claiming there's a cover up surrounding Princess Diana's death and allegedly leaking a list of active MI6 agents, he is still fuming about his dismissal from the Secret Intelligence Service. So he started a weblog, complete with posts containing sensitive information. The British authorities are displeased.
posted by jack_mo at 8:11 AM PST - 33 comments

Bill Frist <3s gorillas. I find this quite charming.
posted by MrMoonPie at 8:11 AM PST - 80 comments

The inventor of the internets (no, not Al), weighs in on the topic of net neutrality, previously discussed here, here, here, and here. (hope I didn't miss anyone)
posted by allkindsoftime at 8:01 AM PST - 29 comments

The Sheep Market -- 10,000 sheep drawn by online workers. Or, if you prefer to be out of step.
posted by OmieWise at 7:13 AM PST - 31 comments

There's a move afoot to censure Jimmy Carter instead of, say, anyone actually responsible for making the world a more dangerous place. I call "attacking the messenger by proxy," or at least, some serious Rove-ian misdirection.
posted by jpburns at 4:01 AM PST - 159 comments

Joseph Cornell was enamored with ballerinas and starlets, the subject of many of his celebrated boxes. "He handed them, personally, to his most loved ballerinas. And they were almost uniformly sent back. He was rejected, laughed at, and, in one unfortunate case, tackled." Anecdotes about Cornell and his muses, via robot wisdom. [more]
posted by madamjujujive at 3:30 AM PST - 52 comments

Wal-Mart fails in South Korea. As a student of business and a resident of Asia, I am fascinated by the examples of "foreign" businesses who either succeed or fail in Asian markets. Recently, Vodafone failed in Japan but in a strange twist has signed a J-V with Softbank to keep their presence in Japan. eBay failed in Japan as did Memoirs of a Geisha. I'd love to have a discussion on the successes AND failures of non-Asian businesses in Asian markets and what, if any, lessons can be taken away for those of us who are in Asian markets or wish to enter Asian markets. (Yes, I realize that "Asia" is too broad of a region but I don't want to limit the discussion to just one nation.)
posted by gen at 2:17 AM PST - 43 comments

A WTO victory came last week for the high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) industry. HFCS is that controversial stuff that seemingly permeates everything in American consumer foods, from Gatorade to cough drops. Mexico had slapped tariffs on HFCS dumping in 1998 but agreed to revoke them in 2007, a move that will expand HFCS outside what is almost exclusively a U.S. market. The industry is quite firm that HFCS is safe, but there are some naysayers.
posted by rolypolyman at 2:15 AM PST - 44 comments

Global warming underestimated by up to 78%. Scientists analyzing historical climate data for Europe have established the existence of a greater-than-anticipated positive feedback mechanism between high temperatures and global carbon dioxide levels. This provides more scientific evidence to support previously-expressed concerns that as global warming intensifies, a chain-reaction of considerably higher temperatures may occur. This corresponds with a new report released by the Australian government, claiming that "there is now perceived to be a greater risk that the upper end of the well known IPCC TAR estimate of a 1.4 to 5.8°C temperature rise will be reached or exceeded by 2100." "Estimates of future warming . . . may have to be raised by about 50 percent."
posted by insomnia_lj at 2:10 AM PST - 40 comments

SaveLivesInMay - "I have received information psychically, which is corroborated by scientific data, according to which on May 25, 2006 a giant tsunami will occur in the Atlantic Ocean, brought about by the impact of a comet fragment which will provoke the eruption of under-sea volcanoes. Waves up to 200 m high will reach coastlines located above and below the Tropic of Cancer." Are you at risk? Meanwhile, FEMA just happens to be preoccupied on the Wrong West Coast.
posted by jahmoon at 12:31 AM PST - 50 comments

Gentlemen, start yer cliches: Thirsty hockey fans drinking Canadian city dry of beer
posted by docgonzo at 7:58 PM PST - 38 comments

Snapping your way to riches, $0.30 at a time. Some say micropayment sites are the bane of photography--that micropayment stock photo sites prey on the gullible and will single handedly destroy professional photography as we know it. Others say it's more money than you would make than if you just let the photos sit around on your computer, that it's just the way it is, it's the way it's gonna be and you may as well hop on board. [via]
posted by flarbuse at 7:09 PM PST - 53 comments

The view (with humour) from two people who serve you drinks. One a cocktail waitress in Vegas, the other a bartender in Cincinnati.
posted by tellurian at 6:21 PM PST - 61 comments

Marijuana doesn't increase your risk of lung cancer. As presented at the American Thoracic Society International Conference today. "Even very heavy, long-term marijuana users who had smoked more than 22,000 joints over a lifetime seemed to have no greater risk than infrequent marijuana users or nonusers."
posted by i_am_a_Jedi at 3:10 PM PST - 89 comments

I don't own a gun, and I hope my neighbors don't either.
posted by jonson at 1:53 PM PST - 225 comments

It's the shoes. Yeah, another iPod post. And a Nike post. iPod + Nike, guaranteed to inflame millions.
posted by fixedgear at 1:50 PM PST - 46 comments

The Kingston Bridge, a neglected urban bridge in Glasgow was recently resurrected as a public work of art by Leni Schwendinger. Lighting was added under the bridge to highlight the architecture but it also reacted to use. The more traffic flowing on the roads above, the more red is displayed, as the tide rises, blues dominate, resulting in some pretty cool, ever-changing public art on a grand scale.
posted by mathowie at 1:47 PM PST - 14 comments

Hamza el Din, hailed as "the father of Nubian music," has died. El Din's death has not yet been reported in the news, but I'm told he passed away from complications of brain surgery. It's a great loss for music lovers all over the world. "Escalay," performed on oud with the Kronos Quartet on their album Pieces of Africa, is probably his best-known work, but "Ollin Arageed," his haunting piece for handclaps and tar -- a goatskin drum -- was played numerous times onstage with the Grateful Dead, who championed el Din's music and jammed with him at the Great Pyramid in 1978. Eclipse provides an excellent introduction to his work, the ethereal sounds of one of the oldest continuously-inhabited regions on the planet. In the 1960s, el Din's own home village in Egypt was drowned underwater by the construction of the Aswan Dam, as archeologists tried to save what they could.
posted by digaman at 1:38 PM PST - 21 comments

Chronon is yet another new, incredibly charming, Eyezmaze puzzle game from On, that GROW guy. It is along similar lines, but while in GROW the arrow of time is firmly fixed in the forward direction, here you can flip back and forth between different times whenever you want.
Despite this, the game is quite a bit more difficult than GROW (especially if you want the maximum score - keep going after the little guy escapes from his cage!), and it's very new so there may still be a few bugs, but it's immensely satisfying to solve!
posted by JHarris at 12:24 PM PST - 25 comments

Sexual ornaments grow out of all proportion It seems that men will be men throughout the animal kindom, not just our little lonely corner of of it. Most body parts grow proportionally with the rest of the body as individuals of a species become larger, although scientists have long known that visual cues of reproductive prowess are a special case. But is this the case with everyone?
posted by pezdacanuck at 9:31 AM PST - 41 comments

Lloyd Bentsen dead at 85. He was a renouned senator and vice presidential candidate on the Dukakis ticket, whom you may know better for his famous quote in this debate.
posted by rollbiz at 8:21 AM PST - 49 comments

Covers It seems that, according to this guy, the fastest way to success is to cover Joy Division's classic 'Love Will Tear Us Apart'. These 25 artists have taken his suggestion to heart, with covers ranging from rock giants U2 to latest pop punk darlings Fall Out Boy, via French lounge act Nouvelle Vague and, of course, New Order.
posted by muthecow at 6:56 AM PST - 39 comments

He lost his chruch,(streaming mp3) lost his congregation, and started a new_{to oklahoma} evangelistic Christianity. (pdf)
posted by bigmusic at 10:50 PM PST - 47 comments

Rugby League player involved in unprovoked drunken assault on woman. The sporting world’s longest running train wreck? Lewd, alcohol-fueled phonecalls and brothel visits during a State team "bonding session". Coaches quitting because players can’t obey simple rules such as "please don’t show up drunk to training." Faeces smeared walls? No problems. I’ll even take a leak under a blackjack table for good measure. The Australian Captain gets dumped, unconscious, outside a police station by a taxi driver. Serial on-field sodomy. Millionaire businessman and boss of an NRL team (and father of supermodel Elle MacPherson) involved in drunken, jumper-slashing fight (or two). Sexual assault at a university dorm. Pack rape group sex by the pool, anyone? And what do you do when you’re the Australian Captain when these sexual assault claims are causing so much angst? Joke about it at a national press conference, of course. Despite all this, interest for tomorrow’s big game is high.
posted by uncanny hengeman at 10:43 PM PST - 36 comments

"We wired the Ho Chi Minh Trail like a drugstore pinball machine and plugged into it every night." From 1965 to 1975, telemetry from thousands of microphones hidden in remote Vietnam jungles were fed to a massive data processing center in Thailand, where an IBM System/360 [wiki] mapped real-time Vietcong movements to display terminals. The details of Project Igloo White remained compartmentalized and highly classified until only several years ago.
posted by rolypolyman at 10:37 PM PST - 33 comments

Cockroach Controlled Mobile Robots — Overview: an experimental mechanism that uses a living Madagascan hissing cockroach atop a modified trackball to control a three-wheeled robot. If the cockroach moves left, the robot moves left. Infrared sensors also provide navigation feedback to the cockroach, striving to create a pseudo-intelligent system with the cockroach as the CPU. Garnet Hertz, creator of Fly with Implanted Webserver and Cockroach with Wireless Video, has used Gromphadorhina portentosa on three generations of autonomous roachbots (YouTube video and Ars Electronica 2005 gallery).
posted by cenoxo at 8:58 PM PST - 29 comments

The Ingmar Bergman site is now available in English. I find the 'Universe' section (examining repeated themes) is particularly interesting.
posted by tellurian at 5:17 PM PST - 6 comments

Watch as the jet blast from a 747 tosses cars as if they are toys! Would Flight 77 Have Really Thrown Cars & People Off The Highway? Perhaps.
posted by augustweed at 3:26 PM PST - 70 comments

Over the weekend Oregon's Portaland General Electric demolished the decomissioned Trojan Nuclear Plant's 499ft cooling tower using 1.3 tons of TNT. Plenty of implosion pr0n is all that remains. Oh, and the containment dome, a bunch of rods with no home, some asbestos, but the tower, man, that's gone.
posted by Ogre Lawless at 3:23 PM PST - 43 comments

Promoted Above Accountability Two years after news of torture at Abu Ghraib broke, the Bush Administration still will not hold decision makers accountable. Investigations into the incidents have focused almost exclusively on enlisted personnel.
posted by expriest at 2:23 PM PST - 28 comments

Blender, meet science: The Pain, the Pain: Modelling Music Information Behavior and the Songs We Hate [link to 454Kb PDF]. The paper, presented at ISMIR 2005, offers "a grounded theory analysis of 395 user responses to the survey question 'What is the worst song ever?'"
posted by camcgee at 11:34 AM PST - 58 comments

Hurricane headlines differ. (warning: Newsfilter)
posted by whimsicalnymph at 11:27 AM PST - 56 comments

Henry Wessel is an American photographer and Professor at San Francisco Art Institute who works with just one camera and just one type of film to capture the American West [NYT]. More specifically, he is interested in documenting light.
posted by grapefruitmoon at 9:58 AM PST - 19 comments

Radiating Places. Twenty years after the Chernobyl disaster, seven artists from Moscow, Minsk, and Berlin travelled to the desolate, restricted area to commemorate the catastrophe.
posted by Gamblor at 8:43 AM PST - 17 comments

The Interpretative Dance Theocrats. Inspired by Salon's excerpt from Michelle Goldberg's new book, Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism, this handy guide will resolve your confusion over Christian theological jargon. [via]
posted by monju_bosatsu at 8:35 AM PST - 15 comments

Banned in D.C., not to mention the rest of the U. S. A. --British-Sri Lankan rapper M. I. A. (myspace page, with music), aka Maya Arulpragasam, has apparently been denied entry into the United States to record her next album, a follow-up to the surprise success of her first major release, "Arular." Could it have been this album that pricked the ears of immigration officials? Or maybe these lyrics ("Sunshowers," available at myspace)?
posted by bardic at 6:44 AM PST - 149 comments

Speaking truth to power: when power speaks back (scroll down). Graduating senior Jean Rohe & Senator John McCain spoke at the New School's graduation ceremony at Madison Square Garden this Saturday. Rohe's speech attacking McCain's actions & positions has been hailed by many on the Left as "speaking truth to power". McCain staffer Mark Salter thinks Jean isn't being fair to his boss. Scroll down to read his reaction.
posted by scalefree at 6:38 AM PST - 121 comments

Wired News has obtained a copy of a file detailing AT&T's involvement with the NSA that was sealed in the EFF's class-action lawsuit against AT&T. At 2AM EST this morning they have published that file on their site for anyone to download (this is the fixed link, the one on Wired is currently broken).[via]
posted by Ryvar at 5:24 AM PST - 65 comments

How many group photographs do you have to take to get one in which nobody is blinking? Nic Svenson and Dr Piers Barnes work it out.
posted by d-no at 3:01 AM PST - 9 comments

Chicago: The New Barcelona? When it comes to cuisine, GQ seems to think so.
posted by KevinSkomsvold at 12:02 AM PST - 22 comments

Berkeley's infamous Naked Guy died of an apparent suicide on Thursday. Before and after his 15 minutes, he was a real person. People loved him. Rest in peace, Andrew Martinez. (NSFW)
posted by freshwater_pr0n at 10:06 PM PST - 64 comments

Corruption Filter: Rep. William Jefferson (D. Louisiana) has been caught on tape accepting more than $100,000 in cash bribes. This is the same Rep. Jefferson who commandeered Katrina relief resources to secure his personal home and retrieve a laptop, three briefcases and a large box.

Jefferson was already under federal investigation pre-Katrina and his house had been raided once for evidence. Jefferson's offices were raided again yesterday where the FBI found another 90k in cash in the freezer. Does anyone else think they know what was so important he had to use a National Guard helicopter to secure it?
posted by T.D. Strange at 8:16 PM PST - 50 comments

NewsFilter: 1 in every 136 US residents in jail or prison.
posted by sourbrew at 7:54 PM PST - 73 comments

This evening, I entertained myself with these clips from YouTube and Google Video. Come inside if you like Bette Davis, Charles Laughton, Kubrick, Frankenstein, Shakespeare, and company...
posted by grumblebee at 7:38 PM PST - 46 comments

A rather well-edited and well-editorialized video of anti-protester police tactics as seen from perspective of police-operated cameras from the infamous protest in Portland of 2002. (Coral Cache here.)
posted by loquacious at 7:19 PM PST - 79 comments

A 20-minute video that will change your life! Well, maybe not.
posted by c13 at 7:17 PM PST - 37 comments

In the competition for best streaker ever, I'm torn between this choice, which gets points for the impact the streak has on the news reporter, & this one, which has the added bonus of unlikely athleticism. Both links go to embedded video, both found via this page, which details the revised rules of streaking).
posted by jonson at 4:23 PM PST - 26 comments

Beatles moments part I and II. A proper use of 30-second clips.
posted by funambulist at 1:28 PM PST - 40 comments

When I Came Home: Iraq War veteran Herold Noel suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder and lives out of his car in Brooklyn. Using Noel's story as a fulcrum, this doc examines the wider issue of homeless U.S. military veterans-from Vietnam to Iraq-who have to fight tooth-and-nail to receive the benefits promised to them by their government.
posted by riley370 at 10:29 AM PST - 45 comments

Backward Movies. When you play a movie backwards, what you get is not creepy messages, but rather a new movie. For example:
Titanic
An enormous iron ship surges up from the vast depths of the ocean in order to save a large number of people who are inexplicably, and somewhat foolishly, floundering in the water near an iceburg. It then kindly takes them back to Southampton.
posted by CrunchyFrog at 8:56 AM PST - 53 comments

Discovering Chylum: Swarthmore Professor David Harrison traveled to Siberia to learn about Chulym, a previously undiscovered local language that reflects its population's culture of hunting, animastic belief system, and bear worship. [More Inside]
posted by gregb1007 at 6:36 AM PST - 17 comments

TVFolk is a collection of 400-odd videos of traditional music from nothern Europe, including a live (leek-free) performance from Loituma (below) in 2001. Other standouts include Hedningarna, JPP, and Garmarna.
posted by Wolfdog at 4:50 AM PST - 12 comments

The top entry* (turn up the volume) in the Scanner Darkly remix contest is already better than the (turn it back down) official trailer.
posted by Tlogmer at 3:02 AM PST - 45 comments

The Dot and the Line. (by Norman Juster) Read the book. Watch the movie.
posted by jrb223 at 11:58 PM PST - 20 comments

Beer Caps. With 12,568 scans available to peruse, Uncle Corkie is the winner in my books. Franco Ferretti may have the largest collection of bottle caps but it's not online. Collecting, a postmodern pastime?
posted by tellurian at 10:48 PM PST - 11 comments

BabyFirst TV is a 24 hour satellite channel designed to entertain babies so you don't have to. Don't expect this American idea to catch on in Britain anytime soon. Even television-wondering Americans are wondering, what was wrong with Big Bird? [NYT] The American Academy of Pediatrics suggests that children of this age group shouldn't be watching television at all. On the other side of the argument, some parents believe that if they're watching anyway, it's better to watch something educational.
posted by grapefruitmoon at 10:06 PM PST - 39 comments

loituma! Dit deedle dit boom bam! (flash)
posted by boo_radley at 9:46 PM PST - 45 comments

