MetaFilter

"Echo Point" is a chilling, sound-rich supernatural radio drama written by Australian author Louis Nowra. Originally aired on BBC Radio 4, it is now available on SoundCloud via producer/director Judith Kampfner. [more inside]
posted by mykescipark at 11:55 PM PST - 6 comments

Let's go back to 1982 and let Jim Butterfield not only tell you about the Commodore 64, but really show you what it's all about, in a two hour demonstration and training video that takes you from opening the box to coding with the Commodore. (on YouTube, and with a different intro on Archive.org) [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 9:40 PM PST - 87 comments

The Final Moments of Karl Brant. "In the near future, a neurologist and two homicide detectives use experimental brain taping technology to question a murder victim about his final moments." [Via]
posted by homunculus at 8:28 PM PST - 32 comments

The Most Exquisitely Weird Spiders You Will Ever See. [more inside]
posted by mazola at 7:25 PM PST - 47 comments

Urinal Man asks players to choose the optimal urinal in a bathroom, and then grades their choices.
posted by Going To Maine at 7:00 PM PST - 121 comments

You might want to check out this video primer first, just to get the idea, or you might just want to dive in and zoom, zoom, zoom into the Tokyo Tower Gigapixel Panorama
posted by flapjax at midnite at 6:36 PM PST - 45 comments

It Don’t Gitmo Better Than This. Inside the Dark Heart of Guantánamo Bay By Molly Crabapple.
posted by chunking express at 5:26 PM PST - 31 comments

Why the controversial (and somewhat backfired) Lauren Green interview of Reza Aslan is is about more than just Fox News idiocy.  
posted by Artw at 5:22 PM PST - 162 comments

Marriage equality comes to Minnesota and Rhode Island at midnight, August 1, and the Minnesota DFL state senators wanted to congratulate their same-sex newlywed constituents. [more inside]
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 4:51 PM PST - 34 comments

Nature is neat, so let's all go on a Neature Walk! [slyt]
posted by mannequito at 4:42 PM PST - 2 comments

Remember when Dan Savage started a campaign to convince LGBT teens that "it gets better"? It's a noble cause, but sadly there's still a huge subset of the population out there for whom it will only get worse...
posted by Blasdelb at 4:26 PM PST - 76 comments

LA-based singer-songwriter Moses Sumney performs his song "Replaceable" in a single-take video shot by famed director Brian Cross, aka B+. Recommended if you like loop pedals (previously-ish) &/or soul music. [more inside]
posted by raihan_ at 3:22 PM PST - 7 comments

What The Posters In Your First Apartment Say About You Now
posted by The Whelk at 12:59 PM PST - 353 comments

Abbie the Cat [Has a Posse] passed away on Tuesday, July 23, 2013. Started in 2001, the blog of Abbie the Cat was sometimes irregularly updated, but almost always written from Abbie's point of view. Readers were warned of Abbie's impending death on July 22 by Rob, Abbie's owner. (Previously.) [more inside]
posted by aabbbiee at 12:38 PM PST - 51 comments

"The Future of Programming" by Bret Victor, July 9, 1973.
posted by mrgrimm at 11:45 AM PST - 28 comments

Warning! These 1950s Movie Gimmicks Will Shock You
posted by brundlefly at 10:39 AM PST - 47 comments

In a new batch of slides from an NSA presentation (originally leaked by now fugitive Edward Snowden), Glenn Greenwald of the Gaurdian goes into great detail about NSA tool "X-Keyscore" information gathering system, which allows the NSA to view "nearly everything a user does on the internet", including Skype, Facebook chats, and other social media activity. [more inside]
posted by lattiboy at 8:56 AM PST - 250 comments

Once upon a time, there was a little yellow house in Brampton, just northwest of Toronto, that housed what we used to know as CFNY. (Americans: think WKRP, but without Bailey Quarters.) Before it turned into the slick abomination 102.1 The Edge, CFNY was the commercial station that (along with community/university stations CIUT and CKLN) supported new and independent music. But starting at noon today, Indie 88 will be inheriting CFNY's mantle, except that kids these days don't wear mantles, so they will have Alan Cross in place as their Guidance Counsellor instead, which is way better than any silly old mantle. They're promising a pretty eclectic playlist, but for the next 12 minutes, this is the one song you'll hear (if you can actually pull in a signal on your terrestrial radio).
posted by maudlin at 8:47 AM PST - 37 comments

Famous Eyeglasses, Famous Shoes, Famous Guitars (video), Famous Guns by designer Federico Mauro
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 8:46 AM PST - 18 comments

Why don't we find men sexy when they're presented in pinup poses considered sexy for women? Photographer Rion Sabean's Men-Ups! project is "... aimed at reversing the stereotypes created by society, begging the questions, why is it sexual for a female to pose one way, and not sexual for a male? Why is it considered more comical or unsettling for males to act the more socially defined feminine?"
posted by Annie Savoy at 8:38 AM PST - 111 comments

Let’s say you’re a writer, working a novel set in Minneapolis. Your protagonist arrives home after a long day of doing whatever it is your protagonist does all day. To this point, you’ve been very specific with local landmarks and a general feeling of the city — your protagonist rides the 21A, eats breakfast at the Grand Cafe, and meets his or her attorney in an office on the 12th floor of the Rand Tower. All good so far. You’ve set the scene very effectively. People are going to say, “This is a great Minneapolis novel" after they read it. However, the time has now come for you to insert a specific street address into the text. You like specifics, and you need a real-sounding mailing address for, say, a situation where the protagonist receives a mysterious letter. How will you accomplish this? Here you have a problem. You only have two options, neither one very good. [more inside]
posted by cthuljew at 8:31 AM PST - 104 comments

100 great science fiction (short) stories by women, with links to the stories where available, as compiled by Ian Sales out of irritation with a 1978 anthology of great science fiction stories in which only five had been written by women.
posted by MartinWisse at 8:11 AM PST - 32 comments

John le Carré on The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. Interview recorded for the BBC Proms Literary Festival. Includes actor John Shrapnel reading extracts (SLYT). It's slightly longer than the version which appeared in that night's concert interval and includes audience Q&A as well as pictures.
posted by feelinglistless at 3:47 AM PST - 8 comments

Jumpy knows a lot of cool tricks! (SLYT)
posted by disillusioned at 10:59 PM PST - 28 comments

Louie Louie is a song with a curious history. Inspired by (and/or partially copied from) El Loco Cha Cha by Rene Touzet and Havana Moon by Chuck Berry (YouTube), the original song by Richard Berry and The Pharaohs (YT) is a mix of calypso, cha-cha, and rhythm & blues. The next version was by Rockin' Robin Roberts & The Wailers (YT), which added a certain rock and roll swagger that will sound more familiar to most folks. But the vocals are all wrong, as they're too sharp, too easy to understand. The Kingsmen made the version everyone was talking about, with concerns of obscene lyrics getting the FBI involved (choice excerpts on The Smoking Gun). [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 9:24 PM PST - 49 comments

Nellie Lutcher - Blue Skies, It Had to Be You & Let's Fall In Love
Martha Davis & Spouse - That's Life
Dinah Washington with Louis Jordan - What A Difference A Day Made & Makin' Whoopee
Ella Fitzgerald -- It Don't Mean A Thing If It Ain't Got That Swing
Count Basie & Helen Humes - I Cried for You
Sarah Vaughn -- The Nearness of You
Billie Holiday -- Fine and Mellow
posted by y2karl at 8:46 PM PST - 13 comments

Bradley Manning cleared of 'aiding the enemy' but guilty of most other charges. "Manning, the source of the massive WikiLeaks trove of secret disclosures, faces a possible maximum sentence of more than 130 years in military jail after he was convicted of most charges on which he stood trial." Transcripts from Bradley Manning's Trial. [more inside]
posted by homunculus at 8:16 PM PST - 222 comments

The local school district in Clarksville, Arkansas will be arming 20 school employees. [more inside]
posted by HuronBob at 7:57 PM PST - 125 comments

Jay Porter had two restaurants: one used the normal restaurant business model and one banned tipping servers, which gained national notoriety for a practice that is all but unheard of in the US. Now that the gratuity-free restaurant, The Linkery, is closed, he is writing about the ultimate experience and the reasons for doing it. [more inside]
posted by Kaiverus at 7:15 PM PST - 54 comments

In a remote psychiatric hospital in Sweden, there is a man known as Thomas Quick who has been convicted of unspeakable crimes. Over the course of multiple trials, he would tell his brutal stories—of stabbings, stranglings, rape, incest, cannibalism—to almost anyone who would listen. Then, after his eighth and final murder conviction, he went silent for nearly a decade. In the last few years, though, he has been thinking about all he has said and done, and now he has something new to confess: He left out the worst part of all.
posted by porn in the woods at 7:04 PM PST - 32 comments

Running with the big boys is not as easy as it looks! (SLYT) [more inside]
posted by elizardbits at 6:23 PM PST - 26 comments

Crystal Castles' "Untrust Us"... masterfully covered by the Capital Children's Choir. (original, for reference) (the oeuvre Capital Children's Choir has been referenced previously, but their Crystal Castles cover is new and it's awesome.)
posted by sigma7 at 5:10 PM PST - 20 comments

Xtranormal (previously on Metafilter) is the animation website that launched with the slogan, "If you can type, you can make movies." Millions of cartoons were produced, and a few of them were very popular. The software was even used to create animation for TV shows (such as a recurring segment on Fox's Red Eye with Greg Gutfeld) and commercials. But in recent months, the company made a series of controversial decisions and began showing clear signs of trouble. They stopped allowing users to monetize their videos on Youtube. They stopped posting new assets, shut down their user forum and blog, and frustrated users by becoming increasingly non-communicative. The site was hit with serious technical problems that made publishing movies almost impossible, and these issues went unfixed for months. Finally, on June 28th, the company announced that it was shutting down the site. "As of July 31, 2013," reads an announcement on the company's Facebook page, "Xtranormal will be discontinuing current subscriptions, points plans and existing services. Please use your existing XP points and publish and download your movies before that date." Strangely, there has been very little coverage of the site's imminent demise. [more inside]
posted by Ursula Hitler at 5:04 PM PST - 54 comments

The Ethics of Saving Lives With Autonomous Cars Are Far Murkier Than You Think
posted by spiderskull at 5:01 PM PST - 54 comments

Rubix by University of Greenwich student Chris Kelly -  an Escher-like surrealist film which mixes and rotates urban landscapes like a Rubik's Cube, created for his thesis "Time and Relative Dimensions in Space: The Possibilities of Utilising Virtual[ly Impossible] Environments in Architecture." (via)
posted by Artw at 4:34 PM PST - 7 comments

Professor Matthew Kirschenbaum, as part of his larger interest in the problem of software preservation, asks the provocative question What are the 10 most influential software programs of all time?
posted by Horace Rumpole at 4:30 PM PST - 93 comments

President Obama visited an Amazon facility in Tennessee today giving a speech proposing a "grand bargain for middle-class jobs" that would cut the U.S. corporate tax rate and use billions of dollars in revenues generated by a business tax overhaul to fund projects aimed at creating jobs. The American Booksellers Association is not happy about the visit and called him out on it.
posted by dukes909 at 12:22 PM PST - 228 comments

"I sent this paper to JK Rowling explaining how the wizarding gene could be singular, autosomal, and dominant despite the protests of a bunch of fans who stopped learning genetics after Punnett squares." See also: Wizarding Genetics: More Complicated Than Mendel! and Purple Orchids and Muggleborn Wizards: A Theory of Wizard Genetics
posted by Memo at 11:26 AM PST - 57 comments

How the Robots lost - The Fall of High-Frequency Trading. For the past few years High-Frequency Trading was where the money was but now it looks like the worm is turning. The scale of HFT is stunning - see, for instance, what happens in a half second of trading in Johnson & Johnson.. While profits are evaporating, serious concerns remain about systemic risk.
posted by storybored at 10:47 AM PST - 50 comments

"At this point, I feel like I need to warn women who are considering starting a blog that this is the stuff they will probably have to deal with" (SLxojane)
posted by box at 10:37 AM PST - 235 comments

A hillbilly and his zaftig racoon friend dance on the porch. [SLYT]
posted by sparklemotion at 10:37 AM PST - 45 comments

There is only one color of dress for romantic comedies
posted by morganannie at 10:25 AM PST - 61 comments

"Don't forget the cream" a video by the LA comedy troupe (and twitter masterclass) Women. Warning: many Women sketches are NSFW and almost none include actual women, or anyone else.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 9:46 AM PST - 13 comments

Released in 1978, Buffalo Rider(Trailer) was a "feature-length exercise in padding out a movie’s running time as much as possible". But in another way, it was also about a guy on a buffalo(Full Movie, If You Dare). Decades later, Austin's The Possum Posse would retell the epic saga of the guy on a buffalo with the series, Guy On a Buffalo:
Episode 1 (Bears, Indians & Such)
Episode 2 (Orphans, Cougars & What Not)
Episode 3 Finale Part 1 (Origins, Villains & The Like)
Episode 4 Finale Part 2 (Rehab, Vengeance & What Have You)
posted by Alvy Ampersand at 9:22 AM PST - 18 comments

Advertising about menstruation has often emphasized the down side - the inconveniences that "feminine products" can save women from. They have also often focused on body-shaming - suggesting that ideally, no one should know you're even using them. Until now - a menstruation-related ad for HelloFlo, a company that sends tampons delivered to your door, regularly, when you need them. It is voiced and acted by a spunky young girl, who is not embarrassed but flamboyantly and splendidly proud of having her period.
posted by corb at 9:19 AM PST - 114 comments

As much as Metafilter loves Jim Henson's Dark Crystal and Labyrinth, neither of those films would be half as powerful without the work of Brian and Wendy Froud. [more inside]
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 9:06 AM PST - 17 comments

Spain Secretary of State for Energy, Alberto Nadal has signed a draft royal decree that levies a consumption taxes on solar power (El Pais translation, lol version)
posted by jeffburdges at 8:43 AM PST - 40 comments

Bubblewrap bike (SLYT)
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 8:40 AM PST - 18 comments

A frightening and violent mob swept through the normally quiet seaside community of Huntington Beach last night following a surfing competition in the area. Businesses were vandalized and looted, portable toilets overturned, and brutal fistfights waged right out in the open. It was an ugly display and a sad day for California. But more than that, it was a reminder that we must begin to seriously consider the values of our thuggish white youth.

(Oddly enough, do make sure to read the comments, they're amazing.)

posted by Blasdelb at 8:32 AM PST - 160 comments

Report to the President L. Rafael Reif releases the Aaron Swartz report to allmit. [more inside]
posted by condesita at 8:28 AM PST - 62 comments

Kubb is a lawn game that was (maybe) invented by Vikings, and is often described as a combination of bowling, horseshoes, and chess. This adorably-accented video explains the rules, as does the helpful infographic here. It's easy to make your own kubb set- and once you have, you can ask all about the finer points at Planet Kubb, read Kubbnation Magazine, and sign up for the National Kubb Championship.
posted by showbiz_liz at 7:56 AM PST - 19 comments

'Bro-Care' instead of Bum-Fights? A homeless person is offered retail therapy, a haircut, a hotel room, a ride in a car with a white leather interior and a substantial meal (oh, and a blindfolding) in exchange for being videotaped to encourage YouTube subscriptions for a channel. Apparently it hits many users of reddit "right in the feels" (a euphemism for feeling emotional/empathetic about something that you're exposed to)
posted by panaceanot at 7:30 AM PST - 41 comments

There's no where to hide anymore. The United States Air Force has a Brony squadron! Here's the squadron patch.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 7:28 AM PST - 32 comments

Hey, remember when archaeologists discovered the remains of Richard III under a car park in Leicester? Well, apparently they also unearthed a stone coffin dated to at least a century before Richard. When it was opened, it was revealed to contain... another coffin, sealed and made of lead. None of us in the team have ever seen a lead coffin within a stone coffin before, says one of the archaeologists. Oh sure, it's probably just the remains of one of the founders of the monastery that used to be there, but if the movies have taught us anything, it's that if something is mysterious, it must also be evil, right?
posted by Cash4Lead at 7:14 AM PST - 45 comments

A Brief History of Sour Beer
posted by exogenous at 7:04 AM PST - 38 comments

Do Communists Have Better Sex? [SLYT]
posted by whimsicalnymph at 6:46 AM PST - 14 comments

Not this guy. Not this guy, either. It's this little fella. [more inside]
posted by pjern at 6:31 AM PST - 20 comments

After a series of death threats led her to quit blogging in 2007 (previously), the brilliant writer/UX designer Kathy Sierra is back with a new blog, and an excellent new post: "Your app makes me fat." In typical Sierra fashion, it's personal, entertaining, research-derived, and provocative. (An archive of old Sierra posts can be found either on her old blog, Creating Passionate Users, or in this 400-page-long fan-made PDF.)
posted by Rory Marinich at 5:50 AM PST - 43 comments

Cat tries to eat octopus; octopus has other ideas. Perhaps not safe for cephalofiles. (slyt)
posted by MartinWisse at 5:24 AM PST - 32 comments

Alexander Trocchi—A Life in Pieces is a short biographical film about the once notorious Scottish writer, provocateur and ‘ungentlemanly junkie,’ including reminiscences from William S. Burroughs and Leonard Cohen. [more inside]
posted by misteraitch at 4:13 AM PST - 3 comments

The time I saw my balls on a giant television
posted by mippy at 2:46 AM PST - 41 comments

The ultimate celebrity interview! McFarlane writes the archetype.
posted by jaduncan at 12:54 AM PST - 25 comments

In 1973, The Who released their sixth album, Quadrophenia. The epic double album tells the story of a boy named Jimmy Cooper who deals with mental illness on top of the run-of-the-mill stresses of teen life. But Jimmy Cooper isn't just any London teen.  Jimmy Cooper is a Mod. [more inside]
posted by Pirate-Bartender-Zombie-Monkey at 8:38 PM PST - 68 comments

Jerry Garcia & David Grisman -- Two Soldiers
Jerry Garcia & David Grisman -- Handsome Cabin Boy
Jerry Garcia & David Grisman -- Man Of Constant Sorrow
Jerry Garcia & David Grisman -- When First Unto This Country
Jerry Garcia & David Grisman -- Dreadful Wind and Rain
Jerry Garcia & David Grisman -- Russian Lullaby
Jerry Garcia & David Grisman -- Sweet Sunny South
Jerry Garcia & David Grisman -- Old Rockin' Chair
Jerry Garcia & David Grisman -- Down Where The River Bends
Jerry Garcia & David Grisman -- Shady Grove
Jerry Garcia & David Grisman -- Friend of the Devil
Jerry Garcia & David Grisman -- Ripple [more inside]
posted by y2karl at 8:34 PM PST - 16 comments