Ray Nagin has been reelected as the mayor of New Orleans.
posted by Mean Mr. Bucket at 8:08 PM PST - 79 comments

Is this America's new meme? Senator Pat Roberts (R-KS), May 18, 2006: "I am a strong supporter of the First Amendment, the Fourth Amendment and civil liberties. But you have no civil liberties if you are dead." (via) Senator John Cornyn (R-TX), December 19, 2005: "None of your civil liberties matter much after you’re dead." Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI), responded to Cornyn: "Give me liberty or give me death." Good on that. First Amendment, Fourth Amendment (General Hayden's version), civil liberties.
posted by taosbat at 7:02 PM PST - 87 comments

Eurovision winner declared: Finland's Lordi, (previously mentioned here, wins with the highest Eurovision score of all time, 292 points, breaking Finland's 40 year long bewitchment of the Eurovision Curse. [Euro♥isionFilter]
posted by taursir at 3:38 PM PST - 103 comments

"The sound was not of this world, it hovered in space like some celestial blessing".
He could play the piano ”before he had learned to smile”, his mother said, and he gave his first concert at the age of six. He studied under Alfred Cortot, Charles Munch, Paul Dukas, and Nadia Boulanger. He was an esteemed teacher and critic at 19, an international phenomenon at 24. He escaped from his native Rumania to Switzerland in 1943 with his fiancée, a joint capital of five Swiss francs in their pockets. After the war, just as he had arrived in the pantheon of great performing artists, Dinu Lipatti was diagnosed with leukemia. In September 1950, near death, despite the urgings of his doctors Lipatti insisted upon one last recital at Besançon. As his wife recalled, this was the only way Lipatti could bear to take his leave of the world. Lipatti was so weak he could barely walk to the piano. But once he began playing, he became transformed. After performing 13 waltzes, he could no longer muster the strength necessary to perform the final selection. So he substituted Myra Hess's piano arrangement of Bach's 'Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring".(page with sound). Three months later, Lipatti died at the age of 33. After Lipatti's funeral, his old mentor Cortot wrote: "There was nothing to teach you. One could, in fact, only learn from you."
posted by matteo at 11:14 AM PST - 15 comments

Schaffer Library of Drug Policy - read the transcripts of hearings held on the 1937 Marihuana Tax Act, or the text of court decisions regarding drug policy, or the well-researched Consumer Unions report on licit and illicit drugs, or the differences between beer and drugs, according to Anheuser-Busch. A huge archive of materials, admittedly compiled from a pro-reform perspective.
posted by daksya at 10:06 AM PST - 27 comments

"Every war becomes a proving ground for new tactics and new technologies." ... "...The Pentagon began this war believing its new, networked technologies would help make U.S. ground forces practically unstoppable in Iraq. ... But now, more than three years into sectarian conflict and a violent insurgency that has cost nearly 2,400 American lives, an investigation of the current state of network-centric warfare reveals that frontline troops have a critical need for networked gear—gear that hasn’t come yet. " [more inside]
posted by paulsc at 3:18 AM PST - 26 comments

the origin of fun bags. The age old question of where breasts came from may have finally been answered!

[boobs] first evolved as an immunoprotective gland that produced bacteriocidal secretions to protect the skin and secondarily eggs and infants, and that lactation is a highly derived kind of inflammation response. [...] Milk is actually a kind of anti-microbial snot mixed in with a lot of fat and sugar.

All vertebrates have an innate immune system consisting of molecules which are hostile to microbes. It appears that the nutritional content of the milk is a product of mutation and repurposing of these immunological molecules! Xanthine oxidoreductase, which produces natural preservatives and disinfectants is also responsible for the essential role of encapsulating fat droplets which promotes suspension in water. Lactose (sugar) "requires a specific synthetic complex consisting of β-1,4 galactosyltransferase and α-lactalbumin for its production." As it turns out, α-lactalbumin is a modified (mutated) version of an awesome little molecule that literally skins bacteria alive - lysozyme!
posted by Tryptophan-5ht at 2:49 AM PST - 127 comments

Los Angeles artist Luke Chueh paints cute, anthropomorphic animals going through rough patches in life.
posted by jonson at 12:46 AM PST - 26 comments

MacSaber! Turn Your Mac Into a Jedi Weapon. I cannot explain how much fun I had slashing co-workers with a laptop today. Be careful not too get too excited. You don't want to lose your grasp on the MacBook or shake so hard you damage the hard drive. Great to try once. Or in my case, 20 minutes straight.
posted by jragon at 12:37 AM PST - 30 comments

Rupert Murdoch Is the CEO of Fox News's parent company, News Corp., and owns a controlling interest. So it might surprise you that he's hosting a fundraiser for Hillary Clinton. Is he simply rewarding a reliable big-business vote, Or does he see a change in the winds? He tends to support who's ever in power, including "Liberal" Tony Blair and the Chinese Government. Or maybe he's just being friendly.
posted by delmoi at 11:50 PM PST - 41 comments

Humans! A lovely little bit of educational animation.
posted by crumbly at 7:38 PM PST - 41 comments

Elephants Dream - A computer-generated movie made using open source applications
posted by growabrain at 4:09 PM PST - 26 comments

One of our greatest living writers died yesterday, and no one seems to care. I can't find a damn news story about it. A revolutionary teacher, thinker and critic, Sorrentino will be remembered as a "a reckless heir to Borges, Barthelme and Groucho Marx." Never read him? Start here.
posted by mattbucher at 1:52 PM PST - 41 comments

Canada's National Post says "Human rights groups are raising alarms over a new law passed by the Iranian parliament that would require the country's Jews and Christians to wear coloured badges to identify them and other religious minorities as non-Muslims." (Sound familiar?) CTV says "Prime Minister Stephen Harper says news reports that Iran could require Jews and Christians to wear coloured labels in public might be true." Hmm...might be true? Montreal's AM 940 says "But independent reporter Meir Javedanfar [who runs a Middle East analysis site], an Israeli Middle East expert who was born and raised in Tehran, says the report is false." Which is it: truth or fiction? And if it's fiction, is it a malicious disinformation campaign or just incompetent journalism? Malcompetence?
posted by scottreynen at 1:37 PM PST - 60 comments

Welcome to the world of Frank Kelly Freas (1922-2005), eleven-time Hugo Award-winning illustrator of book and magazine cover and interior art for science fiction, fantasy, the NASA space program, record albums, advertising, and MAD Magazine.
posted by joe lisboa at 12:05 PM PST - 8 comments

Michael Massing on the Israel lobby and the controversy over the Mearsheimer/Walt article. Massing describes the article as having "serious shortcomings"; the reaction to the article as "hysterical"; and he provides evidence that "on their central point—the power of the Israel lobby and the negative effect it has had on US policy—Mearsheimer and Walt are entirely correct." He summarizes AIPAC's goals: "... to keep Israel strong, the Palestinians weak, and the United States from exerting pressure on Israel." Earlier article on the Israel lobby by Massing. Also: Mearsheimer and Walt respond to their critics.
posted by russilwvong at 9:55 AM PST - 75 comments

Trailer remix filter. Did you like the Shining trailer remix? What about the numerous Brokeback Mountain mashups? Think the Big one was lame? You'll love 10 Things I Hate About Commandments. Starring Charlton Heston, Yul Brenner, Sinead O'Connor and Samuel L. Jackson as Principal Firebush.
posted by daHIFI at 9:39 AM PST - 28 comments

Forever Pregnant. The CDC has released guidelines for improving the "preconception health" of all women of childbearing age whether they plan to have children or not. From the the WaPo article: "among other things, this means all women between first menstrual period and menopause should take folic acid supplements, refrain from smoking, maintain a healthy weight and keep chronic conditions such as asthma and diabetes under control." So ladies, don't even think of touching the litter box. You know, just in case.
posted by kimdog at 9:18 AM PST - 121 comments

CIA vet Michael Scheuer: "I think Iraq is finished. We’ll just find a way to get out. I frankly don’t think we ever intended to win there." And: "As a professional intelligence officer, the last people you want to report to are generals and diplomats. And if General Hayden comes to the CIA, we’ll have Mr. Negroponte [a career diplomat] as head of the community, and a general as the head of the CIA."
posted by js003 at 8:08 AM PST - 45 comments

Zanta: The Movie. If you live or work in downtown Toronto, you've seen him. Shirtless, wearing a Santa hat, and most likely doing pushups, he's David "Zanta" Zancai, and one of the city's most enigmatic characters.
posted by Robot Johnny at 7:52 AM PST - 36 comments

Ever wondered what the Devil has on his iPod? These people think they have a good idea (my favorite). Though it has long been believed that there is evil lurking somewhere in music, disagreement among half-wit experts causes some tension now and again. PBS sheds some light on the subject.
posted by Pecinpah at 7:44 AM PST - 34 comments

Evolution just won't go away. New evidence suggests the development of the human embryo mirrors our species' course of evolution. This guy seems to be stirring up all kinds of trouble these days. It makes me wonder: does this new information help determine the quality of being human? From the link: "Another supposed vagary produced by the abortion issue is the question as to when the embryo or fetus becomes human. Rivers Singleton, Jr. states in his article in Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, that, for some, conception defines the point of being human, whereas, for others, various periods of development suffice to 'distinguish human from non-humans.'"
posted by narwhal at 6:53 AM PST - 39 comments

Oliver Stone's World Trade Center movie trailer is released. Some say it's too intense. Previously discussed here. (various QT video formats)
posted by fourcheesemac at 6:42 AM PST - 154 comments

The Eternal Value of Privacy excellent article by Bruce Schneier.
posted by i_am_a_Jedi at 4:58 AM PST - 13 comments

Fantazy Land Alexandria, Egypt. [coral] The worst theme park in the world?
posted by tellurian at 2:53 AM PST - 32 comments

Many images (large pageload) from platinumfmd [via]
posted by peacay at 12:51 AM PST - 25 comments

updated red state/blue state map of America with recent poll results in place. Bush still (alarmingly) holding down Utah, Idaho & Wyoming, otherwise, not so great...
posted by jonson at 12:32 AM PST - 53 comments

1 DEPLOY GUNS AND BADGES. Josh Bolten's Five Point Plan is in full effect. "It'll be more guys with guns and badges," said a proponent of the plan. "Think of the visuals. The President can go down and meet with the new recruits. He can go down to the border and meet with a bunch of guys and go ride around on an ATV."
posted by scalefree at 9:48 PM PST - 39 comments

Indicted! No, not him. Today the "most prestigious and recognized plaintiff law firm in the United States" was indicted (.pdf) on federal charges of obstruction of justice, perjury, bribery, and fraud.
posted by brain_drain at 7:57 PM PST - 20 comments

Newsfilter: Cure for cancers 'in five years'.
posted by dash_slot- at 4:58 PM PST - 70 comments

"It's Al-Qaida!" I yelled. "We had a heads-up!" In an exclusive AlterNet interview, Judith Miller says (and her then-editor Steve Engelberg corroborates) that in July 2001 an intelligence source (maybe Richard Clarke?) told her about an intercepted communication between two Al Qaida operatives that were disappointed that the US hadn't responded more seriously to the October 2000 attack against the USS Cole. "And one Al Qaida operative was overheard saying to the other, 'Don't worry; we're planning something so big now that the U.S. will have to respond.'"
posted by kirkaracha at 4:55 PM PST - 21 comments

New York City has been trying to revamp its street furniture for nearly a decade and last Fall, deals were struck between a British architecture firm and a Spanish outdoor firm in a 1 billion dollar deal. Recently the designs for public toilets, bus stop shelters, and (my favorite) a modernized clean newsstand were released.
posted by mathowie at 3:09 PM PST - 65 comments

"...this clip of a Japanese show called Gaki No Tsukai stands out not for what it includes, but for what it lacks - talking and screaming. It takes place in a studio made up like a library, with the participants (including Kickboxing champion Ernesto Hoost) stifling their laughter, screams of pain and retching noises, just like any student did in their own junior high school library." [youtube video, text shamelessly lifted from wfmu]
posted by Armitage Shanks at 2:54 PM PST - 25 comments

"And And God created man, for because I have blessed him. And Noah begat Methuselah three wives of it, and to thee nothing but dust shalt say, This is evil continually." What happens when you put a million monkeys at a million typewriters? You get the Markov Bible! After a million years, that is.
posted by tweak at 2:53 PM PST - 17 comments

Guerilla Gardening is a movement to make public spaces more attractive, by planting in derelict or unattractive public ground. Founder Richard Reynolds has enlisted the help of people similarly dedicated to beautifying public space in UK urban areas, and the movement has inspired other groups. For people who don't want to dig holes in the ground or get their hands messy, there are instructions for seed-and-run scenarios. Apparently, even the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay are in on the act.
posted by darsh at 2:22 PM PST - 11 comments

Why not mashup Google maps and NOAA's digital forecast database? Enter a zip code, a city name, or just point and click on a map (continental US and Hawaii only, alas). A 5 day forecast will appear at the bottom of the screen (including some cheesy little pictures illustrating, like rain and fog, just in case you forget what they look like).
posted by jasper411 at 2:00 PM PST - 20 comments

You can't write anything honest, only fairy tales." "This administration," Bob Graham, the former Senator and chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told me, "does not seek the truth as a basis for its judgments, but tries to use intelligence to validate judgments it has already made."

"I spent 30 years at the CIA," said one former official, "and no one was ever interested in knowing whether I was a Republican or a Democrat. That changed with this administration. Now you have loyalty tests."
posted by Mean Mr. Bucket at 1:47 PM PST - 39 comments

Information. One of ten random flash thingys from the 10 ways project.
posted by monju_bosatsu at 1:00 PM PST - 26 comments

Blue Security shuts down It was just a few days ago that Blue Security was beating their chest, straight off a 'victory' over spammers. Now though, the company is conceding defeat.
posted by puke & cry at 11:58 AM PST - 49 comments

They're on NPR? They're in the New York Times? (archived here as a .pdf). I guess it's no wonder - I can't go into half of the rooms at work without hearing them. And they took in $45 million last year singing "Yummy, Yummy"? Yes, i'm talking about The Wiggles, a pop-culture bitch-slap gift from Australia that has apparently kicked Barney's ass. That doesn't mean that they aren't open to some well-deserved satire.
posted by scblackman at 11:41 AM PST - 44 comments

Email used to be the ultimate application of the Internet, and there are still some interesting artifacts of that left behind today: As a source of randomness Email Roulette (which we've seen before) is my favorite application of email. TPC Remote Printing Service, a free mail-to-fax gateway, is pretty useful in a pinch and is something of an Old Internet institution with a history predating the web. Nearly as venerable is the more frivolous Internet Pizza Server from the days when the very idea of making a purchase over the Internet was funny, and the idea of browsing the web via email didn't seem so peculiar as it does today.
posted by majick at 10:30 AM PST - 12 comments

Amazon S3, now for the masses. Amazon S3 has been discussed previously, but several user-facing services have appeared in the last few weeks that allow ordinary non-programmer end users to take advantage of it. One of the most useful of these appears to be Jungle Disk, a free front-end (free beer!) that lets you use S3 as a webdav-mounted disk drive. It works on Windows, Mac, and Linux, and there's GPL code available (free speech!) that lets other people develop alternative compatible front-ends.
posted by dmd at 9:53 AM PST - 29 comments

NewsFilter: Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the chapel, teh gay menace strikes again. The GOP-dominated Senate Judiciary Committee backs the Constitutional amendment to prohibit states from recognizing same-sex marriages. In a fractious hearing, Republican chairman Arlen Specter shouted "Good riddance!" when Senator Russ Feingold (D-Wisconsin) walked out. Laura Bush recently advised her party's candidates not to campaign on this issue and to handle it with "great sensitivity." Maybe next time.
posted by digaman at 9:29 AM PST - 91 comments

"If only" is the frustrated utopian refrain of Oliver Ressler and David Thorne's absurdly dysfunctional URL addresses collectively titled "Boom!".
posted by anotherpanacea at 8:26 AM PST - 11 comments

Flash flood! A New Orleans Times Picayune flash animation of exactly how, and where, and when the city of New Orleans and surrounding areas flooded during Hurricane Katrina. Here's the accompanying article. Even as a local, I had no idea how weak the levee systems were. And apparently still are. Here's some more info from a local grassroots group fighting for better levee protection.
posted by ab3 at 8:21 AM PST - 18 comments

U.S. Marines "overreacted because of the pressure on them, and they killed innocent civilians in cold blood", according to Rep. Murtha (D - Pa.), whose previous comments regarding the "unwinnable" nature of the Iraq conflict drew retaliation and accusations of treason from the GOP and associates. From reports verified by the military, troops "shot dead 15 members of two families, including a 3-year-old girl", despite initial reports that officially claimed a firefight had killed Iraqi civilians. Some have suggested this incident echoes the My Lai massacre of the Vietnam War.
posted by Mr. Six at 8:18 AM PST - 160 comments

The 10 Worst Corporatioins of 2005 Listed alphabetically, here are the 10 Worst Corporations of 2005 and brief lowlights of the activities that earned them a place on the list
posted by usedwigs at 8:17 AM PST - 36 comments

Music from Morrisania: Dr. Mark Naison, urban historian at Fordham University and principal investigator of the Bronx African-American history project, leads a musical tour of one South Bronx neighborhood from the 1950s to the present, describing how hot summers, open windows and a fertile mixing of ethnic groups influenced landmarks in American musical history -- from Tito Puente to "Watermelon Man" to KRS-One.
posted by Miko at 8:04 AM PST - 8 comments

Hilarious website showing one mans passion for drawing conservative themed art. The real gems are in the archive. My personal favorites include "Team W" and these creepy Reagan ghost ones [1] [2]. Don't forget his epic comic The Patriot.
posted by DougieZero1982 at 7:57 AM PST - 57 comments