Mark Hirsch worked as a professional photographer for almost 20 years. He was laid off, then he was hit by a truck. He all but stopped working, until he got an iPhone. His friend goaded him into using the camera, and he started taking pictures of "That Tree." A little more than a year later he was profiled in "How a tree helped heal me."
posted by nevercalm at 6:57 PM PST - 13 comments

If you're reading this it's already too late... Hiding messages in hotels since 2006. By David Bussell. [Via]
posted by homunculus at 5:25 PM PST - 57 comments

Game of Brands: The Game of Thrones Houses as Modern Corporations (Article contains spoilers if you're not up on the end of the current season of the series.) Ads, logos, the whole thing, for such companies as Air Targaeryen, the Lannister Investment Group... [more inside]
posted by mephron at 3:54 PM PST - 35 comments

Gary Shteyngart (previously-ish) tries on a pair of Google Glasses (SLnewyorker)
posted by bbuda at 3:35 PM PST - 49 comments

A layperson-friendly analysis of a seminal (1100+ cites) study on obesity that found no correlation between environment/upbringing and obesity, whilst finding very strong correlation between genetic heritage and obesity. To sum up: adopted children's body weight matches their biological parents, not their adoptive parents.
posted by seanmpuckett at 3:33 PM PST - 64 comments

The Tournament of Literary Friends. "Serious readers know we shouldn’t go looking for friends in fiction. Better to look for moral questions, social truths, emotional possibilities—the stuff of life. And yet, isn’t it sort of fun to imagine playing Eschaton with Michael Pemulis or cruising Mexico with the Savage Detectives? Isn’t imagining ourselves among fictional people actually pretty central to the experience of reading?" Novelist Katherine Hill and her husband draw up a tournament bracket of their likely/ideal friends from literary fiction. From the Paris Review.
posted by sweetkid at 1:56 PM PST - 79 comments

"I hope we come to the meeting today with solutions and not excuses for me to wiggle myself out of the repeated lies I have told over the last 6 months." Tony Bennett, the Indiana Superintendent of Public Instruction, had a big problem. Christel House Academy, a public charter school in Indianapolis founded by time-share magnate and major GOP donor Christel DeHaan, had come in with a C on the state's A-F grading scale, thanks to poor scores by 9th and 10th graders in English and math. "They need to understand that anything less than an A for Christel House compromises all of our accountability work," Bennett wrote to a staffer. Fortunately, Bennett's team found a solution, revealed today in staff e-mails obtained by the AP -- change the state's grading scale so that the offending grades didn't count. Will Bennett be able to hold on as Indiana's top education official? Not to worry: in January, he moved on to the same job in Florida. [more inside]
posted by escabeche at 1:44 PM PST - 70 comments

Top 10 most iconic data graphs of the last decade.
FastCoLabs enlisted three data visualization experts to compile this list to answer the question posed in Simply Statistics, a blog from three Johns Hopkins biostatistics professors. via [more inside]
posted by mcstayinskool at 1:11 PM PST - 27 comments

How the Western Was Lost (and Why it Matters)
posted by Artw at 11:17 AM PST - 222 comments

Psychologists recount a valuable lesson about the fragility of statistical validity and the state of publishing. "Two of the present authors, Matt Motyl and Brian A. Nosek, share interests in political ideology. We were inspired by the fast growing literature on embodiment that demonstrates surprising links between body and mind to investigate embodiment of political extremism. Participants from the political left, right, and center (N = 1,979) completed a perceptual judgment task in which words were presented in different shades of gray. Participants had to click along a gradient representing grays from near black to near white to select a shade that matched the shade of the word. We calculated accuracy: How close to the actual shade did participants get? The results were stunning. Moderates perceived the shades of gray more accurately than extremists on the left and right (p = .01). Our conclusion: Political extremists perceive the world in black and white figuratively and literally. Our design and follow-up analyses ruled out obvious alternative explanations such as time spent on task and a tendency to select extreme responses. Enthused about the result, we identified Psychological Science as our fallback journal after we toured the Science, Nature, and PNAS rejection mills. The ultimate publication, Motyl and Nosek (2012), served as one of Motyl’s signature publications as he finished graduate school and entered the job market. The story is all true, except for the last sentence; we did not publish the finding." [more inside]
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 10:56 AM PST - 19 comments

Two nightmarish visions of Albuquerque collide in this Breaking Bad/Weird Al mashup [spoilers for Breaking Bad through the most recent half-season]
posted by Copronymus at 10:39 AM PST - 20 comments

A Boston inventor has created a cup and straw that detect the presence of date rape drugs. The cup and straw change color in the presence of the common date rape drug GHB.
posted by chrchr at 10:23 AM PST - 91 comments

“It would be dreadfully unromantic to fall in love with a soiled invisible, wouldn’t it,” Clive Thompson reviews Wired Love, a novel about romance over the network, in this case, the telegraph network, circa 1880. [more inside]
posted by zabuni at 10:03 AM PST - 7 comments

Not Even Silicon Valley Escapes History [more inside]
posted by Pruitt-Igoe at 9:59 AM PST - 15 comments

On this day 128 years ago, Theodosia Burr Goodman was born in Avondale, a wealthy, largely Jewish, suburb of Cincinnati. An aspiring actress, she went to New York in 1908. Upon finding that there were no meaningful roles for blondes (Google books preview), she dyed her hair brunette. She gained notoriety some seven years later, with what would be her iconic black hair and dark eye shadow, in the movie version of a Rudyard Kipling poem called The Vampire. It was an overwrought melodrama called A Fool There Was, which starred Theodosia as Theda Bara, a femme fatale who lured men to their destruction. This film marked the first major motion picture publicity campaign and first studio-manufactured "star." [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 9:53 AM PST - 13 comments

Artist Sergio Albiac is creating generative portraits from selfies. You can be part of his new exhibition by submitting a photo via Google Drive. "In a nutshell, this experiment, with the participation of an Internet audience, will produce as many artworks as possible.... An automated process will create human portraits as generative collages, using as sources some images from the Hubble Space Telescope. Generated portraits will be exhibited at the flickr Stardust Portrait exhibition."
posted by Annie Savoy at 8:38 AM PST - 3 comments

"Founded in 1912 as a farm colony of Brooklyn State Hospital, the Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in Queens [New York] became, by mid-century, a world unto itself. At its peak, it housed some 7,000 patients. They tended gardens and raised livestock on the hospital’s grounds. The hospital contained gymnasiums, a swimming pool, a theater, a television studio, and giant kitchens and laundries where patients were put to work. Today, Creedmoor, still run by the New York State Office of Mental Health, has only a few hundred patients" and houses The Living Museum, an 'art asylum within an asylum' where patients can create and exhibit their art. But what is life like inside the institution itself? In 2010, Katherine B. Olsen spent weeks interviewing staff and patients. Her essay, published this week, 'Something More Wrong' takes us inside Creedmoor's women's ward. [more inside]
posted by zarq at 8:01 AM PST - 7 comments

You've just purchased a meal at a restaurant that offers a salad bar, with the stipulation that you can only take items from it once. How do you get the most out of your one trip? Simple: build a salad tower. [more inside]
posted by tocts at 7:18 AM PST - 80 comments

After explaining the situation to two or three people, my nightmare stepped up a notch with the most chilling phrase of all. "But Mr Welch, your cards haven’t been reported stolen." One man's experience of credit card fraud.
posted by Hartster at 6:28 AM PST - 132 comments

Spanning more than four months and 3,000 individual panels, spawing more than 50,000 posts and 1.4 million views on the official thread in the XKCD forums, and generating countless fan theories and speculations, Randall Munroe fame has brought his epic "Time" to an end. [more inside]
posted by brentajones at 6:28 AM PST - 30 comments

By Heart is a series on The Atlantic's website where writers speak about their favorite passages, each illustrated by Doug McLean. Here are a few of the entries so far: Stephen King on two opening lines, Hanan Al-Shaykh on One Thousand and One Nights, Susan Choi on The Great Gatsby, Jessica Francis Kane on Marcus Aurelius, Fay Weldon on The Myth of Sisyphus, Adam Mansbach on Montaigne, Ayana Mathis on Osip Mandelstam, Anthony Marra on Jesus' Son, and Mohsin Hamid on Haruki Murakami.
posted by Kattullus at 5:51 AM PST - 7 comments

Science fiction and fantasy writer/editor Jay Lake has been living with cancer for years, but in early May received notice that unfortunately he wouldn't do so for much longer (diagnostic details), with the most optimistic forecast giving him just a year left to live. If nothing else, this has given him time to wind up his affairs, as well as do something few people get the chance to: attend his own wake.
posted by MartinWisse at 1:38 AM PST - 12 comments

Nutrition experts contend that all we need is what's typically found in a routine diet. Industry representatives, backed by a fascinating history, argue that foods don't contain enough, and we need supplements. Fortunately, many excellent studies have now resolved the issue.