1. Make a remix featuring whale sounds.
2. Save a whale.
3. Get discovered for your remixing skills.
4. Profit! The Whale Remix Project.
posted by ashbury at 6:12 AM PST - 10 comments

Homosexual climbs Mount Everest, despite handicap of being gay
posted by jonson at 12:24 AM PST - 62 comments

Please, allow me to introduce you to Detroit Techno. Artist Derrick May once described it as "George Clinton and Kraftwerk stuck in an elevator." Despite being virtually unknown in the United States, this genre has achieved global popularity. Noteworthy artists include Carl Craig, Sean Deason, Stacey Pullen, Jeff Mills, Underground Resistance, DJ Assault, Moodymann, and Kevin Saunderson (among others). From May 27th-29th the city of Detroit will launch a huge electronic music festival . It isn't something you see everyday in the U.S., so check it out. Here are some o t h e r links.
posted by j-urb at 11:52 PM PST - 45 comments

A televised snooker 147 is the big deal for snooker professionals. The first was by Canadian Cliff Thorburn. The fastest was by Ronnie O'Sullivan. The luckiest goes to John Higgins. Also by Kirk Stevens, Mark Williams, Stephen Hendry, and Ronnie, Ronnie, Ronnie.
posted by parki at 9:24 PM PST - 49 comments

The Comic Book Bondage Cover of the Day - Massive archive of... well, it's pretty self-explanatory.
posted by dobbs at 8:24 PM PST - 21 comments

The final chromosome in the human genome has been sequenced. The Human Genome Project has completed sequencing Chromosome 1 and has published its work in Nature here. If you're impatient, here's a sneak preview..
posted by BlackLeotardFront at 7:45 PM PST - 32 comments

The Australian cigarette health warnings have pretty much filtered down to every retail packet that's bought now. They're pretty gruesome and some smoking acquaintances cover them up with stickers. I thought I'd have a look around and see what other countries warnings were like. None of them were pulling any punches except for Uruguay.
posted by tellurian at 7:21 PM PST - 117 comments

Foreign Relations of the United States, 1861-1960. Foreign Relations volumes contain documents from Presidential libraries, Departments of State and Defense, National Security Council, Central Intelligence Agency, Agency for International Development, and other foreign affairs agencies as well as the private papers of individuals involved in formulating U.S. foreign policy. In general, the editors choose documentation that illuminates policy formulation and major aspects and repercussions of its execution. This enormous collection of documents is now available online at the University of Wisconsin. Example: Kennan's Long Telegram, February 22, 1946. Some additional volumes are also available online from the State Department. Via Curt Cardwell, on H-DIPLO.
posted by russilwvong at 6:34 PM PST - 7 comments

Big, big list of links to YouTube's treasure chest of 80's music videos. Of course, there's good stuff, bad stuff, rare stuff and funny stuff.
posted by davebush at 6:08 PM PST - 76 comments

"many far-left thinkers believe the white power structure that controls America is bad, so a drastic change is needed." O'Reilly continued: "According to the lefty zealots, the white Christians who hold power must be swept out by a new multicultural tide, a rainbow coalition, if you will."
_{Then there's John Gibson's call for more white babies}
posted by delmoi at 5:50 PM PST - 112 comments

Northwestern University has suspended its girl's soccer team indefinitely, stemming from hazing photos surfacing online. The photos seem tame when compared with some other disgusting incidents. Does the punishment fit the crime?
posted by T.D. Strange at 3:29 PM PST - 67 comments

How to copy records.
posted by 31d1 at 3:23 PM PST - 25 comments

Bonofilter: Yesterday, May 16, U2 front-man Bono was a guest "editor" for the UK newspaper The Independent. Called the "RED Edition," half of this issue's proceeds went "to help fight HIV and AIDS among women and children in Africa." Highlights included US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice offering her take on "The Ten Best Musical Works" and an interview with Eddie Izzard on immigration in Europe. Is there a downside to celebrity editing, or is it a win-win-win for Bono, The Independent, and some people in need?
posted by bardic at 3:06 PM PST - 32 comments

Loving v. Missouri: In February, Olivia Shelltrack and Fondrey Loving were denied an occupancy permit because they have three children and are not married. "This ordinance is outdated. We are a family," says Shelltrack, 31. "There's a mom, there's a dad, there's three children. We are a family." Whether Shelltrack, a stay-at-home mom, and Loving, 33, who works for a payroll-administration company, are married "should not be anybody's business, if I pay my taxes, if I'm able to buy the house," she says.
posted by dash_slot- at 2:36 PM PST - 48 comments

The days of needing to remember several telephone numbers, numerous VOIP or instant message identities and other points of contact for our social and professional networks are over.
posted by airguitar at 2:26 PM PST - 20 comments

What happens when an ignoramus reads the Good Book? Slate's David Plotz reads the Bible for the first time as an adult. "My goal is pretty simple. I want to find out what happens when an ignorant person actually reads the book on which his religion is based." The first two installments.
posted by kirkaracha at 12:20 PM PST - 48 comments

The Great Flydini. Old, brilliant Steve Martin bit from the tonight show. [prev]
posted by sluglicker at 12:19 PM PST - 29 comments

Find your celebrity dopelganger. MyHeritage is another site that uses face recognition on photos you upload, but the slick interface in this demo matches you up with one of 3,200 celebrities from the past two centuries which you (supposedly) resemble. You can upload photos with multiple people in them as well, and it will identify all the faces in the shot. I can't vouch for accuracy, but it is entertaining. [Registration required. Try username: metafilter@metafilter.com; pass: metafilter. The site does not appear to save photos that you have uploaded as part of the demo.]
posted by blahblahblah at 11:02 AM PST - 108 comments

Researchers discover that lactic acid is more than just a byproduct. According to George A. Brooks, "lactate is the link between oxidative and glycolytic, or anaerobic, metabolism." You can read the abstract of the paper at the American Journal of Physiology - Endocrinology and Metabolism.
posted by monju_bosatsu at 10:40 AM PST - 19 comments

Wired article about the hardware/technology the NSA is allegedly using at AT&T's San Franscisco switching office to eavesdrop on our internet communications. The Electronic Freedom Foundation is suing AT&T over it. The administration doesn't want that to happen. Previous MeFi|Related ACLU case
posted by i_am_a_Jedi at 10:02 AM PST - 35 comments

Save the 76 Ball. "ConocoPhillips is removing the iconic 76 Balls and replacing them with boring rectangular signs that aren't even orange!" Related story in the Los Angeles Times. Will you help rescue the balls from their sad fate?
posted by Lillitatiana at 9:56 AM PST - 37 comments

Relevant after all? Daft Punk are experiencing a renaissance of sorts. Whereas it seemed only a few months ago they were washed up and out of ideas, in danger having run their persona into the ground, they can now claim to have been the undisputed highlight of the Coachella Festival, responsible for one of the most memorable rap hooks of recent years and are on their way to Cannes to attend the premiere of their first self-directed film, 'Electroma'. At the same time, their influence is the driving force behind the new wave of French electronic music. People are even starting to come around to their previously unloved third album. hint: listen to it loud.
posted by setanor at 9:53 AM PST - 24 comments

Freetar Hero - Create and play any song on your PC. In development.
posted by mrgrimm at 8:45 AM PST - 27 comments

He's so penetrating that even I sometimes can't look, because it's so painful. He brings tremendous pain into his vision, and he makes you very aware of what you're looking at.
Don McCullin thinks that Eugene Richards is "possibly the best walking, living photographer in the world". Richards, who has recently been working on the War Is Personal project for The Nation Institute, has just joined Alexandra Boulat, Ron Haviv, Gary Knight, Antonin Kratochvil, Christopher Morris, James Nachtwey, John Stanmeyer, Lauren Greenfield and Joachim Ladefoged (their portraits are here) in the VII collective. More inside.
posted by matteo at 8:33 AM PST - 18 comments

Ecuador takes over operations of Occidental Petroleum Ecuador began on Tuesday to take over operations of U.S. oil giant Occidental Petroleum Corp, the latest move in Latin America against foreign energy producers after nationalization in Bolivia and growing state intervention in Venezuela.
posted by mountainmambo at 8:18 AM PST - 51 comments

If Banks were Bands, which would they be? A Bloomberg columnist writes about the 'personalities' of the world's big investment banks, and compares them to well-known bands. Some amusing, and insightful, descriptions
posted by darsh at 6:34 AM PST - 57 comments

The World in Contemporary Islamic Art (via bbc) 18 May – 2 Sept; at the British Museum in London. Among the exhibitors are The Iraqi calligrapher Hassan Massoudy Iranian photographers: Shadi Ghadirian and Malekeh Nayini and artists Farhad Moshiri and Khosrow Hassanzadeh The Egyptian artist Sabah Naim The Palestinian artist Laila Shawa and the Saudi Arabian X-ray artist Fahad Mater-al-Ziad (pdf) If, like me you can’t get to see the real thing maybe these will help. Enjoy.
posted by adamvasco at 5:49 AM PST - 11 comments

FRANK R. PAUL: At a time when most Americans didn't even have a telephone, he was painting space stations, robots and aliens from other planets... he was the guest of honor at the first world science fiction convention, and he was the first person to ever make a living drawing spaceships. What could be cooler than that? via the one and only BLDBLOG, with an interesting take on the subject.
posted by signal at 5:12 AM PST - 18 comments

A Story of Survival. The Jewish Foundation for the Righteous was established to fulfill the traditional Jewish commitment to hakarat hatov, the searching out and recognition of goodness .
posted by hortense at 12:25 AM PST - 3 comments

Injunctions in patent cases not automatic. The U.S. Supreme Court issued a unanimous decision (16 page pdf) on Monday in the dispute between eBay and MercExchange. The Court ruled in favor of eBay finding that the lower Appeals Court erred as a matter of law in creating a general rule that “courts will issue permanent injunctions against patent infringement absent exceptional circumstances.” In the concurring opinion written by Chief Justice Roberts, joined by Scalia and Ginsberg, Roberts citing Court precedent noted that: “[d]iscretion is not whim, and limiting discretion according to legal standards helps promote the basic principle of justice that like cases should be decided alike.”
posted by three blind mice at 12:01 AM PST - 23 comments

Radiohead's inventive use of the Web, integrating music and art with deceptively archaic programming. Cryptic web-labryinths, flickering video-collage (click minotaur), The Byzantine Ziggurat ("THE STRATEGIC DEFENCE INITIATIVE IS A ZIGGURAT IN HYPERSPACE THAT WE DON'T KNOW WHAT TO DO WITH."), a "disturbing focus on psychological profiling," consumer survey, Spin With a Grin, The Eraser. Don't forget to consume.
posted by bukharin at 8:53 PM PST - 34 comments

A9 Maps now combines Amazon's BlockView images in another ajax map interface (with the maps by Mapquest, interestingly). Amazon has been driving around major cities taking photos of each block and now as you browse the map, street-level images come up alongside. The interface isn't quite intuitive, but it is nice to see the idea coming together.
posted by pithy comment at 8:25 PM PST - 17 comments

Two girls, three wheels, 10,000 miles: an epic overland adventure from Bangkok to Brighton. Two women are about to embark on a very long and very uncomfortable voyage: driving a "tuk tuk" from Thailand to Britain to raise £50,000 for the mental health charity Mind.
posted by soiled cowboy at 8:05 PM PST - 22 comments

Water Power (embedded video). Inventor creates a hydrogen-powered vehicle that can run completely on water, or rather HHO. This is perhaps nothing new (or is it?), but fasinating nonetheless. Warning: annoying local news reportage.
posted by zardoz at 7:17 PM PST - 38 comments

Tony Snow doesn't want to hug the 'tar baby' of commitment. [WMV] [QT]
posted by SweetJesus at 7:12 PM PST - 189 comments

The Nintendo Physically Augmented Reality Amusement Park
posted by bingo at 6:33 PM PST - 29 comments

Scott Walker has, after an 11 year break, released a new album (Statesiders will have to wait until the 23rd). If it's anything like his previous release, Tilt, I'll be more than pleased. He is also to be the subject of an upcoming documentary. [related]
posted by tellurian at 6:23 PM PST - 12 comments

With little fanfare, after a hiatus that began in May, 2001, and following Greg Knauss's recent guest stint on kottke.org, An Entirely Other Day has returned. Just in case you missed it.
posted by staggernation at 5:07 PM PST - 19 comments

The Work Of Jorg Sasse
posted by sgt.serenity at 3:36 PM PST - 8 comments

The latest victim group: Albinos. "There are no realistic, sympathetic or heroic characters with albinism that you can find in movies or popular culture."
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 3:22 PM PST - 86 comments

"...to me it is like finding Jesus," if Jesus were crunchy, wet and cold, that is. This, and other tales of what will no doubt be America's next popular reason for medication, therapy and loss of productivity, can be found at The Ice Chewers Bulletin Board.
posted by Framer at 1:57 PM PST - 39 comments

Gamma is the new beta. Web 3.0 is here, via the new Flickr interface. And it's sexy.
posted by keswick at 11:02 AM PST - 75 comments

From Dictatorship to Democracy. This guide to non-violent revolution by Gene Sharp was the handbook for turning over dictatorial regimes in Serbia, Georgia and the Ukraine. you know... just for future reference.
posted by empath at 10:27 AM PST - 19 comments

It's going to be as fake as the moon landings! The BBC reports that the US defense department is to release a video of the plane crashing into the Pentagon on 11 September. We've touched on this before, but will this close the conspiracy case for Flight 77?
posted by Meccabilly at 10:08 AM PST - 240 comments

Bush out of favor in 47 out of 50 states. The SurveyUSA 50-state-poll shows some interesting details on Bush's approval rating, which has fallen to just 35% in North (and South) Carolina, 29% in Missouri, and 42% in Texas. He remains popular in only three states: Idaho, Utah, and Wyoming. Could the Democrats have a shot even in Utah in the not-too-distant future? A lot of Utahns think so.
posted by insomnia_lj at 9:40 AM PST - 88 comments

A growing crop of towers pushing 2,000 feet: though just shy itself, the much-redesigned Freedom Tower is finally under construction for completion in 2011; but there is also the stunning Fordham Spire, approved in Chicago, that will rise to 2,000 feet by 2010. Moscow is planning the tallest tower in Europe, while there are a number of sightseeing and radio towers under construction in Asia. In Dubai, two towers under construction (despite worker protests) are racing to be the world's tallest, both are keeping their final heights secret, but will likely be over half a mile in height -- the Burj Dubai and the Al Burj. As previously discussed, there are great illustrations comparing buildings both built and under construction. Bring on Frank Lloyd Wright's The Illinois!
posted by blahblahblah at 8:23 AM PST - 60 comments

DIY Instruments: Guitar, Bass, A Drum, Yokobue, Pipes, analog synth sound effects. And for those of you who don't want to build anything - you can play the spoons.
posted by bigmusic at 8:18 AM PST - 8 comments

Sir! No Sir! The Vietnam GI Antiwar movement. (49 minute video)
posted by leapingsheep at 5:07 AM PST - 34 comments

W32/Hoots-A : Where overworked internet fads leave the basement and become exposed to the harsh light of day. "Why the author should want to print out pictures of an owl is, of course, anybody's guess..."
posted by setanor at 10:21 PM PST - 30 comments

The Rubik's Cube was of course primarily intended as a live music-making instrument. The whole 'solving it' craze was missing the point.
posted by signal at 9:34 PM PST - 5 comments

Hardrock Hallelujah Finland's entry for this year's Eurovision contest. It is indeed the day of Rockening.
posted by EtJabberwock at 9:18 PM PST - 50 comments

FakeNewsFilter: The Daily Show affects young voters. Researchers at East Carolina University claim that "The Daily Show may have...detrimental effects, driving down support for political institutions and leaders among those already inclined toward nonparticipation."
posted by greatgefilte at 8:53 PM PST - 68 comments

"The water, it came to your school. The gasoline, chemicals, sewage and blood came to your doorstep. It settled into the ground of this courtyard where we now gather." Chris Rose's commencement speech at Ursuline Academy in New Orleans.
posted by ColdChef at 8:08 PM PST - 13 comments

The evolution of dance (YouTube video)
posted by chicken nuglet at 7:12 PM PST - 46 comments

Bear v. monkey
posted by docpops at 3:27 PM PST - 68 comments

A song has flown. Former Poet Laureate of the United States Stanley Kunitz has died at the age of 100. Through his work as a founding member of the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, a former judge for the Yale Series of Younger Poets, and through his own delicate words, he has left an indelible mark on the world of poetry.
posted by jesourie at 2:48 PM PST - 15 comments

For a star as big as our universe the calculated vacuum energy inside its shell matches the value of dark energy seen in the universe today. "It's like we are living inside a giant dark energy star" say two physicists and their collegues. Dark energy stars may do away with the concept of black holes. (also seen recently on )
posted by Smedleyman at 2:45 PM PST - 34 comments

Cool site of the day times 2006: PopURLs! [via]
posted by airguitar at 1:54 PM PST - 39 comments

Author Interviews from the Center for Book Culture. I particularly liked the interview/bout with David Foster Wallace. Also the only interview Gaddis has ever done stateside is here. Good times.
posted by Mean Mr. Bucket at 1:07 PM PST - 9 comments

FedEx Thunderstorm Deviations. "FAA radar track sequence of a bank of FedEx aircraft getting into Memphis as thunderstorms pass over the airport" (Google video). I'm having Rip Off flashbacks.
posted by schoolgirl report at 12:30 PM PST - 55 comments

Ayaan Hirsi Ali (née Magan) has already been mentioned in several times in Metafilter. Whether you consider her a couragous campaigner for women's rights and against Islamofascism, or a crass opportunist, there's no denying that she's some character. However, it now seems that her Becky-Sharp-ish rise to fame and power also left a similar trail of embittered ex-friends and lies that has ended up landing her in serious trouble with fellow right-winger (also previously mentioned in Metafilter) Rita Verdonk, Dutch Immigration Minister. Before feeling too sorry for Ayaan, consider that she's moving to Washington DC, where she's landed a job at the American Enterprise Institute. I'm sure she'll fit right in...
posted by Skeptic at 11:47 AM PST - 34 comments

Skype now provides free calls to all landlines and cellphones in the US and Canada. A milestone in the telecommunications revolution.
posted by bobbyelliott at 11:25 AM PST - 50 comments

David Hart: L.A. Public Access TV Legend left me flabbergasted (video).
posted by Scoo at 10:28 AM PST - 12 comments

Michael Wolf (previously mentioned for his Architecture of Density series) has a new project called 100x100, cataloguing 100 individuals and their apartments. Each apartment is 10 feet by 10 feet in size. (via kottke)
posted by tim451 at 10:09 AM PST - 21 comments

Burying Freud. A collection of essays and responses by and about Freud's harshest critics, including "Confessions of a Freud-Basher" by anti-Freud point man Frederick Crews, interviewed at length here.
posted by mediareport at 9:16 AM PST - 32 comments

Federal Source to ABC News: We Know Who You're Calling
posted by EarBucket at 7:59 AM PST - 200 comments

You just can't drink and dial. No, really, you can't. Not if you're dialing on this phone (scroll down to "Voice of Reason".). Need more help?: See also...
posted by Shane at 6:39 AM PST - 19 comments

Christian Nationalism is just one name for that ideological and aggressive species of Christianity just may be more organized, ambitious, and successful than you imagined. The dream transcends the elimination of abortion, the teaching of intelligent design, and the preservation of marriage within American politics, but instead reaches out to restore America to an imagined Christian state. Or more? "World conquest. That's what Christ has commissioned us to accomplish." Or maybe just 29% of it. But some resistance from within Christianity is starting to appear.
posted by kingfisher, his musclebound cat at 5:34 AM PST - 83 comments

The Mission: Complete 101 preset tasks in a period of 1001 days. What would you choose to do?