(SLAtlantic)
posted by anazgnos at 10:37 PM PST - 110 comments

Robert Downey Junior and Sting singing Driven to Tears.
posted by SpacemanStix at 10:28 PM PST - 41 comments

A 21 year old man was arrested for tweeting rape threats. The target of the tweets, Caroline Criado-Perez, had successfully campaigned to have a woman (Jane Austen) shown on the UK's new 10 pound note, and has been subsequently receiving incessant rape and death threats via twitter, a violation of UK law. Twitter's Terms of Service are being repeatedly and flagrantly violated in this episode, and the company appears to be having issues responding to a backlog of reports; it responded to Criado-Perez only that she take the matter to the police. This resulted in shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper asking Twitter to review its policies for handling abuse complaints. [more inside]
posted by vira at 10:24 PM PST - 128 comments

Largest space battle in history claims 2,900 ships, untold virtual lives. After 5 hours of battle, CFC defeats the TEST alliance. [more inside]
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 10:15 PM PST - 82 comments

Estimated US Energy Use in 2012: 95.1 Quads - "Energy flow charts show the relative size of primary energy resources and end uses in the United States, with fuels compared on a common energy unit basis." (via) [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 9:45 PM PST - 12 comments

Some insight into what Stanley Kubrick liked of what he saw in the world of film over the years, with a master list at the end.
posted by indices at 6:39 PM PST - 21 comments

One Nation Under Elvis

My own conversion to country music came all of a sudden in 1990, around another campfire, also in Nevada. The great Western Shoshone anti-nuclear and land-rights activist Bill Rosse, a decorated World War II vet and former farm manager, unpacked his guitar and sang Hank Williams and traditional songs for hours. I was enchanted as much by the irreverent rancor of some of the songs as by the pure blue yearning of others. I’d had no idea such coolness, wit, and poetry was lurking in this stuff I was taught to scorn before I’d met it.

[more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 4:06 PM PST - 108 comments

Twelve Absent Men: Rebuilding the American Jury. "Juries hear only 4 percent of criminal trials in America. Their decline has fostered radical punitiveness, but reforms and novel institutions are breathing new life into the jury and civic participation more broadly."
posted by homunculus at 2:00 PM PST - 54 comments

"I would refuse to go to a homophobic heaven. No, I would say sorry, I mean I would much rather go to the other place." Nobel Peace laureate Desmond Tutu, former chair of independent advisory group The Elders, was in the papers today. "I would not worship a God who is homophobic and that is how deeply I feel about this." Also reported by BBC News and The Mail on Sunday.
posted by glasseyes at 1:16 PM PST - 113 comments

A look at the phenomenon of "dabbing" and concentrated cannabis (butane hash oil, or BHO) - its potency, legality, and its exclusion from the 2013 Emerald Cup - from a Humboldt County perspective, courtesy of the Lost Coast Outpost. In pot-friendly towns like Arcata, it's got the streets on fire.
posted by porn in the woods at 1:15 PM PST - 55 comments

Slackstory presents a clip reel of Saturday Night Live actors breaking character.
posted by The Whelk at 12:37 PM PST - 63 comments

How I Recovered My Stolen iPad - in which Facebook, Twitter, and Find my iPad work in tandem to find a doofus.
posted by nevercalm at 11:51 AM PST - 159 comments

Barnaby Jack, a hacker and security researcher previously known for his hacks involving ATMs and insulin pumps, has died in San Francisco. He was 35. His death came just days before he was to give a presentation about techniques for hacking implanted heart devices, which could kill a person from 30 feet away.
posted by anemone of the state at 11:49 AM PST - 26 comments

Give The Anarchist A Cigarette: Counterculture legend Mick Farren dies with his boots on Mick Farren, rabble rouser, musician, and writer, collapsed last night on stage at the The Borderline, in London. He died soon after. Hmm, sorry, I seem to be crap at this. Here's some more links to the story: From Uncut: Mick Farren 1943 - 2013, From Vintage Vinyl News: Passings: Mick Farren of the Deviants (1943 - 2013), and from Ultimate Calssic Rock: Mick Farren Dies After Collapsing On Stage In London That last has a pretty good version of "Let's Loot The Super Market".
posted by evilDoug at 11:44 AM PST - 19 comments

The War Diaries of Lt. George Lester Cushman
posted by curious nu at 11:11 AM PST - 4 comments

Dan Bergstein, Sparknotes blogger (and best known for blogging about the Twilight series), has posted some YouTube instructional videos on How to Knit a Scarf, How to Make a Pumpkin Pie, and How to Wrap a Present. Please note that Dan does not actually know how to do any of these things, and that if you do have these skills viewing these videos might be slightly traumatizing.
posted by orange swan at 9:48 AM PST - 11 comments

The Clone Wars (previously) are over, with only a few last mopping up operations underway and a few Jedi unaccounted for. But there is another... Star Wars Rebels will be the new Lucasfilm animated series, and will be taking it's design direction from the work of Ralph McQuarrie.
posted by Artw at 9:34 AM PST - 29 comments

The disease that sours oranges and leaves them half green, already ravaging citrus crops across the world, had reached the state’s storied groves. To slow the spread of the bacterium that causes the scourge, they chopped down hundreds of thousands of infected trees and sprayed an expanding array of pesticides on the winged insect that carries it. But the contagion could not be contained.

With a precipitous decline in Florida’s harvest predicted within the decade, the only chance left to save it, Mr. Kress believed, was one that his industry and others had long avoided for fear of consumer rejection.

They would have to alter the orange’s DNA — with a gene from a different species. (SLNYT)
posted by yeoz at 8:32 AM PST - 117 comments

Time to collect firewood - a short video showing how a solitary man harvests bark-beetle damaged trees using a home-made raft and a collection of specialized tools. For contrast, the same raft is used in the very social "Crayfishing in Ätran"
posted by 445supermag at 8:13 AM PST - 19 comments

A guide for classical radio announcers... and whoever else is interested.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 6:31 AM PST - 27 comments

Phil Fish, the volatile and sometimes controversial developer of indie game Fez, has abruptly announced its cancellation: "this is as much as i can stomach. this is isn’t the result of any one thing, but the end of a long, bloody campaign. you win." Though this follows in the wake of a popular podcast's host calling him a "tosspot", a "wanker", and a "fucking asshole", Fish has been the subject of massive Internet antagonism ever since his appearance in Indie Game: The Movie; he's been hounded for saying that Japanese games suck, though he claimed the comment was taken out of context, for Tweeting that "PCs are for spreadsheets" prior to Fez's PC release, and for not patching a save-corrupting bug that he claims Microsoft was charging him "tens of thousands of dollars". Fish has often responded poorly to critics in public, but Jonathan Blow (The Witness, Braid) and C418 (Minecraft) each claim that Fish has been at the receiving end of far worse, and far more frequent, vitriol.
posted by Rory Marinich at 6:19 AM PST - 205 comments

For a few days now, Scott Simon, host of NPR's Weekend Edition Saturday, has been present at his mother's bedside in the intensive care unit of a Chicago hospital. He is documenting this time, what will apparently be his last days with her, in a series of heartwrenching messages on his Twitter stream.
posted by deliciae at 2:57 AM PST - 60 comments

Fox steals cell phone. Fox sends texts with stolen cell phone. Cuteness ensues. [Cached version] [more inside]
posted by gingerbeer at 10:21 PM PST - 45 comments

Offenses attack; defenses react. This is a truism, but it's a truism on which almost all sports strategy is built. In the NFL today, no tactic more pressingly requires a swift, strong reaction than the so-called "read-option." Defending the Read-Option sends coaches back to college. If the read-option is dead, the next great offensive strategy may also be one of the oldest, it was good enough to beat Sean Payton and a bevy of NFL coaches.
posted by Ghostride The Whip at 8:46 PM PST - 54 comments

The annual World Bodypainting Festival is now over, but that means there are a ton of new images online, with galleries for each of the award categories, including brush/sponge bodypainting, airbrush bodypainting, special effects bodypainting, and facepainting. (Note: painted [mostly] naked bodies; previously, a decade ago)
posted by filthy light thief at 8:42 PM PST - 10 comments

What Canadian bears do when no one is looking
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 8:14 PM PST - 48 comments

Mark Knopfler takes his former Dire Straits band mate John Illsley on a journey to discover the six guitars that defined his sound and music. [SLYT 44min]. An excellent documentary from SkyARTS.
posted by Long Way To Go at 7:26 PM PST - 14 comments

The Old Reader is back up again (scroll down for updates), after several days of being down when the servers crashed. But many users are not happy and some are bailing.
posted by anothermug at 5:49 PM PST - 120 comments

2001: A Space Odyssey - Discerning Themes through Score and Imagery: As Ligeti's music ends, the first image we see is a celestial alignment of the sun the earth and the moon as Richard Strauss' exhilarating Also Sprach Zarathustra begins. It's critical to note that Thus Spoke Zarathustra is also a novel by Friedrich Nietzsche. This musical choice thus signals that the film deals with the same central issues in this book. [via]

[more inside]
posted by troll at 4:31 PM PST - 18 comments

One of the last remaining copies of Schindler's List has been posted for sale on Ebay, with a starting bid of $3,000,000 USD. [more inside]
posted by Strange Interlude at 2:56 PM PST - 49 comments

Gary Bolton has been found guilty of selling fake bomb detectors to countries including Iraq. In May James McCormick was sentenced for 10 years for committing a similar fraud (previously, previously, previously). The original fraud is now 20 years old.
posted by dogsbody at 2:29 PM PST - 29 comments

With a Super 8 camera and a keen eye, young “Deek” Deekma documented himself, his brother and their neighbouring friends in the summer of 1971 as they created new forms of raw stunts daily. Using 8ft toboggans fitted with rollerskate wheels they sledded and surfed the rolling pastures of their family farms. Other inventions include a flying squirrel suit, a fleet of unusual home made bicycles and the ‘road ski’.