06. Draw on a sidewalk with chalk?
23. Sing Milli Vanilli in a karaoke bar?
27. Be flexible?
28. Find your biological father?
31. Panic on the 1000th day?

Maybe you'd like to team up with others?
posted by divabat at 4:50 AM PST - 16 comments

TV Theme Songs: The Dukes of Hazzard, The Love Boat, Taxi, Knight Rider, Air Wolf, The Prisoner, and many more. From TV Cream previously mentioned 1, 2, 3.
posted by bigmusic at 2:17 AM PST - 30 comments

bomb sniffing flowers. Danish, Canadian and U.S. scientists are closing in on a genetically engineered plant that will send up a floral signal: “DANGER—land mines below." Scientists in Denmark have been tinkering with Arabidopsis thaliana [...] to produce a plant [that] will turn a warning red whenever close to a land mine.” Arabidopsis can be genetically sensitized to the nitrogen-dioxide (NO2) that leaches from buried explosives.
posted by Tryptophan-5ht at 1:41 AM PST - 29 comments

Deviation (embedded video); a Machinima film hits the mainstream festival circuit. (previous forays into Machinima)
posted by jrb223 at 9:54 PM PST - 16 comments

Darfur reality: More killings, more rapes | Despite a cease-fire, the horrible situation in Darfur persists. Based on Google Trends data, it appears that, as of January, people are becoming interested in Darfur again (or at least they're researching it more), which may be a catalyst for politicians to act. Or maybe not...
posted by ashcan at 2:22 PM PST - 27 comments

Q, a sort of digital art hack of Quake - from Nullpointer, where you can find all sorts of cool digital art-type stuff. The game world is twisted unrecognizably yet the feeling of motion and action is preserved - . Download here and run (8.5mb, Windows only, I'm afraid). It's successor is QQQ, a similar effort done for Quake 3. No download but movies here. Also on Nullpointer is the fantastic WebTracer, a tool for visualizing websites as 3d networks of nodes. Here's what MeFi looks like with 1000 nodes tracked.
posted by BlackLeotardFront at 1:59 PM PST - 12 comments

A9 gets MS? Amazon's search tool / portal, formerly powered by Google, is now using Microsoft's Windows Live search service. I first noticed when my image results went missing (which sucks, but I still use it for the incentive program). Does this mean MS is shifting out of the half-assery phase of its search strategy? What happens when its adCenter keyword program opens up? [commentary]
posted by grobstein at 11:42 AM PST - 8 comments

A little over a year ago, the Guiding Hand Social Club issued a stunning press release - after months of infiltration and planning they had fulfilled an assassination contract on the CEO of a major corporation and ransacked the corporation's hangers, stealing almost 20 billion ISK, worth over $16,000 USD at the time. See PCGamer's excellent detailed description of the event: pages 1, 2, 3, 4. As synthetic worlds like Eve-Online and World of Warcraft gain popularity, what should we make of this kind of behavior? Eve's own players respond. Also, a response with a little more perspective. And what's going to happen when the IRS catches on?
posted by heresiarch at 10:37 AM PST - 56 comments

The Pain in the Brain. (NYT)
posted by semmi at 10:11 AM PST - 36 comments

Chinese classics and translations. A collection of some of the greatest works of Chinese literature in the original chinese and translated in English and French. Every Chinese character is also a link to a chinese dictionary, allowing you to translate on the fly. Includes the Yi Jing The Book of Changes, Dao De Jing The Way and Its Power, The Analects of Confucius, Sun Tzu's Art of War and many more.
posted by afu at 9:25 AM PST - 16 comments

BBC interviews news editor regarding the Apple/Beatles verdict. Only one problem: the gentleman in the hotseat was the news editor's driver. Hilarity ensues. (video of the interview here - the driver's expression when he realizes he's been mistaken is priceless.)
posted by aberrant at 8:35 AM PST - 75 comments

Storm Warning. Seems like Iran has already started flexing it's economic muscles-haven't seen it reported that widely anywhere else, but these two events seem to be connected. Then again, maybe I've been spending too much time reading itulip.
posted by jaksoul at 5:27 AM PST - 35 comments

5 mins of highlights from yesterday's epic FA Cup Final between Liverpool and West Ham. Read the West Ham and Liverpool player ratings for a good idea of how the players performed individually. This game had everything.
posted by nthdegx at 2:15 AM PST - 29 comments

"The right man to lead the CIA at this critical moment in our nation's history." (youtube) A nice catch by The Daily Show.
posted by hypersloth at 11:48 PM PST - 49 comments

An interesting anti-war animation (flash). (via) Another one. More.
posted by IronLizard at 8:20 PM PST - 22 comments

A memorial ride is taking place tomorrow in New York City in memory of a fourteen-year-old boy who was rundown on his bike last year. This man is responsible for the death and there are many unanswered questions. No charges have been filed, but what is more disturbing is the lack of remorse from the young man who was responsible for this tragedy.
posted by jennababy at 7:52 PM PST - 73 comments

Silly little fairy!
posted by mischief at 7:48 PM PST - 42 comments

Chef Kazuki Yamamoto will cook just about anything. Casting aside all concern for the law, he prepares exotic dishes for celebrities and the ultra-rich. No species is off limits; his dishes have included penguin, walrus, whale, seal, dolphin, hippo, rhino, sea lion, chimpanzee, gorilla, monkey, brown bear, gazelle, giraffe, zebra, mountain lion, sea turtle, gila monster, ferruginous pygmy owl, bighorn sheep, Bichon Frise, and (it is claimed) human.
posted by Rhomboid at 7:00 PM PST - 44 comments

She had been sitting in her arm-chair, telling us a long, beautiful tale; and when it was finished, she said she was tired, and leaned her head back to sleep awhile. We could hear her gentle breathing as she slept; gradually it became quieter and calmer, and on her countenance beamed happiness and peace. It was as if lighted up with a ray of sunshine. She smiled once more, and then people said she was dead. [In honor and memory of our mothers.] Tons of stories by Hans Christian Andersen, from the main site Aesop Fables, and other cool stuff like "The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus" by L. Frank Baum.
posted by sluglicker at 6:35 PM PST - 5 comments

Apparently, Karl Rove has been indicted.
posted by thirteenkiller at 5:39 PM PST - 166 comments

Behold: the self-contained circular kitchen. Design coolness for apartment dwellers. "After centuries of conventional kitchen design, the self-contained circular kitchen challenges many of the notions of a normal kitchen, treating it more as an appliance than a dedicated, inflexible room."
posted by CunningLinguist at 4:10 PM PST - 36 comments

Lazy Ramadi
posted by ColdChef at 12:30 PM PST - 20 comments

Cheney Pushed U.S. to Widen Eavesdropping In the weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, Vice President Dick Cheney and his top legal adviser argued that the National Security Agency should intercept purely domestic telephone calls and e-mail messages without warrants in the hunt for terrorists, according to two senior intelligence officials.
posted by Postroad at 11:35 AM PST - 60 comments

Searchable database of >120,000, reasonably high-resolution editorial cartooons. Mainly from the UK, and from the last 100 years. Search by person depicted (e.g., Thatcher, Gorbachev, Thatcher and Gorbachev); by year (e.g., Hitler and Stalin in 1941 or 1942), by design elements (e.g., cartoons referencing sculpture by Rodin, or cartoons with zebras), by topic (e.g., BSE, Falklands War), by artist (e.g., William Hogarth, L.G. Illingworth, Carl Giles, Steve Bell) or by publication outlet (e.g., Punch, Evening Standard (over 10,000 from Evening Standard alone). There is a handy searching wizard as well.
posted by Rumple at 11:01 AM PST - 17 comments

The Rational Neo-graphic Magazine. Special Edition: Into Thick Air - the thrilling challenges of low-altitude mountaineering
posted by pyramid termite at 10:27 AM PST - 9 comments

The Open Mind. First Broadcast in May, 1956, The Open Mind is still produced weekly by Richard D. Heffner, host, historian, and University Professor of Communications and Public Policy at Rutgers University. These conversations with some of the most creative thinkers of the last half-century are available on the Internet.
posted by semmi at 9:49 AM PST - 1 comment

Oil and Gas are such slut bags! Coal is so cute! Don't you feel like such a schmuck for not liking coal? A NPO promoting the benefits of coal with children for spokespeople.
posted by thefreek at 7:27 AM PST - 34 comments

Don't Regulate is telecom-sponsored ad dressed up as an underground cartoon, writes Timothy Karr. At issue is net neutrality (previously discussed here).
posted by F Mackenzie at 7:13 AM PST - 31 comments

What’s a dog worth? Los Angeles kills more animals in its shelters than any other metropolitan area in the United States. For that to change, we will have to figure out what to do with the pets none of us want.
posted by PenguinBukkake at 7:06 AM PST - 53 comments

It's not about the bike: A dalmation rides a bicycle. Way cooler than those Tony Hawk wannabes.
posted by hindmost at 2:07 AM PST - 36 comments

Newsfilter: Home of Former CIA No. 3 Man, Kyle "Dusty" Foggo raided by FBI
posted by delmoi at 11:09 PM PST - 54 comments

Sinatra & Jobim. 6 minutes of Bossa Nova beauty, for your viewing pleasure. (Youtube link)
posted by Chrischris at 6:57 PM PST - 45 comments

The Show with Ze Frank. Like the Daily Show, but shorter, quicker, and more spastic. The Show has been going for about a month now, but Ze appears to be hitting his stride now.
posted by monju_bosatsu at 5:30 PM PST - 50 comments

How to kill at the eighth-grade mixer. B3ta master and blogger Rob Manuel collected a slew of tasteless jokes and recently published a compendium called The Bumper B3ta Book of Sick Jokes. But a devoted public demanded (and submitted) even more of these witticisms, so he created the Sickipedia.
posted by GrammarMoses at 4:20 PM PST - 27 comments

Radial engined motorcycles are insane, but not unprecedented.
posted by mr_crash_davis at 3:32 PM PST - 24 comments

Video Wombat, dedicated to burrowing through online video sites, snuffling and culling the best and feasting upon the sweet, sweet media.
posted by darkstar at 2:08 PM PST - 11 comments

The Case of the Disappearing Affirmative Action Letters In August 2005, letters written by future Chief Justice John Roberts, dealing with the Reagan Administration's policies on affirmative action, disappeared from the Ronald Reagan Library in Simi Valley, California. The National Archives and Record Administration was so concerned they conducted their own investigation, but their report on the investigation has so many redactions it raises more new questions than it answers about White House lawyers who had unguarded access to the papers.
posted by jonp72 at 1:56 PM PST - 12 comments

There's a USA National Bikini Team? Time was you had to actually have sex with a student before you got in trouble. Now it seems, you don't even have to go that far! After all that, let's hope the good ole U.S. of A. can beat the Swedes
posted by clearlynuts at 12:55 PM PST - 41 comments

the questionable super soaker. How did this get past the marketing department? A gun that shoots shots of white slime? The product review on the Anazon site has been deleted and locked after a flood of joke reviews of the toy which exploited its pornographic similarities.
posted by Liquidwolf at 12:09 PM PST - 96 comments

"Sam & Max, Freelance Police" are back, in 3D. The first game of the series will come out this fall. Maybe now we'll finally find out where Max keeps that BFG. ("None of your business, Sam.")
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 12:01 PM PST - 39 comments

1987 - Siskel and Ebert - Behind the scenes: Part 1 (28mb), Part 2 (16mb), Part 3 (18mb). Each segment is about three to four minutes long. For those of us who grew up with these guys on TV, almost 20 years ago, this is a side you've never dreamed of. Part one ends on a down-note, but parts two and three...worth the watch. (language NSFW)
posted by rougy at 12:01 PM PST - 53 comments

"I can give up smoking at any time, but I don't find it affects my pregnancy."
Oh yeah, this expectant mother is also 12 years old.
posted by StrasbourgSecaucus at 10:44 AM PST - 99 comments

Recycled Robots, hand-made from scavenged parts. Robots, robots, more robots, and their pets. And where there are robots, rest assured, there will be rayguns. (via the eminently readable Drawn!)
posted by Gamblor at 8:59 AM PST - 14 comments

Halliburton solves global warming! An advanced new technology will keep corporate managers safe even when climate change makes life as we know it impossible. Pics here. oh, wait...
posted by mkultra at 8:59 AM PST - 20 comments

It's possible. The team's board has resigned on the heels of a possible match-fixing scandal (or at least a ref-fixing scandal) during the 2004-2005 season. Other Serie A teams are implicated, as well. Juve is also being probed for bookeeping irregularities (well, it IS an Italian team... that sort of thing is expected).
posted by wfc123 at 8:28 AM PST - 15 comments

Heinz Stücke has travelled 335,000 miles by bicycle since 1960. And he's done it all on one bicycle, a 3-speed that weighs 56 lbs. That journey was threatened a few days ago when a thief stole his bike (it was later found by police). He's been shot at, robbed, arrested, and celebrated, embraced and admired in every corner of the planet. Though Charles Veley has the domain name and the top google hit, Stücke is the MAN. "Would I do it all over again? No! I never liked to cover the same terrain I've already conquered. IT'S THE UNKNOWN AROUND THE CORNER THAT TURNS MY WHEEL…"
posted by mcstayinskool at 7:58 AM PST - 11 comments

Morgellon's disease A new disease is surfacing in Southeast Texas exhibiting what could possibly be the grossest symptom profile ever besides botfly, and doctors are stumped as to causes and treatments. Over 100 sufferers so far have complained of black, tarry sweat, non-healing lesions, a feeling like bugs are crawling under their skin, and worst of all, "fibers" that poke out of the wounds. Happy Friday!
posted by Sidthecat at 7:41 AM PST - 82 comments

Culture Wars: School buses are riddled with sniper bullets, gas lines are cut, windshields broken, and bomb threats disrupt schools daily. Teachers and custodians must remove nails and broken glass from their school parking lots each morning, and several school buildings have been damaged by early morning firebombs and dynamite. One minister has prayed publicly for the deaths of three board members. 'It was simply overwhelming.' Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. (via)
posted by Otis at 7:21 AM PST - 27 comments

Black , the final entry in Adidas' Adicolor short film campaign., is seriously messed up, with a fish and a panda playing russian roulette. Also featuring Pink, Red, Blue, White, and Yellow. (via)
posted by blue_beetle at 7:18 AM PST - 25 comments

What What: I came across this and offer it to the MeFi community, mostly in the hopes you guys can explain it all to me.
posted by ancientgower at 6:23 AM PST - 12 comments

The Bicycle Ride. This animated short, "The Bicycle Ride," is a fanciful depiction of Dr. Albert Hofmann's discovery of LSD. 3:47 video.
posted by fixedgear at 3:54 AM PST - 36 comments

A Swarm of Angels is about making a £1 million movie and giving it away to one million people in one year. By using the Internet to gather together 50,000 people willing to pay £25 to join an exclusive global online community – The Swarm – the project’s ambition is to make the world’s first Internet-funded, crewed and distributed feature film. (more inside)
posted by slimepuppy at 2:37 AM PST - 31 comments

Only 2,029 out of 9,145 veterans with post traumatic stress disorder resulting from combat have been referred to mental health for evaluation/treatment. I say give them the same treatment the IDF gets.
posted by augustweed at 7:21 PM PST - 42 comments