posted by edgeways at 2:15 PM PST - 16 comments

'Life on Moss' is a short nature film, filmed from noon till sunrise. [SLV, Via]
posted by homunculus at 1:50 PM PST - 8 comments

Poet Kenneth Goldsmith writes in praise of dumb art.
posted by chrchr at 1:44 PM PST - 39 comments

Boris Johnson unveils a giant blue cock in Trafalgar Square , causing an outbreak of terrible puns. Hahn/Cock is the work of Katharina Fritsch, better known for her Rat-King sculpture. The colour is (probably) an homage to (NSFW) Yves Klein's favourite colour.
posted by elgilito at 11:33 AM PST - 43 comments

Starting on September 22 last year, Professor Robert Fuller of the University of North Georgia spent four months paddling down the Chattahoochee River system, from the Chattahoochee's headwaters in northern Georgia down through the Apalachicola into the Gulf of Mexico, studying water quality along the way. Then he paddled 200 miles through the Gulf, turned at the mouth of the Mobile River, and paddled another 750 miles upstream on the Mobile, Alabama, Coosa, and Etowah Rivers all the way back to northern Georgia—a total of just over 1,500 miles of solo paddling in his Kruger Sea Wind. Along the way, he kept a blog, "ate a lot of Beanie Weenies", and faced difficulties including cold, hunger, injuries, and river obstructions. Incidentally, he did all this while living with leukemia. [more inside]
posted by Orinda at 11:30 AM PST - 10 comments

Swedish farmer drops a turbo into his tractor.
posted by vansly at 9:29 AM PST - 50 comments

Bankrupt By Beanies - A short documentary about what happened to people after the "Beanie Babies as investments" fad wore down. (YouTube, 8:30)
posted by The Whelk at 9:18 AM PST - 167 comments

Sadly true, at 74. (JJ Cale previously, and Wikipedia.) Otherwise best to just let the man and his guitar speak for themselves via classic albums such as Troubadour, Grasshopper, Naturally, Okie and Shades.
posted by Pouteria at 8:50 AM PST - 56 comments

Every movie reference in "The Simpsons": Seasons 1-5
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 6:21 AM PST - 27 comments

"Beijing-based music critic Wang Xiaofeng says that when he heard Lao Qiang for the first time about 18 years ago, it reminded him of heavy metal: very physical and somewhat operatic."
posted by deathpanels at 6:00 AM PST - 6 comments

The Food Bank for New York City is the country’s largest anti-hunger charity, feeding about 1.5 million people every year. It leans heavily, as other charities do, on the generosity of businesses, including Target, Bank of America, Delta Air Lines and the New York Yankees. Toyota was also a donor. But then Toyota had a different idea. Instead of a check, it offered kaizen.
posted by destrius at 1:54 AM PST - 69 comments

Texts from J. Alfred Prufrock [more inside]
posted by zeptoweasel at 11:29 PM PST - 31 comments

It's Donkey Kong. In stop motion. [SLYT]
posted by Room 641-A at 8:58 PM PST - 11 comments

Some people interpreted the Geotaggers' World Atlas maps to be maps of tourism. This set is an attempt to figure out if that is really true. Some cities (for example Las Vegas and Venice) do seem to be photographed almost entirely by tourists. Others seem to have many pictures taken in places that tourists don't visit. Blue points on the map are pictures taken by locals (people who have taken pictures in this city dated over a range of a month or more). Map of photosets (scroll through photo thumbnails to discover new cities in the photoset [more inside]
posted by KokuRyu at 8:49 PM PST - 10 comments

Maria Bamford* has a new Web series called Ask My Mom!, wherein questions asked by the viewers are answered by Maria, playing her mother. Episodes thus far: #1 - SAD SACK #2 - SEX #3 - RAISING KIDS #4 - ABSTRACT #5 - RELIGION #6 - SHOW BUSINESS #7 - FAVORITE #8 - CHEERFUL #9 - A PRIVATE MOMENT [more inside]
posted by Toekneesan at 7:09 PM PST - 29 comments

The trailer for the new film, Fateful Findings (a Neil Breen film).
posted by dobbs at 6:42 PM PST - 11 comments

Dinosaur Comics explains the true origins of Zombies.
posted by mediocre at 6:15 PM PST - 34 comments

The iconic monarch of the North Woods is dying at an alarming rate. Is it climate change, a brain-piercing parasite, or is something else to blame?
posted by brundlefly at 5:22 PM PST - 40 comments

From Reddit: What is the best horror story you can come up with in two sentences. When /r/shortscarystories are too long, and you've already read through MicroHorror (previously) and Flashes in the Dark.
posted by filthy light thief at 2:50 PM PST - 281 comments

Walter De Maria, R.I.P. (LAT) The famed but reclusive sculptor and composer was 77. In a loving tribute, Jerry Saltz writes of De Maria's Earth Room (previously), and of the effect it had on him personally.
posted by Capt. Renault at 1:36 PM PST - 21 comments

Darryl Kelly was hired to clean out Harry Shunk's New York City apartment. Things worked out well for Kelly.
posted by R. Mutt at 1:34 PM PST - 50 comments

Xiaoou is a Norwegian artist who raps in Mandarin Chinese about income inequality in China, his love for Beijing, and going through a breakup.
posted by klue at 1:14 PM PST - 8 comments

Would you like to choose your baby? We definitely want to be able to avoid genetic mutations that could cause diseases or problems later on. But what if you could make your babies more intelligent? Or more Athletic? or More beautiful? Or affect their political orientation? (A 2011 study looked at differences between conservative and liberal leanings—and found, surprisingly, three areas that might be linked to political predisposition.) Should you be able to choose what characteristics you want your babies to have? [more inside]
posted by TheLittlePrince at 11:18 AM PST - 162 comments

The '90s Button [via avclub]
posted by mysticreferee at 10:42 AM PST - 98 comments

It goes back to honoring Thomas Harris and imagery we have in the books, in the Hannibal Lecter books. So we knew that we had to have fantastic imagery that you wouldn’t see on another crime-procedural show. Being competitive and wanting to be completely different from what you see on other shows, which is usually, on a crime procedural you see a body in a room splayed out and blood, but you rarely get to see people covered with mushrooms or impaled on severed stag heads or blood eagled and the totem pole. We would sit in the room and say, “What is the image? What is the death tableau? What are we going to see that’s going to be so striking and cinematic and beautiful at the same time, but will actually be a horrible crime scene?” So every crime scene that we have has to have this element of beauty and art to it.

Bryan Fuller, showrunner for NBC's Hannibal (previously), discusses each episode of the first season with the AV Club. Part 1. Part 2. Part 3. Part 4.
posted by figurant at 10:19 AM PST - 82 comments

"Believing they are losing the messaging war with progressives, a group of prominent conservatives in Washington—including the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and journalists from Breitbart News and the Washington Examiner — has been meeting privately since early this year to concoct talking points, coordinate messaging, and hatch plans for "a 30 front war seeking to fundamentally transform the nation," according to documents obtained by [David Corn and] Mother Jones." Photo Gallery: Meet Groundswell's Major Players. Also: Groundswell's Secret Crusade to Crush Karl Rove // (Via) [more inside]
posted by zarq at 10:14 AM PST - 75 comments

Wildcatting: A Stripper’s Guide to the Modern American Boomtown. Susan Shepard details her time stripping in Williston, North Dakota (previously).
posted by zabuni at 7:54 AM PST - 57 comments

That's not a plot hole. Allow me to explain. Scott Nye discusses a movie trend that, once seen, cannot be unseen.
posted by The Deej at 6:45 AM PST - 259 comments

Books with borax crystals growing on them. Artist Alexis Arnold grows crystals on the pages of books.
posted by gauche at 6:12 AM PST - 24 comments

""He just went out to the shop, and my mum was waiting for him to come home, and he never came," Linda Davis said of her father." -- During World War II tens of thousands of Chinese seamen served in the UK's merchant navy, many of whom had settled in Liverpool and some of which developed relationships with local women. Yet in 1945, as soon as the war was won, Liverpool police forces, on orders of the Home Office mounted razzias and deported the majority of the 20,000 Chinese men living in the city, leaving behind their wifes and children. [more inside]
posted by MartinWisse at 5:00 AM PST - 17 comments

Tony Award winner Larry Kramer, author of The Normal Heart, Reports from the Holocaust, screenwriter of Women in Love, and founder of ACT UP and Gay Men's Health Crisis, has gotten married. [more inside]
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 4:52 AM PST - 16 comments

Experiment Twelve is an ambitious game (Windows download, 218 MB), a chapter by chapter collaboration between (in order of appearance) Terry Cavanagh, Ian Snyder, Jack King-Spooner, Zaratustra, Richard Perrin, Michael Brough, Robert Yang, Alan Hazelden, Benn Powell, Jake Clover, TheBlackMask, and Jasper Byrne.
posted by nobody at 4:32 AM PST - 12 comments

Legie is a depressing Czech adventure game/dungeon crawler. The only record of it left is this Let's Play.
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 11:40 PM PST - 19 comments

How DC Contracts Work. Mark Waid, author of Superman: Birthright (drawn on heavily for the recent film Man of Steel), "explains how professionals are generally compensated for working on company-owned characters".
posted by paleyellowwithorange at 4:40 PM PST - 46 comments