RobotFilter: Korea Unveils World's Second Android (YouTube), China manufactures personal robot, Japan's domestic robot, Why the Japanese want their robots to act more like humans. Robot runs over water, robotic tentacle (mpeg), 'baby' robot learns like a human (avi 1,2), Pill-sized intenstinal robot, speedy robot, spider robots. Lego Unveils NXT Robotics Toolset, Lego robot plays Super Mario Bros, Connect Four, solves Rubik's Cube. Building an army of robots, Big Dog, (wmv), Robots break Asimov’s first law. [more inside]
posted by MetaMonkey at 7:06 PM PST - 14 comments

It's mango season in India! Thanks to a new agreement, Americans will be able to partake in the joy of Indian mangoes, but in the meantime, there are plenty of ways to enjoy a Florida mango. Get creative with recipes, try one with chili powder or salt and pepper (and no, MTV, it's nothing sexual), buy the mango lover in your life a splitter, or make a wish at a mango tree. (Hint: try South Florida.) Just don't eat (or burn) the leaves!
posted by anjamu at 6:34 PM PST - 50 comments

MiHail of the portabella mushroom fame died in February while waiting for what would have been her third liver transplant. She will always be with me in my soul. Rest in peace, Cathy.
posted by Jade5454 at 6:19 PM PST - 141 comments

Roy D. Mercer asks Bill Goldberg if he's ready for an ass whoopin.[more inside]
posted by bigmusic at 5:25 PM PST - 18 comments

When a runaway train crashed through the floor in Washington, DC's Union Station back in January 1953, the Pennsylvania Railroad immediately started to cover it up. But this coverup was in all the newspapers: the railroad just built a temporary floor over a locomotive and two railroad cars, because of all the traffic for Eisenhower's inauguration. A few weeks later, the locomotive was retrieved, repaired, and running again, like nothing had ever happened. Another page includes some pictures (scroll down).
posted by Godbert at 4:58 PM PST - 14 comments

Chris Tucker has become the highest-paid actor in Hollywood for agreeing to star in the third installment in the Rush Hour film series. Apparently he's already prepping for the car chases. No word on whether not he got those editing rights he was asking for last year.
posted by ktoad at 4:23 PM PST - 44 comments

Life Beyond Earth and the Mind of Man. Direct Google Video link to a fruitcake-tastic half-hour film of "a symposium held at Boston University on November 20, 1972 that explores the implications of the possible existence of extraterrestrial life within the galaxy and the universe. " Well worth scrubbing through for some good moments if you don't have time to watch the whole thing. Other cool old NASA videos on google video include Who's Out There?, starring a cigar smoking Orson Welles squinting a lot and reading off the cue cards, and Debrief: Apollo 8: "Happiness is bacon squares for breakfast".
posted by 6am at 3:49 PM PST - 7 comments

HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson told an audience that he'd cancelled a loan because "a minority businessman" didn't like the President. He later claimed to have been joking. [via]
posted by Sticherbeast at 3:40 PM PST - 21 comments

Meet the grolar bear (via)
posted by reklaw at 3:30 PM PST - 38 comments

Renegade wild hogs captured using dogs and bare hands. Greg Whidden captures the hogs from a nature preserve where they're causing environmental damage.
posted by exogenous at 1:46 PM PST - 16 comments

Priest convicted in 1980 nun-slaying. The 71-year-old nun was found on Good Saturday 1980 strangled to death, stabbed 27-32 times, wrapped in an altar cloth with her under-garments around her ankle. Abuse victim Jane Doe re-opens 1980 case with account of childhood Satanic ritual abuse. Was there a cover up by the diocese?
posted by Marnie at 12:53 PM PST - 40 comments

Battle Cry, the youth arm of the Christian Reconstructionist (also called Dominionist) movement, is holding a rally in Philadelphia this weekend. They've already had events in San Francisco & Detroit. Create your own Battle Plan or just chat with other soldiers in God's Army. But not everyone is happy about it.
posted by scalefree at 12:10 PM PST - 120 comments

Margaret Thatcher Dot Org. For all your Margaret Thatcher related needs.
posted by sgt.serenity at 11:15 AM PST - 39 comments

CIA Secret Prisons Exposed The disappeared: Are they dead? Are they alive? Ask Congress. Ask the president.
posted by Postroad at 10:30 AM PST - 39 comments

I didn't believe my eyes, but it turns out that it only takes some cold water and a thermal inversion to make a superior mirage (superior in both position and awesomeness). Pekka Parviainen has written about the phenomenon in Finland and has lots of photos to share. Still don't believe? Watch the videos: especially the one in which the mirage disappears before your very eyes! (.rm)
posted by imposster at 9:38 AM PST - 23 comments

Just when you thought we'd run out of things to sue over. A man who was denied a red nylon tote bag during a Mother's Day promotion at an Angels baseball game has filed a sex and age discrimination lawsuit against the team.
posted by StrasbourgSecaucus at 9:22 AM PST - 36 comments

Allen, 24, and Brandon Day, 28, of Dallas, were in Southern California for a financial convention. They got lost Saturday west of Palm Springs after wandering off a trail during what was supposed to be a day hike. [On the third day] they discovered a campsite in a dead-end gorge. Day and Allen were elated, thinking someone there could help them find the way out. But something was wrong. A radio and flashlight were corroded. They realized the place was deserted. ``His last journal entry was one year ago to the day that we found it, which was very eerie,' Day said. ``Nobody knew where he was, nobody knew to come looking for him, so he was preparing for the end. We were looking at the words of a man who was passing.' The missing man was John Donovan, who had disapeared a year earlier while hiking the pacific crest trail. "Even in his death, he was helping people," Donovan's longtime friend, Chris Hook, said from Richmond, Virginia.
posted by 445supermag at 9:12 AM PST - 26 comments

Killing the CIA. A startling and important look at the recent dismantling of the CIA by the Bush Administration.
posted by Mean Mr. Bucket at 8:48 AM PST - 26 comments

After 12 weeks, viewers of the UK version of "The Apprentice" saw Michelle Dewberry beat off Ruth Badger to win a £100,000 a year job working for Sir Alan Sugar. Inspired by the show, some organisations are leaning towards this style of hiring for their own recruitment. Not surprisingly, others are dismayed.
posted by mr_silver at 6:09 AM PST - 32 comments

New security glitch found in Diebold system California, Pennsylvania and Iowa are issuing emergency notices to local elections officials, generally telling them to "sequester" their Diebold touch screens and reprogram them with "trusted" software issued by the state capital. Then elections officials are to keep the machines sealed with tamper-resistant tape until Election Day.
posted by leapingsheep at 5:15 AM PST - 104 comments

NSA has massive database of Americans' phone calls. "The NSA's domestic program began soon after the Sept. 11 attacks, according to the sources. Right around that time, they said, NSA representatives approached the nation's biggest telecommunications companies. The agency made an urgent pitch: National security is at risk, and we need your help to protect the country from attacks"
posted by gsb at 4:55 AM PST - 182 comments

You have all dropped your MySpace profiles and jumped to AIM Pages, haven't you? [via]
posted by tellurian at 11:09 PM PST - 48 comments

Have your war and heat it too? As the war approaches the $350 billion mark, Cass Sunstein notes: "For the United States, the economic burden of the Iraq war is on the verge of exceeding the total anticipated burden of the Kyoto Protocol." Costs may rise as high as $10 trillion. At least we know it wasn't about oil: in a good year, Iraq makes about $14 billion on fossil fuels. (via)
posted by anotherpanacea at 9:06 PM PST - 28 comments

The odd films of Neural Surfer. I've yet to watch them all but my fave so far is Little Things that Jiggle: Richard Feynman and Atomic Physics {google vid}, which is part of the Philosophy in less than five minutes (sometimes) series.
posted by dobbs at 8:34 PM PST - 10 comments

John Birch Society Member calls for a Rebel Alliance in this fascinating article on those opinions jointly shared by both conservatives and liberals. I didn't expect to read this from someone I consider so far to the right.
posted by jfrancis at 7:47 PM PST - 33 comments

Funny Stuff. Laughing usually doesn't hurt but even when it does it can help you stay healthy and happy too! Other than the obvious *ahem*, is there anything the internet is better for than laughing yourself into a coughing fit? If you like jokes, or puns (that one is awesome - by the way), or people setting their faces on fire (my personal favorites), it's all out there.
posted by twjordan at 7:37 PM PST - 11 comments

Another black eye for ID (youtube link): Zoologist Dan-Eric Nilsson of the University of Lund in Sweden explains how the complex human eye could have evolved gradually from a primitive light-sensitive eye-spot. Via Swift.
posted by flabdablet at 7:17 PM PST - 50 comments

Writing has been around for a long time, but that doesn't mean we've mastered it yet. Want to make fiction? Perhaps it makes itself, perhaps it makes you... Self reference breeding infinite hyperrealities. Which world will you choose?
posted by 0bvious at 6:27 PM PST - 9 comments

"But What About Us? Student Photographs from the Corridor of Shame" is a traveling photography exhibit that follows up on “Corridor of Shame: the neglect of South Carolina's rural schools" [wmv], a 58 minute documentary that tells the story of the challenges faced in funding an adequate education in South Carolina's rural school districts. The documentary tracks the evidence presented on behalf of eight school districts in Abbeville County School District v. The State of South Carolina [pdf]. The exhibit is a powerful demonstration to the needs still unmet in South Carolina's rural schools. Only five pictures and captions are on the website now, but most of the pictures appear inside with permission from the copyright holder.
posted by ND¢ at 6:12 PM PST - 28 comments

Google Trends is really cool. Yes, it's yet another google project, but you can compare so much pointless stuff with it!
posted by blacklite at 6:03 PM PST - 122 comments

Hungry like the wolf. In his state-of-the-nation address, Vladamir Putin took a swipe at the Bush administration, saying that Russia should build "a strong, reliable home because we do see what's going on in the world. . . Comrade Wolf knows whom to eat. It's eating without listening to anyone. And by all appearances, it's not going to listen . . . Where is all this pathos about the need to fight for human rights and democracy when it comes to the need to pursue their own interests? Here everything is possible. There are no limits."
posted by insomnia_lj at 4:01 PM PST - 25 comments

Order from chaos! Fill a cylindrical bucket with water and make it so the bottom can spin. At certain speeds, stable regular polygonal shapes will spontaneously form at the turbulent surface of the water. See the video. [2.6MB avi] [via last week's PRL]
posted by sergeant sandwich at 3:14 PM PST - 28 comments

Super Mario Galaxy
posted by reklaw at 2:35 PM PST - 59 comments

No More Black and White. An article in the Washington Post about a census report released today shows that 45 percent of children under 5 are racial or ethnic minorities, with Hispanics the largest group. Interestingly enough, as Andrew Sullivan notes, among the under-5 population only 4% are black, a trend he's seen in the time he's lived in Washington D.C. ("It's only gotten whiter and browner.") This has happened/is happening perhaps most dramatically in New Orleans (previously).
posted by fugitivefromchaingang at 2:30 PM PST - 40 comments

The Little Bird Flies Away animation short by Veronica Ibarra. also, the Cooking Set.
posted by trishthedish at 1:05 PM PST - 10 comments

The Magical Number Seven Psychologist George A. Miller on the human limits for processing and remembering data. It is a little dramatic to watch a person memorize 40 binary digits in a row without error.
posted by Lanark at 11:37 AM PST - 14 comments

Luttig Resigns. Judge J. Michael Luttig, long considered a front-runner for a Supreme Court nomination, at least until he was passed over by President Bush, has resigned his position on the Fourth circuit. Luttig will take over as general counsel to Boeing. Read Boeing's press release and Luttig's resignation letter [pdf].
posted by monju_bosatsu at 9:28 AM PST - 29 comments

Gum Blondes Celebrity portraits done in chewed gum. By artist Jason Kronenwald.
posted by grapefruitmoon at 8:46 AM PST - 31 comments

George Bataille's Documents—a short-lived but influential journal conceived as a 'war machine against received ideas'—has inspired an exhibition, Undercover Surrealism (Flash with sound).
posted by jack_mo at 5:32 AM PST - 8 comments

Living without Numbers or Time...
The Pirahã people have no history, no descriptive words and no subordinate clauses. That makes their language one of the strangest in the world -- and also one of the most hotly debated by linguists. [via aldaily.com]
posted by moonbird at 4:27 AM PST - 43 comments

British supermarket giant Tesco recently posted profits of £2m ($3.73bn), like most modern employers it decided to reward its employees for their hard work: by giving them a free meal in the staff canteen worth £1.40 ($2.60). Others were offered sausage rolls and tuna sandwhiches. Does this make Tesco the most tightfisted corporation of all time? Or are their others equally parsimonious? Or even worse?
posted by MrMerlot at 2:04 AM PST - 64 comments

Spinner Disk A flash site with Einstein, penguins, ninjas, narwhals and a dinosaur. What more could one want?
posted by Serial Killer Slumber Party at 1:12 AM PST - 20 comments

Study shows that just handling a gun increases testosterone levels in men.
posted by 445supermag at 8:45 PM PST - 62 comments

Brian Eno is the godfather of electronica, the inventor of ambient music, and producer of the best work by bands like the Talking Heads and U2. Tchad Blake has helmed the mixing board for Elvis Costello, Tom Waits, Soul Coughing and the Bad Plus, to name just a few. Paul Simon is one of the most recognized names in pop music both for his work with Art Garfunkel and for his fusion of American pop music with African and South American music. Surprise is the the album they collaborated on, the new Paul Simon record featuring Eno's signature sonic landscapes all over it, and the entire lovely thing, complete with liner notes, is available to listen to on Simon's website.
posted by eustacescrubb at 7:43 PM PST - 69 comments

"The mind-set that invites a couple to use contraception is an anti-child mind-set," she told me. "So when a baby is conceived accidentally, the couple already have this negative attitude toward the child. Therefore seeking an abortion is a natural outcome. We oppose all forms of contraception." Don't even mention the mind-set behind a vaccine for HPV.
posted by missbossy at 7:01 PM PST - 1194 comments

In nature, mothers aren't so motherly.
posted by Citizen Premier at 5:51 PM PST - 21 comments

Is Stephen Merritt a racist? Sasha Frere-Jones, the New Yorker's Pop Critic and maybe the finest music critic writing today, has long been an activist against rockism. Stephen Merritt, the gay, white auteur behind such postmodern pop experiments as 69 Love Songs, and sometime target of S/FJ's ire, recently got into hot water with Jessica Hopper, among others, for allegedly racist comments made at the EMP Pop Music Conference, which is Christmas and Halloween all rolled into one for music crits and their fellow nerds. Slate's John Cook defends Merritt, claiming that disliking rap doesn't necessarily make one a racist, and S/FJ responds with some further thoughts. But was Frere-Jones accusing Merritt of racism, specifically, or simply of wack unexamined biases? And is that a fair criticism? Slate's readers don't seem to think so.
posted by maxreax at 4:53 PM PST - 174 comments

A nice mixed bag of live mp3s.
posted by dobbs at 4:08 PM PST - 18 comments

Yesterday, the President of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, wrote a letter to the President of the United States of America, George W. Bush. Here it is. (Courtesy Le Monde, 8 page PDF, English.) The letter has been "dismissed by its recipients as a rambling philosophical treatise." (Times) Further coverage at NYT and Le Monde (French). The letter ends 27 years of diplomatic silence.
posted by blacklite at 3:58 PM PST - 94 comments

A meth bust turned deeply odd in East Palo Alto, California when an underground hospital clinic was discovered in a drug raid on a house owned by a Stanford Hospital employee. The world of underground medicine has been memorably fictionalized in film, but it can be argued that [nytfilter: metabooty/bootytastic] the real thing is plenty bizarre (link possibly NSFW) on its own merits.

On the other hand, what constitutes underground medicine? You can go with the literal definition, or you can consider this recent near-miss with one of the most persistent urban legends. However, as is often the case, the most entertainingly impassioned defenses of "underground medicine" are those promulgated by "alternative health" practitioners (mustache possibly NSFW).
posted by scrump at 3:17 PM PST - 12 comments

Newspaper Snippet Generator
posted by crunchland at 2:07 PM PST - 17 comments

[419Filter] The Perfect Mark: After losing thousands and being sentenced to prison, John Worley is still convinced the Nigerian governmental officials and their fortune exist.
posted by mowglisambo at 2:02 PM PST - 50 comments

What’s a protest without a little counter-protest? Not that army of one Nita Shinn hasn’t done a bang up job before, but asking people to come out and protest with their toilet bowl brushes, their brooms, their lawn mowers, their pots and pans? - man, that’s just brilliant. Because it’s not un-American to fight to keep America, or to turn in an illegal alien. And, uh, what was the issue again? Flags? Or the national anthem in Spanish or something?
posted by Smedleyman at 12:41 PM PST - 29 comments

Worried that the nearby field is going to become cookie-cutter houses? No need to do anything rash, instead do a little planting.
posted by Ogre Lawless at 12:07 PM PST - 36 comments

A huge, steaming hot slab of rock has been growing out of Mount St Helens by over one meter a day since last November. Here's a time-lapse movie of the slab growing.
posted by gottabefunky at 10:50 AM PST - 53 comments

Nueva Orleans Before Katrina, Hispanics accounted for 3 percent of New Orleans’ population, with just 1,900 Mexicans showing up in the 2004 Census. No one knows for certain how many new ones have arrived, but estimates put the number between 10,000 and 50,000.
posted by ColdChef at 10:35 AM PST - 105 comments

Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C. is a liberal arts college and graduate school for the deaf (there's also a high school and primary school). In 1988, Gallaudet students protested when a hearing person was chosen as university president, and until today, I. King Jordan has served. Recently, a new president was chosen--Dr. Jane K. Fernandes, the school's Provost, who was born deaf but grew up speaking thanks to new therapies and technologies. A varied, vibrant student body never afraid to make their "voices" heard has spoken (with photos). Last night, so did a majority of the faculty, but Dr. Fernandes says she will stay.
posted by bardic at 10:14 AM PST - 162 comments

"What has our world come to if we cannot join nature by climbing one of nature's most beautiful features?" asks Dean Potter after he free-climbs Utah's Delicate Arch and pisses off the Park Service. Again.
posted by mr_crash_davis at 9:14 AM PST - 87 comments

Kattenstoet, a triennial cat parade is this weekend in Ypres, Belguim. The festival culminates with Kattenworp, the hurling of kittens from the Cloth Hall Belfry, a continuation of Europe's long ambiguous history of fascination with the feline. [more inside]
posted by If I Had An Anus at 8:14 AM PST - 17 comments

The shaving conspiracy.
The author suggests that shaving cream is a conspiracy. If you're not ready to throw away the shaving cream, then you can always opt for the traditional badger brush and safety razor. via Joey deVilla
posted by mecran01 at 6:53 AM PST - 123 comments

UN reports "vast" levels of hunger for Iraq's children. The World Food Programme is reporting that a "dismal shortage of cash" is jeopardizing the health of over 3 million Iraqis, over half of them children. The organization cites "a growing negative impact on the most vulnerable". Last year, a survey indicated that over 27 percent of all Iraqi children under the age of five were chronically malnourished. This was before reports came out, indicating that food rations have been cut off, and reports of food prices escalating sharply. Some Iraqis have resorted to selling their blood for money to make ends meet. Approximately 400,000 Iraqi children now suffer from "wasting," a condition characterized by chronic diarrhea and dangerous deficiencies of protein. Iraq now has the third highest infant mortality rate in the world, just ahead of Afghanistan.
posted by insomnia_lj at 4:47 AM PST - 54 comments

IndieKarma micropayments: automatically tip the weblogs you favour 1¢ each time you visit. (Via Kottke, perhaps unsurprisingly.)
posted by jack_mo at 3:00 AM PST - 24 comments

Running nearly a marathon every single day (24 miles) might seem a little crazy. Keep perspective, though: it's all in preparation for running 40 miles a day for three months straight, across the country. What's more, the guy is 6'5", and will go through roughly 8000 calories a day -- as many in the jaunt as most people eat in an entire year. And then you realize that the whole thing is being done for charity. Now that takes balls (of your feet).
posted by ajshankar at 1:59 AM PST - 50 comments

The Daily Kitten No matter how jaded and cynical you are, it is well nigh impossible to visit this site and resist clicking thru at least a few weeks' worth of pictures.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 9:09 PM PST - 41 comments

What the Democrats have to do to win back the American middle class. (PDF file recommended by Democrat Martin Frost, who served in the US House of Representatives from 1979 to 2005.)
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 8:46 PM PST - 144 comments

We Feel Fine is an art project that finds sentences from blogs and stitches together a real-time picture of how the web community is feeling. The default visualization uses a particle system to show the most recent thousand feelings. You can also build your own set based on criteria, such as gender, age, or location. Click the heart menu and go to Mobs to watch the particles organize in impressive ways. The gestalt of the visualization is compelling, but the details are the best part. Some sample montages. Also see a related project, Love Lines, which uses the same API.
posted by spigoat at 8:16 PM PST - 13 comments

Penis panic, is a type of body dysmorphia, among other strange afflictions. Also known as koro, it may be induced by cannabis, superstition or fear.
posted by nickyskye at 8:07 PM PST - 23 comments

Leonardo3, a design team in Milan, was given unprecedented access to the Codex Atlanticus [PDF], Leonardo da Vinci's closely guarded notebooks, in which he designed hundreds of machines he had hoped to build. The team transformed more than 100 drawings into 3-D graphic representations of his inventions. From these they built working models which are now displayed for the first time in the U.S., at the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry.
posted by ericb at 5:26 PM PST - 29 comments

The Linux Open Source Sound Project. Music made with open source software, published under a Creative Commons Sampling License, to download (or if you've created some yourself, upload). Each track lists the software used in it's creation. Download are mostly Ogg Vorbis (naturally). Mostly electronic music (in case you were wondering).
posted by drill_here_fore_seismics at 3:11 PM PST - 7 comments

"One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night" An example of nonsense?
posted by ozomatli at 2:50 PM PST - 56 comments

Always Help a Bird (1965); Sleeping Beauty (1959); Rooty Toot Toot (1952); and even more modern design cartoon and animation treasures from author Amid Amidi's blog Cartoon Modern. Look for the book to be out in August.
posted by soiled cowboy at 2:33 PM PST - 11 comments

The world's largest scientific instrument is under construction beneath the polar ice. Encompassing a square kilometer of the Antarctic icecap, the IceCube array of photodetectors is designed to spot neutrinos, those most elusive of particles. You can see pictures of IceCube being built at the South Pole, or a video (quicktime) of what the detector network looks like. Other massive neutrino detectors are also photogenic, like the Super Kamiokande (other pictures), located in a mine a kilometer underground, or BooNe at Fermilab, filled with 800 tons of mineral oil.
posted by blahblahblah at 1:42 PM PST - 30 comments

A good rant about "delusional advertising" but if you have 10 minutes to TOTALLY waste, click on the "PLAY" button for Pirelli's amazing(ly silly) short film featuring The Malkovich as a priest using four tires and a cross to fight a demonic Naomi Campbell over the soul of a sports car.
posted by wendell at 12:03 PM PST - 53 comments

Reflections on Psychoanalysis: 150 Years.
posted by trinarian at 11:51 AM PST - 22 comments

We have about 4 billion years left until our planet is going to be destroyed. If a meteor doesn't smash us in first, over the next 250 million years the continents will continue drifting to form another pangea. If we're all still friends having survived the climate change and each other, we'll be roasted by the expanding red giant after our sun exhausts its interior hydrogen supply. In about 5.5 billion years time the helium left in the core will get hot and dense enough to burn, flaring up in a massive helium flash engulfing what remains of the solar system. When the helium core is gone, hydrogen in the outermost layers will drift off to form a ring nebula, leaving in the middle a bright white dwarf star that will slowly cool down into a cold, dense black dwarf: a silent and forgotten fossil, floating through infinite space. In other news: cats are funny! hahahahaha!
posted by 6am at 11:39 AM PST - 69 comments

Ancient observatories from space Satellite images of Angkor Wat, Chichen Itza, Chaco Canyon, Stonehenge, Teotihuacan, and others. The observers, observed. High res images available.
posted by carter at 10:28 AM PST - 22 comments

Newsfilter: Chavez announces he may call a referendum asking voters to allow him to rule without further elections until 2031, well past the 2012 limit currently imposed by the Venezuelan constitution. Bluff? Naked power grab? Fatal mistake? Either way, watch what you say about it if you're in Caracas.
posted by loquax at 10:26 AM PST - 248 comments

15 days ago, there was a relatively small earthquake near Beaconsfield, Tasmania, which left 3 miners trapped in a gold mine. The situation looked grim after the body of one of the miners was recovered. But after 5 days, there was elation as the other two were found, still alive, buried one kilometer underground in a small cage. Australia's major commercial networks immediately sent their top news celebrities to the small mining town, assuming there would be a quick and easy rescue. In hindsight, they were perhaps a bit over enthusiastic. Accusations of a media circus, and chequebook journalism soon followed. After a couple of days of nothing happening, the media even started turning on their own. The story took an unexpectedly sad twist this weekend when one of Australia's most well known journalists died at the site from an apparent heart attack. But tonight, after 15 days underground, it seems the rescuers are finally breaking through the rock to reach the unfortunate trapped miners.
posted by Diag at 9:01 AM PST - 19 comments

Baltimore House is the New Dylan? Probably not, but Baltimore Club is an interesting sub-genre of dance music, anyway-- taking influences from Hip-Hop, House, Go-Go, Miami Bass, Detroit Ghettotech, Rave and TV theme songs(!) and merging them into a sound that's unique to Charm City's underground dance clubs. You can sample (and buy) some of the classics here. (warning, horrible web design, IE only) or listen to a whole mix CD here here. (lyrics NSFW)
posted by empath at 8:48 AM PST - 19 comments

Maohair, Chinese "peasant with a camera": China's Weegee? (Weegee links: The Getty, Int'l Center of Photography, Eastman Collection, 1945 radio interview and weegee.org); (Maohair links: His MSN Spaces page (in Chinese w/pics), more pics.) Warning: Not for the faint of heart.
posted by docgonzo at 8:45 AM PST - 13 comments

Grant McLennan, of the Australian group The Go-Betweens, has died in his sleep at the age of 48. I just discovered this wonderful band, through the pop masterpiece 16 Lovers Lane. If you haven't discovered them, many mp3 blogs are paying tribute. (Some discussion in this Metatalk thread, but I thought this needed an FPP.)
posted by barjo at 8:28 AM PST - 23 comments

The German town of Hesel bore witness a few weeks ago to the International German Beard World Championship. Photos here and here. [more inside]
posted by monju_bosatsu at 7:59 AM PST - 16 comments

The Laurence Hutton Collection Of Life & Death Masks is one of the more fascinating collections of historical artifacts out there, consisting of more than 100 plaster casts of the live and dead faces of the great, near great, and famous figures stretching from the 19th Century all the way back to the 15th. Laurence Hutton, an author born in New York in 1843, collected these masks all his life, hunting them down in thrift shops, curio shops, private collections and even garbage dumps, and after his death the collection was inherited by Princeton University. For years the masks sat collecting dust in cardboard boxes, and were available for viewing by appointment only. However, someone recently had the obvious idea to make digital photos of the masks and put them on line, making these riveting portraits available for all to see. This is a subject that has always fascinated me, for a life mask is the truest portrait we have of many historical personages. I have my own small collection of such masks; a life mask of Beethoven and Chopin, and even Paul McCartney (I am, surprise, a musician.)
posted by Nicholas West at 7:50 AM PST - 29 comments

evolution of cooperation apparently the evolution of cooperative behavior has been something of a rough spot for evolution researchers. Some guys (Mikhail Burtsev & Peter Turchin) developed a computer simulation that helps to explain how the essential selfishness of survival is not mutually exclusive to altruism and cooperation as well as how these behaviors can arise naturally. (further reading from google: ###)
posted by Tryptophan-5ht at 12:43 AM PST - 25 comments

In a new afterword to "The End of History and the Last Man", Fukuyama reflects on how his ideas have survived the tides of criticism and political change.
posted by semmi at 12:11 AM PST - 33 comments

The Quentin Crisp Archives. Includes a selection of letters , and memories of his early career as a life model.
posted by Rumple at 12:06 AM PST - 6 comments

A talk given by Matt Webb on fictional futures, and a whole lot besides. Just some text and some pictures, but he takes you on a most excellent brain adventure, from Italo Calvino to a map of all the biochemical reactions on Earth to Vannevar Bush’s machine, the Memex with dozens of stops in between. One of my favorite parts -- and the coolest use of RSS I've ever seen -- is a tool to subscribe to your personal lightcone. [via]
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 11:37 PM PST - 18 comments

Monday Flash Fun. In Mad Shark, you're an angry shark trying to get away from some evil experiments (probably the type mentioned here). You need to get away fast, but there's a catch! The faster you swim, the quicker you'll run out of strength. But don't worry. There's plenty of fish and scuba divers to eat. Secondary link in case the first bombs out.
posted by Effigy2000 at 8:09 PM PST - 25 comments

The cast of Battlestar Galactica drawn as Simpsons characters. (via)
posted by tvjunkie at 12:52 PM PST - 37 comments

Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush In this excerpt from his book, Eric Boehlert writes about how "[c]owardly and clueless, the U.S. media abandoned its post as Bush led the country into a disastrous war. A look inside one of the great journalistic collapses of our time."
posted by shivohum at 11:03 AM PST - 67 comments

When we last saw EA Spouse, she was married to an Electronic Arts employee and she painted a rather unflattering portrait of EA's programming employment practices. Now at last, Erin Hoffman's identity has been revealed. She and her husband have found employment in the field they love and they've established a website where people in the games industry can discuss the pros and cons of their jobs. Will it be enough to effect permanent change an industry that still has so much on the line? The recent EA settlement bodes well at least.
posted by ktoad at 9:54 AM PST - 30 comments

Why Hillary Can't Win (by Markos "Kos" Moulitsas). Why John Can't Win (by Byron York). (via)
posted by bardic at 9:47 AM PST - 88 comments

Advanced Animation by Preston Blair, "the best 'how to' book on cartoon animation ever published." Blair, a Disney and MGM animator, put the book together in 1947 to illustrate the various basic principles of animation, only to have the book pulled from shelves after the rights to use some of the characters were revoked. Animation historian Jerry Beck has been hunting for a first edition of Blair's landmark book for many years. He finally found a copy and is sharing high-quality scans on the Animation Archive. (Archive previously linked in this thread; discovered via this thread.)
posted by soiled cowboy at 9:16 AM PST - 11 comments

Happiness [pdf] A financial analysis.
posted by onalark at 9:05 AM PST - 75 comments

Every Playboy centerfold, December 1953 - May 2006. [NSFW]
Every Playboy centerfold, 1960-1999. [NSFW, via]
posted by dirtynumbangelboy at 8:05 AM PST - 120 comments

A Butterfly with transparent wings you say?
Indeed.
posted by Mutant at 7:50 AM PST - 22 comments

And so begins the startling adventures of the most sensational strip character of all time : SUPERMAN!
posted by crunchland at 6:34 AM PST - 24 comments

I Like Pandas (flash), by Spümcø animator Jessica Borutski, from the Nicktoons Animation Festival (flash again), which is currently accepting submissions. Music by Plone. Not that Plone.
posted by ulotrichous at 10:27 PM PST - 23 comments

Cajun Music MP3s, featuring music from the 1920s to 1970s.
posted by LarryC at 9:29 PM PST - 16 comments

Why We Fight, the BBC documentary from Eugene Jarecki about the American military-industrial complex and its origins (trailer@apple). For some reason its up in full at Google Video, so if you didn't get a chance to see it in the theaters, well, here it is! 1hr,40m - save it for later, perhaps. It's named after a series of war propaganda newsreels, directed by Frank Capra, demonstrating the need to enter WWII. These too are available on GV, as well as archive.org - to your surprise and delight. And for your convenience: Reels One, Two, Three, Four, Five parts 1 and 2, Six, and Seven
posted by BlackLeotardFront at 8:12 PM PST - 52 comments

Two Australian gold miners spent a 12th night trapped underground as rescuers struggling to cut the final stretch of an escape tunnel by hand on Sunday considered using explosives. Officials had hoped to free Brant Webb, 37, and Todd Russell, 34, before dawn but said progress chipping through the solid rock by jackhammer was slower than expected. Previously, when a narrow shaft had been bored to provide them with air and food: Trapped Australian Miners Get IPods. This promps Dave Grohl of the Foofighters to offer to buy them a beer. One of the miners also requested "a newspaper so he could check the classified ads for a new job". Hope they make it out OK.
posted by 445supermag at 7:07 PM PST - 25 comments

Super Columbine Massacre RPG! A computer role playing game based on the Columbine massacre and the event leading up to it in which the player plays the part of the killers. Think it's in poor taste? A Columbine survivor paralyzed from the chest down disagrees.
posted by juv3nal at 6:44 PM PST - 15 comments

London Underground Fashion Victims - as featured on the Going Underground blog.
posted by Mwongozi at 5:48 PM PST - 33 comments

The NASA Centennial Challenges: Inspired by the X-Prize, NASA has begun a series of challenges to private inventors with cash prizes for things ranging from extracting oxygen from moon rocks to building better astronaut gloves to improving personal aircraft. Thanks to Congressional approval, NASA will be launching larger challenges of up to $50 million in value, including a new multi-million dollar lunar lander contest. With government space efforts criticized by private entrepreneurs, is this the right direction for NASA?
posted by blahblahblah at 5:04 PM PST - 10 comments

The Sultan's Elephant. A 42-ton wooden elephant materialises on the streets of London, thanks to Royal de Luxe (previously). The BBC has lots of background, including video (obligatory YouTube link). More from TimeOut and The Guardian.
posted by cbrody at 2:05 PM PST - 35 comments

The War For Hasidic Williamsburg: Immediately after the recent death of the Satmar Grand Rebbe his two sons went to war over over which one will be the new leader of what is perhaps the largest Hasidic sect in the United States. This sect is extremely anti-modernist, even compared to other Hasidic groups, and it also strongly anti-Zionist. A former leader of the Satmars once blamed the Holocaust on the Zionist campaign for a Jewish homeland. But this internal battle is not the only threat to the community. The gentrification of Brooklyn (warning: pdf link) has both driven up the price of land, making it extremely difficult for the large families of the Satmar to obtain additional housing, and made it far more difficult for the youth to escape the corrupting moral values of the outside culture.
posted by spira at 10:27 AM PST - 35 comments

On at least one occasion, Jonathan Taylor's photographic studies of the seedy side of Southeast Asia have featured in Time Magazine, but thanks to the wonders of the Internet, you can view his photographic take on Thailand's drug problems, sex industry, and hired killers, as well as moving and disturbing images of the legacy of US involvement in Southeast Asia.
posted by bcveen at 3:53 AM PST - 26 comments

80 improv artists invade Best Buy disguised as employees. Predictably the real Best Buy employees freak out. (via /.)
posted by grouse at 2:15 AM PST - 119 comments

First it was called The War on Terror. Then it was called the Global War on Terror. It was even, at one stage, called The Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism. Basically, it has had many names. But now President Bush is simply calling it World War III.
posted by Effigy2000 at 6:25 PM PST - 155 comments

"Blood for oil" seems to be the new cry on campus (or at least "Plasma for gas").
posted by 445supermag at 5:49 PM PST - 30 comments