The Defector: Escape From North Korea, an interactive documentary. The Trailer. via. Flash required. [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 4:37 PM PST - 6 comments

One sunny summer day in Dublin, pub drinkers spill out onto the streets. Blocking traffic. And dancing. With taxi drivers. The taxi driver is part-time DJ Wayne Karney. His dance partner is Andrea Pappin, spokesperson for the Irish Presidency of the EU 2013.
posted by DarlingBri at 3:40 PM PST - 15 comments

Spain has declared three days of mourning following a deadly train crash that killed at least 80 people and injured many more. [more inside]
posted by randomnity at 3:36 PM PST - 88 comments

Mouseunculus: How The Brain Draws A Little You. [Via]
posted by homunculus at 3:35 PM PST - 16 comments

Frenchmen dance a Spice Girls medley ...in high heels.
posted by The Whelk at 2:48 PM PST - 21 comments

At the age of 19, Joe Engel started pitching for the Washington Senators in 1912 (Google books preview), but he only played one game per year in 1917, '19, and '20, due to arm injuries. Unimpressed with his performance, Manager Clark Griffith shooed Engel off to swap himself for someone from the minors who could play ball. Engel sent back the catcher Edward Patrick ("Ed" or "Patsy") Gharrity. Gharrity turned out to be so good that Engel was hired to scout for Washington, and later manage the Chattanooga Lookouts, then the farm team for Washington. It was there in Chattanooga that Engel's true career in baseball took off, where he was given the title "Barnum of Baseball." [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 2:46 PM PST - 6 comments

Burka Avenger is a new cartoon series (in urdu) scheduled to start running in Pakistan in early August. Created by the British-Pakistani pop singer Haroon, the series features a ninjaburqa-clad, pen-and-book-wielding superheroine / mild-mannered non-burqa-wearing schoolteacher who fights for her school against Taliban-like baddies (short interviews with Haroon and a slightly worried media analyst).
posted by elgilito at 2:32 PM PST - 11 comments

Night Stroll by Tao Tajima. A visually stunning nighttime display of lights and shapes across the streets of Tokyo. [via / epilepsy warning] [more inside]
posted by Wonton Cruelty at 1:36 PM PST - 6 comments

Scientifically accurate DuckTales. (SLYT, NSFW)
posted by Chrysostom at 1:21 PM PST - 65 comments

Depending on who you ask, Cloud Rap either is "the best shit happening right now" or it doesn't exist. If you ask Killscreen, the genre owes a lot to Japanese Role Playing Games. But according to Philly cloud-rapper Lushlife, "All Rap Is Cloud Rap." [more inside]
posted by Potomac Avenue at 1:11 PM PST - 45 comments

There are few more cherished nostrums in American life than the importance of equal opportunities. Unfortunately, one of them is the importance of summer vacation... A 2011 RAND literature review concluded that the average student “loses” about one month’s worth of schooling during a typical summer vacation, with the impact disproportionately concentrated among low-income students. “While all students lose some ground in mathematics over the summer,” RAND concluded, “low-income students lose more ground in reading while their higher-income peers may even gain.” Most distressingly, the impact is cumulative. Poor kids tend to start school behind their middle-class peers, and then they fall further behind each and every summer, giving teachers and principals essentially no chance of closing the gap during the school year. [more inside]
posted by bookman117 at 1:03 PM PST - 136 comments

Rape Joke, a poem by Patricia Lockwood (previously).
posted by mahershalal at 12:40 PM PST - 84 comments

Zebra Face and friends have Rumbles In The Tumbles, and also Cloud Trouble. [more inside]
posted by doiheartwentyone at 12:33 PM PST - 3 comments

Are human beings the descendants of chimpanzee/pig hybrids? This radical theory might seem easy to disprove, but "decent arguments against the hybrid origins theory are surprisingly hard to find."
posted by chrchr at 12:13 PM PST - 129 comments

Sam Simon, an original developer for The Simpsons, is still listed on the opening credits despite leaving the show in 1993. He once told a magazine that he continues to make "tens of millions" of dollars a year from his contributions. In 2012 he was diagnosed with terminal cancer. He has recently announced that he will give away his entire fortune to charity. The Sam Simon Foundation.
posted by girlmightlive at 12:00 PM PST - 17 comments

Does what it says, on the tin. Or bottle. Or glass.
posted by jacquilynne at 11:22 AM PST - 18 comments

"Arresting Portraits of Children in Water" by Wendy Sacks [Some nudity.]
posted by andoatnp at 11:02 AM PST - 19 comments

Feeling down? Watching a talkative porcupine eat a banana might cheer you up! (SLYT) [more inside]
posted by elmer benson at 10:26 AM PST - 67 comments

PreCheck, a new program instituted by the TSA, will allow passengers to keep their shoes, jackets and belts during screening, as well as allow laptop computers and approved liquids to remain in bags for a fee of $85.
posted by Omon Ra at 9:59 AM PST - 208 comments

There’s no such thing as “black-on-black” crime.
posted by latkes at 9:41 AM PST - 46 comments

Call Me Maybe, 1920s style (SLYT)
posted by Gelatin at 8:28 AM PST - 57 comments

Detroit, New Orleans, Oakland... some of the safer places in America to live! Sure, big cities might have more murders per capita... but residents in large cities are *MUCH* safer when it comes to injury deaths than those living in more rural parts of America, according to a new study in The Annals of Emergency Medicine.
"Cars, guns and drugs are the unholy trinity causing the majority of injury deaths . . . Although the risk of homicide is higher in big cities, the risk of unintentional injury death is 40 percent higher in the most rural areas than in the most urban. And overall, the rate of unintentional injury dwarfs the risk of homicide, with the rate of unintentional injury more than 15 times that of homicide among the entire population."
posted by markkraft at 8:03 AM PST - 71 comments

Gnomeland "New Hampshire's Premiere Gnome Destination!" Also known as, what happens when friends play a prank on you and install 500 handpainted gnomes in and around your house. Full Flickr set [via mefi projects]
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 7:34 AM PST - 29 comments

"High school was a lot like the Civil War: it lasted four years, you were defined by what you wore, and I lost 1 in 10 of my friends to gangrene."

Daria: The Live-Action Movie, starring Aubrey Plaza. [more inside]
posted by Horace Rumpole at 7:22 AM PST - 82 comments

"All Android applications contain cryptographic signatures, which Android uses to determine if the app is legitimate and to verify that the app hasn’t been tampered with or modified. This vulnerability makes it possible to change an application’s code without affecting the cryptographic signature of the application – essentially allowing a malicious author to trick Android into believing the app is unchanged even if it has been." [more inside]
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 6:26 AM PST - 55 comments

The Doom that Came to Atlantic City was billed as something of a Monopoly meets Cthulhu. It was a Kickstarter that got great reviews and raised over $120K. Then, suddenly, it was over. [more inside]
posted by graymouser at 6:15 AM PST - 100 comments

The diverse range of misconceptions and erroneous beliefs within historical fencing studies today is considerable. But there are perhaps some myths that are more common, and more pervasive, than others. This webpage presents an ongoing project that will continually try in an informal and condensed manner to help address some of these mistaken beliefs.
posted by cthuljew at 5:24 AM PST - 39 comments

If you find it impossible to make restaurant reservations online it might be because you're competing against bots. A developer explains how it works and just how common it might be in San Francisco. [more inside]
posted by Foci for Analysis at 2:58 AM PST - 65 comments

So back in the early thirties the Soviets had a problem: how to combat adult illiteracy in a country where millions of peasants had never had been to so much as primary school? How do you get these people to learn the alphabet? Well, by making an adult illiteracy campaign into an adult illiteracy campaign using an erotic alphabet book designed by Sergei Merkurov.
posted by MartinWisse at 2:57 AM PST - 47 comments

A new article in Nature warns that "the costs of a melting Arctic will be huge", thanks in part to the likely release of "a 50-gigatonne (Gt) reservoir of methane, stored in the form of hydrates" beneath the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, "either steadily over 50 years or suddenly". An abrupt release is "highly possible at any time", says Natalia Shakhova of the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, who has observed plumes of methane up to a kilometre wide bubbling to the surface in the area. [more inside]
posted by rory at 2:42 AM PST - 62 comments

Had enough government rhetoric? Tired of following the sheeple? Fed up with believing what THEY want you to believe? Maybe it's time to branch out and discover THE TRUTH.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 1:24 AM PST - 31 comments

Brazilian people against the costs of Pope’s Visit.
Video of Clashes in Brazil Appears to Show Police Infiltrators among Protesters, including throwing a molotov cocktail.
Much of the reporting outside of MSM of these and earlier protests is being done by the Midia Ninja collective.
posted by adamvasco at 7:08 PM PST - 20 comments

The Avenging Page (In Excelsis Ditko) is an exhaustive essay on the recent self-published comics of legendary artist and writer Steve Ditko.
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 5:03 PM PST - 23 comments

Former wrestler Diamond Dallas Page has recently emerged as a health guru of sorts, with an exercise routine based on Yoga. He's also reaching out to former wrestlers who are battling addiction problems, Scott Hall and Jake Roberts. ^via [more inside]
posted by Ghidorah at 4:48 PM PST - 17 comments

According to a new survey by the Public Religion Research Institute [PDF], 1 in 5 Americans can now be defined as "religious progressives". These people, who eschew the current Republican agenda of religious social conservatism, have Republican leaders caught in the middle between an aging religious conservative majority and young religious progressives.
posted by reenum at 3:42 PM PST - 181 comments