Downtown Helsinki seemed semiapocalyptic tonight while a set of warehouses near city-center burned to the ground. The buildings were previously owned by the State Railway, and (as Wikipedia tells) recently had become an unofficial cultural center hosting BDSM conventions and heavy metal festivals. The buildings were previously scheduled for destruction on Monday to make way for a new music hall, but it looks like the demolition happened early. Fire trucks had visited the scene earlier this week when it was last set on fire during a May Day eve protest-- or was that drunken revelry? Strangely, this wasn't considered significant enough for the police to worry about it. More photos.
posted by taursir at 3:47 PM PST - 15 comments

The audio toolbox for the audiophile:
CD ripper - Exact Audio Copy (Windows)
Media Player - Foobar2000 (Windows)
MP4 Encoder - Nero MP4 command-line encoder (Windows, Linux soon)
Audio techology forum - Hydrogenaudio [more inside]
posted by Sharcho at 3:29 PM PST - 56 comments

Fred Phelps' daughter (direct link to wmv) appeared on Hannity and Colmes to justify her church's protests at the funerals of American soldiers. Rather than using the show to have a discussion, Hannity and Colmes only berate her and keep her from finishing her sentences. Regardless of how cruel her church's actions are to the families of dead soldiers, it's interesting to see how the anchors steer her away from the issue of homosexuality, especially considering how vocal they've been on that subject.
posted by OverlappingElvis at 1:32 PM PST - 147 comments

Canadian musicians protest file-sharing lawsuits. The Barenaked Ladies, Broken Social Scene, Sloan, Avril Lavigne, Sarah McLachlan, and many other Canadian artists have formed a coalition to protest the hard line taken by the recording industry against file-sharers, and call for copyright reform. Is there a better way to protect intellectual property rights than suing file-sharers?
posted by Johnny Assay at 12:00 PM PST - 35 comments

Wikocracy. Don't like the law? Write it yourself.
posted by monju_bosatsu at 11:56 AM PST - 29 comments

The Song In the world of sports, there is not a more moving moment than the one when the horses step onto the track for the Kentucky Derby post parade and the band strikes up "My Old Kentucky Home". Link has history, lyrics. My Old Kentucky Home [realplayer]
posted by Postroad at 11:27 AM PST - 14 comments

Newsfilter: CIA director Porter Goss resigns. After taking some of the fall heat for bad intelligence in the months before 9/11, Cheney's "cat's paw" finally gets out of the kitchen.
posted by digaman at 11:12 AM PST - 200 comments

Happy Beltane! Today, astronomically speaking, is one of the four Cross-Quarter days, exactly midway between the solstices and equinoxes. To some people, that makes today the start of summer - after all, why would you begin the season that's supposed to be bright and hot on the day when the only direction to go is darker? (Yes, I know they say May 1 - the first site I linked to figures out the exact dates and times mathematically, so I'm more inclined to trust it).
posted by wanderingmind at 10:53 AM PST - 16 comments

Google Maps + World of Warcraft = MapWoW. (Via)
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 10:32 AM PST - 21 comments

Friday insanity: "We are no longer going to be the band that plays old game tunes. We are going to be the band that plays old game tunes on game controllers!" [23Mb DivX, explanation]. Witness Commodore 64 revival band Press Play On Tape playing Cannon Fodder using a bunch of game console controllers. War has never been so much fun.
posted by hoverboards don't work on water at 10:13 AM PST - 9 comments

High Dynamic Range Imaging: The dawn of a new era? In computer graphics and cinematography, high dynamic range imaging (HDRI for short) is a set of techniques that allow a far greater dynamic range of exposures than normal digital imaging techniques. The intention is to accurately represent the wide range of intensity levels found in real scenes, ranging from direct sunlight to the deepest shadows. quote from HDR Wikipedia page
posted by spock at 9:30 AM PST - 54 comments

37 versions of Stairway To Heaven, including Rolf Harris [mp3], Dolly Parton [mp3], and SCTV's Dave Thomas [mp3] doing a K-Tel ad for, uh, 30 versions of Stairway To Heaven. (See also 32 versions of Ghost Riders In The Sky.)
posted by Armitage Shanks at 9:02 AM PST - 32 comments

Panic -- makers of "Shockingly Good Mac Software" and visually appealing marketing collateral (including their website) -- have documented the various places their branding has been honored flatteringly borrowed ripped-off on the internets. My favorite is the site selling one of their original icons for $199, promising "exclusive ownership." Is imitation really the sincerest form of flattery?
posted by pmbuko at 8:37 AM PST - 27 comments

Mat Bevel Company is a gizmotronic fanfare of spunk, funk and kinetic junk. [lots of small embedded qt movies]
posted by carsonb at 8:14 AM PST - 10 comments

The Supercharger was a fantastic innovation, but it has its downsides. Volkswagen tried solving them by adding both a Supercharger and a Turbocharger, in their TSI engines, but this solution is relatively expensive. Perhaps the new invention by Atonov has merit. Instead of using a standard Roots supercharger, it uses a more efficient centrifugal supercharger, and adding a small two-speed automatic transmission to the loop, ensuring that the engine operates on boost throughout the rev range.

It may not sound like much, but it may change the way superchargers are working forever, allowing smaller engines with higher performance, or adding obscene amounts of power to large engines
posted by SharQ at 8:04 AM PST - 35 comments

Is Cinco De Mayo For Sale By the Alcohol Industry? In the 1960s, Chicano activists in Colorado promoted a boycott of Coors beer in response to employment discrimination against Latinos at Coors breweries. Coors had two problems. They had to fix their image with Latino consumers, and they had to figure out some way to get college students to drink more beer in May. The solution: start sponsoring Cinco de Mayo! Thus, even though Mexicans in Mexico celebrate their independence day on September 15th and 16th, Mexican-Americans are more likely to celebrate the May 5th anniversary of the Battle of the Puebla, which is not even commemorated with a national holiday in Mexico. In fact, the Battle of the Puebla was a skirmish in the Pastry War, a French intervention in Mexico that began because a French chef demanded several thousand pesos to compensate him for Mexican military officers looting his pastry supply.
posted by jonp72 at 7:21 AM PST - 44 comments

The Aria Database is a diverse collection of information on over 1000 operatic arias.
posted by Gyan at 11:12 PM PST - 6 comments

Unsafe-science-experiments-you-did-in-class-Friday: an advisory on dangerous chemistry experiments (they mention Nitrogen Triiodide, Chromate Volcanos, Whoosh Bottles, and Potassium Chlorate and Sugar), unwise microwave oven experiments, and, of course, thermite (and a great thermite video). I am amazed anyone survives high school, what other dubious but educational experiments did you do? Note: all pages are science education sites. Read the warnings. The awesome Chemistry Comes Alive site mentioned prev.
posted by blahblahblah at 11:10 PM PST - 44 comments

MusicFilter: You supposedly can't buy it yet. Well, you actually can get it other ways. Flea isn't that pleased about it either.
posted by sjvilla79 at 10:27 PM PST - 85 comments

Propelling under iridescence of the influential weather. Selfish Reflector basks on vastness of the faded blue pastels. Army of the inauspicious Barrel riders. Participating amongst the lines of expected anticipation. Journeying within the parallex Worlds of soaring heights. The greedy feeder treats the drifting creepy sleepers. Chain gang Members hang-in the dignity of thriving redundancy. And much, much, much more. Now everything is illuminated.
posted by azul at 6:35 PM PST - 39 comments

Arthur Magazine interviews the lead singer of Godsmack. In 2003, the US Navy used a song by rock band Godsmack as a part of an updated and more TOTALLY ROCKIN' recruitment campaign. Arthur Magazine asks how the band feels about this, in light of recent events war. Not very Wiccan of them indeed. via.
posted by unknowncommand at 4:32 PM PST - 87 comments

Claudia Emerson, a Virginian poet and English professor, has won the 2006 Pulitzer prize for poetry for her book The Late Wife. Here is an interview from 2002, and here is a podcast of Professor Emerson reading from The Late Wife in 2005. Some of her poems: "Bone," "The Bat," more.
posted by whir at 4:03 PM PST - 23 comments

Newsfilter: Rumsfeld squirms (via).
posted by bardic at 1:50 PM PST - 101 comments

Hoth Hell Freezes Over. The madness of King George subsides.
posted by Robot Johnny at 1:37 PM PST - 77 comments

Titan Descent Data Movie with Bells and Whistles
posted by crunchland at 1:36 PM PST - 40 comments

The Day the Lawn Wasn't Mowed
posted by buriednexttoyou at 1:24 PM PST - 79 comments

E and E-sharp will end tomorrow. Only 631 and a half years to go.
posted by arse_hat at 11:55 AM PST - 58 comments

Al-Zarqawi can't shoot. Lynch said the images he showed indicate that al-Zarqawi "tends to have a problem" with mastering his own weapons system and with finding capable and competent aides. "Why he's their leader, I don't know."
posted by furiousxgeorge at 11:43 AM PST - 53 comments

How to cure your asthma or hayfever using hookworm - a practical guide
posted by reklaw at 11:09 AM PST - 35 comments

The Hanso Foundation -- Reaching Out For A Better Tomorrow. Call 1-800-HANSORG for more information. Also, the late Gary Troup's last book has finally been published. There's an interview here.
posted by empath at 10:02 AM PST - 53 comments

1000 Angry Monkeys, Blogging About Politics... The partisan political blogosphere has been humming along nicely for the last several years. But where the progressive and conservative ideologies intersect, at technology, they can possibly be best categorized as libertarian, particularly if limited to the development, growth, corporatization, regulation, and taxation of the internet. As such, there's much news worthy of our attention. More inside...
posted by rzklkng at 8:34 AM PST - 21 comments

Kent State, May 4, 1970 Today is the 35th anniversary of the Kent State shootings (via Wood s Lot) Alan Canfora who faced the troops, eyewitness photographs the search for historical accuracy and the legacy
posted by robbyrobs at 8:20 AM PST - 141 comments

This light bulb has been burning continuously for 104 years. Watch it live for limitless entertainment!
posted by leapingsheep at 3:27 AM PST - 59 comments

A nightvision camera you phone up This seems to be a wireless CCTV camera that you phone up with your mobile and watch what is going on. It says it works in the dark. Now what would anybody use that for? As you dial it I guess it has it's own sim. "Pupillo", err horrid name.
posted by priorpark17 at 2:28 AM PST - 4 comments

Fox pussies out. Recently a bill passed in mexico legalizing all drugs under certain specified quantities. The bill was promoted By Vincente Fox's party, and came from his offices. However he decided not to sign it under U.S. pressure.

There go my vacation plans.
posted by Paris Hilton at 1:06 AM PST - 57 comments

Flora Brasiliensis [flash needed] was published between 1840 and 1906. It contains taxonomic treatments of 22,767 species of Brazilian flora. The beauty of the illustrations and the level of detail you can magnify to is magnificent (sorry, direct linking to example images is not possible but trust me, go and have a look).
posted by tellurian at 10:47 PM PST - 9 comments

What animals are endangered? (2006, updated from 2004) One in four mammals. One in three amphibians. Raw data and photos behind what others call the mass extinction crisis. Polar bears expected extinct in 25 years. In a little good news, Great Apes may be granted human rights in Spain (like the mountain gorilla -- all 660 that remain). In other news, without salmon, widespread bankruptcy expected in California's fishing industry. Me? I can only afford an electric sheep.
posted by salvia at 8:44 PM PST - 41 comments

Manlyweb.com -- One Real Damn Manly Site. We set out to create a web site for real men. Men who do their own engine work. Men who don't just read it for the articles. Men who know that good whiskey doesn't need to be mixed with anything, except maybe an ice cube or two.
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 7:56 PM PST - 79 comments

"Do we have the political will, do we have the military power, will we spend the resources required to achieve our aims [in Iraq]?" writes retired Army Gen. Barry McCaffrey in a memo addressed to the heads of the social science department at West Point summarizing his findings after a week-long fact-finding trip in Iraq. It will take ten years and billions of dollars, but the McCaffrey Memo claims that to leave Iraq prematurely would risk "a ten year disaster of foreign policy in the vital Gulf Oil Region." Fred Kaplan thinks the costs are too high.
posted by shivohum at 7:53 PM PST - 18 comments

“Even if one is not at all in agreement with her, with her politics, her ideology, one cannot help but respect her, admire her, even love her.”* Golda Meir, a key founder and later Prime Minister of Israel, was born on this day in Kiev in 1898. She was famously quotable (though one of her more famous quotes was actually more of a misquote). The University of Wisconsin fascinating set of photos of her life, from her youth to her old age.
posted by blahblahblah at 7:23 PM PST - 8 comments

Christopher Hitchens vs. Juan Cole (via).
posted by homunculus at 7:21 PM PST - 59 comments

A NOAA report says Earth's surface and atmosphere are both warming, and that earlier work that found otherwise contains flaws. In other news, global warming has started to weaken an important wind circulation pattern over the Pacific Ocean, a study suggests. The change could alter climate and the marine food chain in that area; polar bears and walrus pups sad.
posted by kliuless at 7:03 PM PST - 25 comments

Science imitates Star Trek, again. Physicists Nicolae Nicorovici and Graeme Milton have published a paper in the Proceedings of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences outlining a theoretical means for constructing a cloaking device. A superlens constructed from a metamaterial with a negative refractive index could be used to create a resonance that cancelled the light coming off of a (very small) object, rendering it invisible.
posted by justkevin at 5:53 PM PST - 11 comments

Nutsack too hairy? Let Philips Electronics help.
posted by jonson at 5:19 PM PST - 65 comments

Advances in traffic management are slowly being recognized as superior to stoplights. (java, video, video)
posted by bigmusic at 4:31 PM PST - 36 comments

Steering Them Wrong: How Schools Push Kids to Accept Pro-Gay Dogma.
posted by Mean Mr. Bucket at 4:08 PM PST - 129 comments

Power Surge: The Constitutional Record of George W. Bush Not much of this report from the Cato institute will be surprising to MeFites, but it is a great document [31 page PDF] that summarizes Bush's consistent disregard for the Constitution and drive for greater executive power.
posted by knave at 3:32 PM PST - 19 comments

No Death Sentence for '20th Skyjacker' Moussaoui (he Newsfiltered), and as he was led from the courtroom, the defendant, who had looked for the last few weeks like he was campaigning for martyrdom, clapped his hands and said “America, you lost. I won.” (I had severely underestimated this character's skill at Political Theater) In spite of the final spit-in-the-face-of-the-US, MSNBC.com's Unscientific Instapoll has 51% saying it was the right decision, while CNN.com's Poll says 63%, and Foxnews.com's poll... is about tax cuts. Disclaimer: Yes, I do some writing for the Entertainment section at MSNBC.com, but the News department does not know I exist and doesn't want to. And newssite instapolls are so-o-o Web 1.0, I know, but still, what's with the non-outrage?
posted by wendell at 2:54 PM PST - 75 comments

Solved: the case of the disappearing royal member. King Tut's penis was there all along.
posted by ibmcginty at 2:28 PM PST - 35 comments

In May 1968 a general strike broke out across France. The strike started at the University of Nanterre and spread to the streets as 80,000 students, teachers and workers demanded the fall of Charles de Gaulle's government, and they were joined by many other people protesting the brutality of the police. Timeline. Reports shown in cinemas. An eyewitness account from Solidarity. This revolt also gave rise to some amazing posters, printed by the 'Popular Workshop' at the Ecole des Beaux Arts. Also of note was the graffiti sprayed about the city, many taken from Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle and the Situationalist International. 1968, it seems, was an interesting time to be around. Boredom is counterrevolutionary.
posted by Zack_Replica at 2:16 PM PST - 17 comments

Get A-Life - an interesting read on artificial life and evolutionary computation, from the game of life (playable applet), through core wars, tierra and on to genetic programming. This approach has recently borne fruit to genetic programming pioneer and inventor of the scratchcard, John Koza, who last year patented his invention machine, actually a 1000 machine beowulf cluster running his software, which has itself created several inventions which have been granted patents. [See also: BBC Biotopia artificial life experiment, another odd BBC evolution game, Artificial Life Possibilities: A Star Trek Perspective]
posted by MetaMonkey at 12:31 PM PST - 14 comments

Canadian PM Stephen Harper eats babies. Or at least that's what many Toronto commuters read on their commutes Thursday, Friday, and Monday (they decided to leave the news up over the weekend). Another case for real news becoming more like The Onion?
posted by patr1ck at 12:22 PM PST - 58 comments

Forty men and one woman went to prison for sedition in Montana Seems that we make faulty assumptions about how we have protection and rights in our democracy, and that things used to be much better than they now are...not so. A big difference, though, is that now our Big Brothers have technology to help snare misbehaving citizens.
posted by Postroad at 11:05 AM PST - 38 comments

Sad -- such a sweet-looking kid, the smile on the face of a future suicide. Sad -- "If she only knew then how things would turn out…" Sad -- "I chose to kill her." Sad -- "You could see her personality break through the coma." Life is dukkha, said the Buddha -- a Pali term that means something like "suffering" or "the incapability of satisfaction." (Or as Mick Jagger put it, "I can't get no...") Here's the tangible evidence.
posted by digaman at 11:02 AM PST - 39 comments

My mother is very worried. ExxonMobil moved in and helped Bolivia develop, she says. Now they have food and medicine, thanks to the kindly hand of Big Business. But now Bolivia's kicking them out. After Exxon spent 3 billion dollars helping them! What will happen to the next poor country that needs Exxon's help?
posted by redsparkler at 9:56 AM PST - 108 comments

Mahatma Gandhi. Everything you ever wanted to know about Mahatma Gandhi including image galleries and his complete collected works.
posted by Roger Dodger at 9:40 AM PST - 25 comments

Newsfilter: 8.0 Quake Hits Tonga Lets hope this isn't a repeat of the Indonesian disaster, because 8.0 is huge.
posted by zeoslap at 9:25 AM PST - 57 comments

Safari is added to the spring 2006 update of the SANS Top Twenty Internet Security Vulnerabilities, following its last update in the fall which for the first time added OS/X to the list. OS/X saw its first zero-day exploit this year, there are at least seven new vulnerabilities waiting for a patch, and everyone is starting to notice. Do you still think your Mac is bulletproof?
posted by poppo at 9:00 AM PST - 91 comments

Today is the National Day To Prevent Teen Pregnancy. In the past decade, possibly no social program has been as dramatically effective as the effort to reduce teen pregnancy. Between 1990 and 2000 the U.S. teen pregnancy rate plummeted by 28 percent. This is great, except for the fact that this may be in part due to a decrease in male sperm count that will cause the human race to soon become extinct. It is also somehow related to the extinction of the taint. Previously.
posted by ND¢ at 8:52 AM PST - 48 comments

Avenue is a site of a snap photograph. Please enjoy it slowly. Here's a Japanese site of exquisite photographs. And lest I be accused of self-posting, let me say for the record that I neither took nor posed for the photos in the Orange Swan series.
posted by orange swan at 8:36 AM PST - 8 comments

A Brief History Of The Clenched Fist. With illustrations.
posted by jack_mo at 7:20 AM PST - 17 comments

Down with the Clowns? The Juggalos have been having a bit of a hard time lately. Perhaps it's because they lack a spiritual grounding. Though, lo, like many nascent faiths, the Juggalos strain for acceptance. No word yet on the details of Juggalo eschatology.
posted by klangklangston at 7:17 AM PST - 98 comments

Gotta love a website that thinks it's 1982. Jack Lawrence, Brendan Benson, Jack White and Patrick Keeler are The Raconteurs. This is their website. It's kinda neat.
posted by The Ultimate Olympian at 5:59 AM PST - 47 comments

New Zealand is a backwater when it comes to high speed internet. Today the government has done something about it.
posted by Samuel Farrow at 3:02 AM PST - 16 comments

bookmach.com Track memes and whatnot, as they propagate through the blogotronic information ethersphere, web 2.1 style_{[via mefi projects]}
posted by delmoi at 2:23 AM PST - 6 comments

Six String Shooter. "What we want to create is an invitation to an attitude of change," [Cesar López] says. "It says a lot of different things — but the main idea is that weapons can be changed from an object of destructiveness to an object of constructiveness." Swords into plowshares axes, Music from Menace, Music Out of Madness.
posted by weston at 12:14 AM PST - 5 comments

Video of guitarist who plays slide with a spoon held in his mouth.
posted by KevinSkomsvold at 12:00 AM PST - 11 comments

Ships are so cool, except when they collide with bridges and catch on fire. [flash] You can also listen to some snappy dialogue from the USS Enterprise. [Warning: The laws in some countries may not permit you to listen these sound clips]. This, and other goodies (including hi-res downloads) from the Solent.
posted by tellurian at 10:21 PM PST - 14 comments

Fomites, fomites everywhere. We all know that handwashing (or Purelling) is a great way to prevent the spread of nosocomial infections in hospital. But now that we know that stethoscopes, white coats, neckties, medical charts, and computer keyboards can all harbor harmful bacteria, what's a doctor to do? Two words: robot doctors.
posted by scblackman at 9:23 PM PST - 12 comments

Bush administration signals intent to invoke the obscure state secrets privilege in order to stop the EFF lawsuit against AT&T, (previously discussed here) for providing the NSA direct access all 312 terabytes of its customers' telephone and internet traffic since 2001, (including those Good Vibrations charges you racked up). In a nutshell, according to legal experts, invoking the privilege kills the judicial process dead: the courthouse doors are closed, and there's nothing but grownup stuff to see here; move along, kids.
posted by squirrel at 7:47 PM PST - 50 comments

The Katrina Cottage is economical, rather charming, and can serve as a "grow" house. At $35,000 for 308 sq ft, it compares favorably to the $75k FEMA trailer. Not a totally new idea - some of the 1906 earthquake refuge shacks are still in existence in San Francisco. Might tiny houses be the future for disaster relief? (via The Blues and Then Some)
posted by madamjujujive at 6:54 PM PST - 39 comments

Flash for cash If you contribute to her campaign Loretta Nall is going to show you the biggest boobs in Alabama politics.
posted by nyxxxx at 6:27 PM PST - 28 comments

Just 'cause they're made by Diebold doesn't mean you have to kick them! A 61-year-old man was arrested after an alleged "poll rage incident" today, kicking over 2 pricy voting machines. See here for more fun & games from the Ohio primary elections. Thanks to malfunctioning Diebold machines and overall shenanigans, polls are open 'til 9:30 tonight. Congressional rep Stephanie Tubbs-Jones was on the case earlier...
posted by bitter-girl.com at 6:14 PM PST - 18 comments

They are aware that 666 signifies the Mark of the Beast or the Antichrist to some organizations and believe June 6 is a date that could trigger problems.
posted by StrasbourgSecaucus at 5:24 PM PST - 79 comments

Bottled water for dogs. For the malnourished or dehydrated pooch. I might be mistaken, but isn't this in Revelations as one of the portents of the apocalypse?
posted by howfar at 5:05 PM PST - 28 comments

Time stands still while you view NetHack porn... The incubus seems to have enjoyed it more than you. NSFW.
posted by hoverboards don't work on water at 2:43 PM PST - 47 comments

Myspace goes into the cell phone business. For $85/month you can take as many photos as you want with your Myspace-branded camera phone and upload them to your Myspace home page. (Take that, LiveJournal!)
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 2:35 PM PST - 30 comments

Following the Money "Millions of dollars contributed by a handful of donors have allowed a small network of theologically conservative individuals and organizations to mount a global campaign that has destabilized the Episcopal Church and may break up the Anglican Communion." Yesterday, in anticipation of the upcoming General Convention, the Diocese of Washington released a report on the influence people like Howard Ahmanson Jr and other wealthy conservatives have had on the Episcopal Church, especially in regards to the church's positions on gays and lesbians.
posted by Biblio at 2:26 PM PST - 20 comments

The Health Insurance Marketplace Modernization and Affordability Act (S. 1955) has passed out of committee and is now slated for a floor vote. The bill is ostensibly designed to save small employers money and extend health insurance options to employees who hadn’t had them. What it is actually likely to do is end basic health insurance coverage for women (and diabetics); birth control, regularly taken prescriptions, cancer screenings, maternity care, and more. Women in every state will lose benefits. S. 1955 would allow insurance plans to ignore important state laws that protect patients, directly affecting more than 90 million Americans. [more inside]
posted by dejah420 at 1:23 PM PST - 42 comments

Some Romans may have lived in ancient China. A few Chinese citizens today in the Gansu province have curly blonde hair and European features. It seems possible now that captured Roman soldiers settled in parts of China. We also know that China and Rome weren't completely isolated from one another. Of course, not everyone agrees.
posted by clockworkjoe at 12:16 PM PST - 44 comments

The Music Animation Machine is a way to visualize complex music - fugues and sonatas and all that. Other tools, such as those mentioned previously here and here, accomplish a similar task in a way, but this is still very, very cool. Watch and download all the videos you can. Bach, Chopin, Scarlatti... if only there were more! Of course, you could buy the DVD.
posted by BlackLeotardFront at 12:12 PM PST - 21 comments

Search early 20th Century news photos. Welcome to the Library of Congress' new George Grantham Bain Collection: the extensive files of one of America's earliest news picture agencies. Some favorites after a morning spent perusing just a small number of the 50kish pics: The Whiteman Submarine Band, a fire truck heading to the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, the flowers at Wilbur Wright's funeral, Ignaz Hildebrandt dead in Union Square, Theatre marquee, a fire in NYC, midday crowd in Union Square, Penn station on a Sunday, suffragettes......and many more.
posted by CunningLinguist at 11:58 AM PST - 37 comments

Somos Americanos Part of the current immigration discussion is a lot of arguing about the proper lyrics to an old English drinking song [mp3] U.S. Senator Lamar Alexander (R-TN) introduced a resolution saying the national anthem should be sung in English. President Bush was for singing the anthem in Spanish; now he's against it. The US Bureau of Education commissioned a Spanish-language version in 1919 and the State Department has otras versiones en español on its web site. "The Star-Spangled Banner" became the US national anthem in 1931.
posted by kirkaracha at 11:39 AM PST - 70 comments

Free Comic Book Day - May 6, 2006 : It's that time again! ZAP! POW! Kaboooooom! Your local comic book store will be offering free samples from your favorite publishers. [FAQ]
posted by blue_beetle at 9:16 AM PST - 19 comments

Long for the lonely whistle and the curving rail? The documentary Catching Out expands on the fascinating world of hobos and freighthoppers as previously pointed out on MeFi. Of course, for those interested, there's the usual wealth of resources. Hell, you can even play the game.
posted by Happy Dave at 9:03 AM PST - 9 comments

Cash in your space game bucks with an ATM card. The online game Entropia now provides players with a real life ATM card, that will convert your galactic booty into actual dollars.
posted by Mean Mr. Bucket at 7:41 AM PST - 31 comments

...Yet set against contemporary values of transparency and accountability, the Nixon-Meir deal of 1969 is now a striking and burdensome anomaly. Not only is Israel's nuclear posture of taboo and total secrecy anachronistic, it is inconsistent with, and costly to, the tenets of modern liberal democracy. At home and abroad Israel needs a better way to handle its nuclear affairs. The deal is also burdensome for the United States, not only because it is inconsistent with U.S. values of openness and accountability, but also because it provokes claims about double standards in its nuclear nonproliferation policy.

Israel crosses the threshold
Shorter version: The Untold Story of Israel's Bomb
posted by y2karl at 7:23 AM PST - 82 comments

Shelley is a Republican.
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane at 6:33 AM PST - 51 comments

Cut and Run? You Bet. A former general explains why he thinks the arguments for staying don't fly. Personally, I think leaving Iraq without disarming militias would be a disaster.
posted by js003 at 5:14 AM PST - 40 comments

Put down that credit card, and step away from the retail counter. In these troubled times, many of our brethren are searching for simplicity, and Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping are here to help. International buy nothing day is only one project they endorse.
posted by paulsc at 1:44 AM PST - 34 comments

Is the Media Failing in America? Dan Rather, in conversation with Orville Schell, Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism.UC Berkeley webcast/podcast conversations via
posted by hortense at 12:31 AM PST - 22 comments

One minute long video of bullets passing through objects in super slow motion. The best part is, from the looks of it, some of these objects totally needed shooting. (link goes to embedded wmv)
posted by jonson at 11:21 PM PST - 33 comments

The Digital Silk Roads Project continues to grow apace with more additions from the Toyo Bunko rare books archive. Now available online, among others, are Les grottes de Touen-Houang, The Thousand Buddhas and several German books, including Chotscho. Unfortunately, all of the high resolution images are greyscale. [related]
posted by tellurian at 8:57 PM PST - 5 comments

Mickey Jupp, the Father of Pub Rock and England's answer to Chuck Berry. Why havent Americans heard of him? As alluded to in the great song "You'll Never Get me Up (in one of Those)" Mickey did not like the thought of flying. Collaborated with Rockpile , Dave Edmunds, Nick Lowe, (who covered his "Switchboard Susan" Lowe's Labour of Lust is commanding in excess of $100 on Amazon, and Jupp's early 70's band, Legend, who sound like Bad Company command in excess of $70 frequently on Ebay. Good stuff for real rock and roll lovers ... Personell on Juppanese: Mickey Jupp, Dave Edmunds, Billy Bremner, Nick Lowe, Terry Willi, Gary Brooker, Bruce Lynch , Chris Spedding, Dave Mattacks,
posted by celerystick at 8:40 PM PST - 12 comments

Remember Napster? Well, it's returned to its roots and is once again offering free music via a revamped ad based web-site. But according to their FAQ, you can only listen to any given song up to 5 times before you'll be asked to pay for it. Even though this equates to roughly 10 million free plays, in an age where BitTorrent is king, will this pay off for the company? Some say no, as the catches that come with this new system are just too many. But (for the moment at least) the share market is saying yes.
posted by Effigy2000 at 6:17 PM PST - 37 comments

Their view is that psyops can be directed toward global transregional audiences. My view is that that’s not possible because it directs psyops against our own friends and allies and even at our own public. ... In Mind Games, Columbia Journalism Review thoroughly examines the disintegrating lines between Public Affairs, Psy-Ops, IO, the public, and the truth. Some old friends are mentioned too: the Lincoln Group, the Rendon Group, the Pentagon, our own media, and others. If truth is our greatest weapon, as Rumsfeld has said, how can the administration hope to prevail in an information war when it is not honest with itself?
posted by amberglow at 4:53 PM PST - 21 comments

Wendelstein 7-X is an advanced stellarator. When finished in 2010 it will be used to contain plasma up to 100 million degrees in a very powerful magnetic field. It's one step towards building a nuclear fusion reactor. I was surprised to find out just now that there are already plans to build one in France.
posted by namagomi at 4:45 PM PST - 29 comments

Conspiracy Central hosts a torrent for The AntiChrist and a Cup of Tea. Author, Tim Cohen, takes legal action. PayPal seizes CC's account. CC appeals to its members exlaining the situation. Tim Cohen joins the fray.
posted by airguitar at 3:21 PM PST - 41 comments

While the main Day Without An Immigrant site is down at the moment (cached), the protests have begun and they are everywhere (LA, Arizona, Pennsylvania/NJ). In SF they look quite large. More on flickr and google news.
posted by mathowie at 1:45 PM PST - 199 comments

Pat Venditte is an ambidextrous pitcher. He's not quite in the Big Leagues, but pitching with both arms is extremely rare. The last time it happened in the Majors was 1995. Before that it was 1893.
posted by turbodog at 12:26 PM PST - 27 comments

Forgotten silent film comedian Larry Semon. Part II - Heyday. Part III - Trouble Brewing. In 1920, he was the world's 2nd-most-famous Hollywood star, with a contract and creative control rivaling Chaplin. In 1921, he made a popular series of films with Oliver Hardy as his main comic foil, six years before Laurel & Hardy became a household name. In 1925, he directed a truly bizarre silent version of The Wizard of Oz, just as wild overspending, erratic behavior and lawsuits ruined his career. The Larry Semon Research site has an interesting picture gallery.
posted by mediareport at 12:13 PM PST - 15 comments

KCDX: Five years of non-stop rock. "There is no discipline at KCDX, where the song choices are as chaotic as a schoolyard at recess... The signal, which started broadcasting throughout central Arizona and much of Phoenix in 2002, played an eclectic mix that included hits by Huey Lewis and the News and an obscure 1971 tune about cannibalism by the Buoys. There were no commercials, no DJs, no way the station made money."
posted by rkent at 11:44 AM PST - 29 comments

Maid for a Month. On February 1, Ontario raised its minimum wage from $7.45 to $7.75 per hour. Well-known Toronto Globe and Mail writer Jan Wong: "I thought the best way to tell the story of that 30-cent raise was to work — and live — at the bottom of the food chain. I would find a low-paying job, a low-rent apartment and, single-mom-like, take my boys with me for the month and see how we survived."
posted by russilwvong at 10:34 AM PST - 151 comments

Do you ever get the calling to witness to atheists but don't respond because you don't know how to start? Have you ever tried, but got pulled around from one point to the next spending hours getting nowhere? Are you just too chicken to do it? Well fret no more - help is here! The Chat-O-Matic is specifically designed to get you started on the right foot when debating skeptics on the Christian faith. It will also help you obey Jesus' command in not throwing your pearls before swine. (An Atheist Witnessing Tool for the rest of us)
posted by youarenothere at 10:09 AM PST - 88 comments

Tunnel Runners drive convoys of very expensive sports cars very slowly through tunnels under London. It's the acoustics.
posted by carter at 10:07 AM PST - 32 comments

North by South : web content on the Great Migration, the result of a six-year, NEH-funded collaboration between Kenyon College and K-12 students in Ohio and various Southern communities.
posted by Miko at 9:56 AM PST - 3 comments

ABC Streams full episodes of Lost, Alias, Desperate Housewives and Commmander in Chief for free in May via flash.
posted by blue_beetle at 8:36 AM PST - 53 comments

Zen Bondage (game, non-sexual, large download (~28 MB), Windows only) [more inside]
posted by Bugbread at 8:32 AM PST - 18 comments

MAYDAY. The largest and most audacious civil disobedience action in American history is also the least remembered yet it had a profound affect on the development of tactics for practicing civil disobedience in the United States. MayDay! was perhaps the only essentially peaceful action, at least in modern times, undertaken with the intent to shut down the federal government . The slogan, early on at least, was "If the government won't stop the war, we'll stop the government! Thanks to Wikipedia, at least there is something easily accessible about it. And, with the advent of blogging, other thoughtful pieces are appearing.
posted by swlabr at 8:17 AM PST - 19 comments

She's she's been pawed by apes, strafed by a bomber, and snubbed by the daleks. But today, at 75, the Empire State Building still looks great.
posted by Smart Dalek at 7:23 AM PST - 25 comments

Mission Accomplished? Then why is there even more outrage? Last year, celebration and theatre dominated the day.. This year it's different. This is also the 120th anniversary of the Haymarket Riots resulting in four anarchists being hanged. Interestingly enough, the riots happened because of workers rights being unfair. Is this a case of history repeating itself?
posted by wheelieman at 6:59 AM PST - 8 comments

Today Is Mission Accomplished Day
posted by If I Had An Anus at 6:44 AM PST - 100 comments