For over five years, journalist and TV presenter Ding Yu headed up a  massively popular Chinese TV talk show. Every week, She would sit down with convicted murderers and interview them about their life and crimes, before they were taken out and put to death by either firing squad or lethal injection. The show, "Interviews Before Execution", was taken off the air in March 2012. [more inside]
posted by Pirate-Bartender-Zombie-Monkey at 3:32 PM PST - 16 comments

BIGMIKESOCAL is a youtube user who likes horns.
Big horns. [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 3:00 PM PST - 8 comments

Isaac Cordal makes little figures out of concrete, painting some, while leaving others their native grey color. He then places them in various places and situations around Europe, and has set them up in gallery shows. You might find them in the street, sitting on rooftops, precariously balanced on a pipe, standing up to their waists in water with a life preserver, or standing in the snow. The figures are made in clay, then a silicone mold is made in which the concrete is cast. Street Art London has an interview with Cordal. [Cordal, previously]
posted by filthy light thief at 2:37 PM PST - 6 comments

So, Boston's KISS 108 FM decided to hold a Taylor Swift Biggest Fan Contest. But they cancelled it. [more inside]
posted by Melismata at 2:14 PM PST - 152 comments

The modern male singer-songwriter has a type. She is thin. She wears a great deal of eye makeup. She is pale. She does not smile, and often walks in the rain. Most importantly, she is very, very sad....These Sad Girls are all terribly, terribly sad in their own unique ways, of course, but which one of them is the saddest? The Toast investigates.
posted by troika at 1:49 PM PST - 65 comments

John Morillo of Windsor, Ontario, Canada, will apparently not turn down a dare, even if it causes an international incident and racks up fines in the five figures. For instance, if you tell him he can't swim from Windsor to Detroit across a busy shipping lane, he'll do it (with the assistance of eight beers). And he'll swim back, too, as evidenced by the fact that the U.S. Coast Guard found him on the Canadian side. As Morillo said, "If I’m going to be in the paper, I’d at least like them to say I actually made it, even though I got in trouble and everything." [more inside]
posted by Etrigan at 1:42 PM PST - 76 comments

The upside is that none of these records will go down in history like Chinese Democracy. The downside, of course, is that none of these records will go down in history like Chinese Democracy. Why it had to die in 2008 so that Random Access Memories, The 20/20 Experience, m b v, The Next Day and other records could live in 2013.
posted by mannequito at 1:10 PM PST - 53 comments

Chris Bucchere, the cyclist that killed a pedestrian last March in San Francisco while attempting to obtain Strava glory has pleaded guilty to felony vehicular manslaughter becoming the first bicyclist convicted of manslaughter in the United States. [more inside]
posted by playertobenamedlater at 1:06 PM PST - 186 comments

Can You Name These Cities by Their Starbucks Locations? (Single link Slate quiz)
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 12:59 PM PST - 45 comments

The bloggers at The St. Louis Slinger Tour have completed their comprehensive 16 month review of the Slingers available at 58 different St. Louis area restaurants. Follow them chronologically or check out Tim and Tony's Top 10 for later enjoyment (consensus favorite: The Sidebar). Also available for your convenience is a list of the worst Slingers in St. Louis (e.g. Uncle Bill's), to be avoided or ordered out of morbid curiosity. [more inside]
posted by jedicus at 12:21 PM PST - 35 comments

Saskatchewan scientists are working hard to identify ways to preserve the habitat of the endangered Greater Short Horned Lizard, best known for shooting great streams of blood from its eyes when threatened.
posted by 256 at 11:32 AM PST - 43 comments

While they were dating back in the 90's, Paul Thomas Anderson directed several of Fiona Apple's videos including "Across the Universe", "Paper Bag" and "Limp". Though they have long since broken up, he recently came back to direct the video for "Hot Knife" off of her most recent album. The result is hypnotic.
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 11:16 AM PST - 22 comments

After gossip site The Dirty posted explicit Facebook chats between NYC Mayoral frontrunner Anthony Weiner (previously) and a young Democratic organizer who initially wrote to castigate him for his original scandal, he was forced to acknowledge that "his habit of sending racy messages to women had persisted long after his resignation." The New York Times has called for him to drop out. So has the Wall Street Journal. So have his opponents, somewhat predictably, for obcuring the issues with "a never-ending sideshow." His support is dwindling, but a lingering question is: will (and should) voters even care?
posted by Potomac Avenue at 10:58 AM PST - 230 comments

Heard: a free iOS app that could solve a lot of arguments, and probably end a lot of marriages. It continuously records audio into a 12-second buffer (extend it to 5 minutes for $1.99), letting you save what you just, um, heard. Part Orwellian, part Chappellian (NSFW).
posted by gottabefunky at 10:40 AM PST - 54 comments

Unhappy Truckers and Other Algorithmic Problems - What happens when the traveling salesman problem meets the real world at UPS and Yellow Freight.
posted by Chrysostom at 9:06 AM PST - 54 comments

Fan's of cult 90's UK children Television shows rejoice, Knightmare, the virtual reality kids show is back for a one off episode. [more inside]
posted by Cannon Fodder at 9:05 AM PST - 8 comments

280 movies sing Vanilla Ice's "Ice Ice Baby". (SLYT)
posted by alynnk at 8:38 AM PST - 38 comments

Slideshow of wolves feasting on watermelons. The idea for the party came after park staff noted that the wolves were looking longingly at watermelon slices that the humans were eating during a July 4th celebration. [via]
posted by Cash4Lead at 7:46 AM PST - 57 comments

The racial wage gap in the United States — the gap in salary between whites and blacks with similar levels of education and experience — is shaped by geography, according to new social science research.

"The average racial gap [in wages] in metropolitan areas of around 1 million people — and you can think of a place like Tulsa, Okla. — is about 20 percent smaller than the gap in the nation's largest metro areas of Chicago, L.A. and New York," Ananat says. Ananat's research suggests that the racial gap is not directly the result of prejudice or, at least, prejudice conventionally defined. Rather, it has to do with patterns of social interactions that are shaped by race — and a phenomenon that economists call spillovers.
posted by DynamiteToast at 7:06 AM PST - 80 comments

What rhymes with Alison Lundergan Grimes? [more inside]
posted by threeants at 3:47 AM PST - 102 comments

Via Gamasutra: "I used to work at [company], and it paid well and advanced my career," the person told me. "But I recognize that [company]'s games cause great harm to people's lives. They are designed for addiction. [company] chooses what to add to their games based on metrics that maximize players' investments of time and money. [company]'s games find and exploit the right people, and then suck everything they can out of them, without giving much in return. It's not hard to see the parallels to the tobacco industry."
posted by tarpin at 3:44 AM PST - 105 comments

Some punk from Iowa is hoping to go number one in the charts with an album that technically came out over a decade ago, was recorded on a boombox, and which has divided opinion. The record in question is called All Hail West Texas and that punk from Iowa (technically Indiana) is named John Darnielle and releases music as The Mountain Goats. The album can be streamed on the record label website as well as most of your favorite streaming services. You can download a couple of the outtakes here, listen to a recent interview Marc Maron did with John Darnielle that covers his youth and some of his Iowa period, and read Notes on imaginary extant, lost, deleted, and unrecorded tracks written, performed, recorded for or during the period of time in the life of John Darnielle that would produce All Hail West Texas not included in this collection because they are all imaginary by Matt Fraction.
posted by Kattullus at 3:36 AM PST - 73 comments

How do you define the Midwest? As part of their exhibit Reinvention in the Urban Midwest (in most-certainly-not-in-the-Midwest Boston) Sasaki has created an online tool for people to contribute what the boundaries of the Midwest are for them. Results can be sorted by respondents' percentage of time spent in the Midwest and state of birth. An Atlantic Cities article shows one writer's opinion, and also links to Bill Rankin's similar Midwest mapping project on his always-excellent Radical Cartography site. An excerpt from The Midwest: God's Gift to Planet Earth has a more irreverent take on mapping the region.
posted by andrewesque at 12:00 AM PST - 184 comments

The American Historical Association just released a statement that "strongly encourages graduate programs and university libraries to adopt a policy that allows the embargoing of completed history PhD dissertations in digital form for as many as six years." The statement is aimed at publishers who are disinclined to consider books based on dissertations that have been made freely available in open access databases. Some responses cite a 2011 survey, "Do Open Access Electronic Theses and Dissertations Diminish Publishing Opportunities in the Social Sciences and Humanities?," that found most publishers self-reported they would indeed consider publishing such dissertations, but also suggested university libraries are refusing to buy books based on dissertations that have previously been available online. "The Road From Dissertation to Book Has a New Pothole: the Internet," a 2011 article from the Chronicle of Higher Education, quotes editors who are wary of publishing such books, and discusses the process by which students can restrict access to their work at companies like ProQuest, "the electronic publisher with which the vast majority of U.S. universities contract to house digital copies of dissertations." [more inside]
posted by mediareport at 8:20 PM PST - 40 comments

The Pixel Painter is a short documentary about Hal Lasko, a 97-year-old artist who paints in Microsoft Paint. [more inside]
posted by oulipian at 8:08 PM PST - 21 comments

The Sardine Museum with host Tony Nunziata (part two, part three, part four, part five). Bonus: Tony tells a short story. [more inside]
posted by Ice Cream Socialist at 5:32 PM PST - 8 comments

Francis Ching is professor emeritus of architecture at the University of Washington who keeps a blog of his city-focused sketches. Discussion varies from thinking about construction and layout to materials and focus when drawing scenes.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 4:48 PM PST - 11 comments

Previously mentioned back in in 2012, The Argument, a concept album with influences from Milton's Paradise Lost and William Burroughs, has at last appeared. [more inside]
posted by larrybob at 4:39 PM PST - 7 comments

727 illustrations by legendary paleoartist Zdeněk Burian.
posted by brundlefly at 4:32 PM PST - 15 comments

放浪息子 Hourou Musuko (often translated as Wandering Son) is one of the better depictions of transgender life in manga and anime (and maybe in any medium). It's a slice of life drama about two young people who are trans and starting middle school in Japan. The manga is being published in English by Fantagraphics, and the anime is officially licensed in English subs on Crunchyroll. [more inside]
posted by jiawen at 3:57 PM PST - 14 comments

In his meticulous diaries, written from 1846 to 1882, the Harvard librarian John Langdon Sibley complains often about the withering summer heat: “The heat wilts & enervates me & makes me sick,” he wrote in 1852. Sibley lived before the age of air-conditioning, but recent research suggests that his observation is still accurate: summer really does tend to be a time of reduced productivity. Our brains do, figuratively, wilt. [more inside]
posted by whyareyouatriangle at 3:04 PM PST - 127 comments

What happens when you strip out all the music from Miley Cyrus' " We Can't Stop" music video and dub in new sound effects?
posted by The Whelk at 2:47 PM PST - 66 comments

John and Hank Green of the Vlogbrothers have launched a new subscription service called Subbable, that aims to crowdsource support for content creators through direct payments, rather than through the typical model that uses advertising. Subscribers can pay nothing and still view the content, but those who opt to pay earn Perks from the channels to which they subscribe. Right now, the vlogbrothers' educational channel Crash Course is the only content available, although applications are being taken for other content creators to join...assuming it works with Crash Course. [more inside]
posted by guster4lovers at 1:59 PM PST - 18 comments

The Science Museum in London closed their Shipping Galleries in 2012, having been open for almost 50 years. But in case you missed it, here's a narrated short virtual tour, as it looked then. [more inside]
posted by ArkhanJG at 1:21 PM PST - 14 comments

Alex Wellerstein, an historian of science who specializes in the history of nuclear weapons and nuclear secrecy, has put together two online maps mashups: NUKEMAP2, and NUKEMAP3D, which use Google Maps and Google Earth, respectively. With those tools, you can see the blast radius for nuclear explosions of your own design, or from one of the presets. But this doesn't get into dispersion of fallout. If you're interested in that kind of thing, you might want to see various smoke modeling tools, which are used for wildfire management. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 12:42 PM PST - 21 comments

Pronunciation Book (previously), a YouTube channel started in April 2010, is known for providing mostly-accurate pronunciation guides for difficult words: acacia, ouroboros, Tlaxcala. But on July 9th, the channel started posting something new: a countdown. [more inside]
posted by specialagentwebb at 12:41 PM PST - 121 comments

Sad YouTube finds poignant moments in the youtube comments section.
posted by cmyr at 12:24 PM PST - 17 comments

Degrassi Panthers "Degrassi Panthers is a blog dedicated to mapping out the shoot locations of all 3 seasons of the Canadian TV series Degrassi Junior High."
posted by chunking express at 11:55 AM PST - 13 comments

Of cats, rabbits and monstrous births, about the persistent Medieval/Early Modern belief that a woman's pregnancy could be influence what she gave birth too, as in the case of Agnes Bowker, who supposedly gave birth to a cat.
posted by MartinWisse at 11:22 AM PST - 6 comments

In 1980, two years before her death, she was offered a short column in “Parade.” Here are some excerpts. Ask Ayn, by John Hodgman. (SLNewYorker)
posted by Lutoslawski at 11:15 AM PST - 44 comments

At the dawn of the millennium, Japanese society has suffered a severe economic collapse, leading to widespread youth apathy and 800,000 students boycotting school. Adult society sought to reassert their authority by passing the Millennium Education Reform Act, otherwise known as the BR Act. - a look at Kinji Fukasaku's Battle Royale.
posted by Artw at 11:03 AM PST - 64 comments

Milwaukee Brewer Ryan Braun has been suspended for the rest of the season due to his involvement with a former "anti-aging" clinic called Biogenesis that allegedly supplied athletes with human growth hormone, anabolic steroids, testosterone, and other performance-enhancing drugs (Taiwanese animation video). Alex Rodriguez is expected to be suspended next, along with 15-20 other Major League Baseball players, with punishments expected to linger into the 2014 season.
posted by mrgrimm at 10:54 AM PST - 72 comments

POV is a trick used in both Hollywood filmmaking and adult filmmaking to let the viewer feel like the camera’s eyes are theirs. The problem is, no matter how skilled the Hollywood cinematographer or the porn videographer, traditional POV shots don’t have a true lifelikeness because the camera is still too big to get intimate, close-up line-of-sight shots as we would see with our naked eyes. Glass changes that. And while the quality of Glass-shot video isn’t good enough for Hollywood blockbusters, it’s more than good enough for porn. [SLFC] [NSFW]
posted by chavenet at 10:22 AM PST - 47 comments

In 2010, six friends sat down to watch all four Rambo movies in one day. Inspired, they realized how f&%king awesome it would be if Rambo were to fight his doppelganger Rocky. They plotted the movie in five minutes, split up the writing chores, and each wrote a section, without any of them reading the others' work. This is that story. (Not the story of how they wrote it, but the actual script they wrote, Rocky Vs Rambo)
posted by Potomac Avenue at 9:53 AM PST - 15 comments

The Department of Justice filed a lawsuit yesterday (after a long investigation) against the state of Florida alleging the state is in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in its administration of its service system for children with significant medical needs. [more inside]
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 9:44 AM PST - 47 comments

3-D Scans Reveal Caterpillars Turning Into Butterflies [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 9:14 AM PST - 17 comments

Nothing to Prove (SLYT) The Doubleclicks rebut the "fake geek girl" meme in this awesome song. [more inside]
posted by Gelatin at 8:20 AM PST - 136 comments

It hit me this morning that perhaps all of my endless toil and hard work has landed me here. I've transferred so much within the company that all paperwork on me has been long since misplaced. I exist only in a computer program that spits out a 4 digit paycheck to my bank account every other Thursday - just another tick on the underbelly of the corporate warthog. Too senior to be fired, too misunderstood to be bothered, I am truly the forgotten employee.
posted by Mach5 at 8:17 AM PST - 50 comments

The Hebrew Home in Riverdale, NY has a comprehensive policy regarding sexual expression. The policy, which appears to be the only one of its kind among U.S. residential facilities for the elderly, says that residents "have the right to seek out and engage in sexual expression,” including “words, gestures, movements or activities which appear motivated by the desire for sexual gratification." As Baby Boomers age and begin to enter nursing homes in greater numbers, they're taking their freer sexual attitudes -- and their Viagra-- with them. An 80-something resident of the Hebrew Home says "she’d love to have someone special in her life. 'You want to have someone to pat you, someone to hold hands with,' she said. 'Age should not be a barrier to anything.'"
posted by Annie Savoy at 6:58 AM PST - 38 comments

Glacier, the concluding track from John Grant's 2013 album Pale Green Ghosts is "the song that I wish I would have heard when I was a teenager". [more inside]
posted by greenish at 6:20 AM PST - 25 comments

"In Victorian England, getting a job was all about who you knew, [but] Charles Trevelyan, the permanent secretary to the Treasury 1840-59, was horrified by the Barnacle types in the civil service, once describing a colleague, as a "gentleman who really could neither read nor write, he was almost an idiot"."
posted by marienbad at 3:45 AM PST - 20 comments

A female asylum seeker comes to terms with the fact she won't be settled in Australia [more inside]
posted by mattoxic at 10:51 PM PST - 212 comments

In the same way that the detective movie is a fantasy about city life, the spy movie is a fantasy about tourism.
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 9:54 PM PST - 37 comments

After 35 years, Maxwell's in Hoboken, NJ, is closing. Once called "the best club in New York" by New York magazine, Maxwell's was ground zero for "The Hoboken Sound", with such bands as The Bongos, The Feelies, and Yo La Tengo playing there frequently. It was also the setting for Bruce Springsteen's Glory Days video. [more inside]
posted by fings at 7:55 PM PST - 37 comments

"Poverty is a more powerful influence on the outcome of inner-city children than gestational exposure to cocaine." [more inside]
posted by Orinda at 6:42 PM PST - 89 comments

[NSFW] "Ask First! was written by J. Mary Burnet & Kaleigh Trace in response to Robin Thicke's gross, unconsensual song and video Blurred Lines... We don't want to have to listen to Robin Thicke tell us he knows we want it over such a damn catchy beat. We wanna dance to music that's sexy and radical." [more inside]
posted by DarlingBri at 6:01 PM PST - 144 comments

Cracker Barrel's Oddly Authentic Version of American History [more inside]
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 5:48 PM PST - 71 comments

Los Intocables (The Untouchables) by Erik Ravelo
posted by andoatnp at 5:11 PM PST - 22 comments

Cosmos returns in the year 2014. "A Personal Journey" becomes "A Space-Time Odyssey". Presented by Neil deGrasse Tyson and produced by Seth MacFarlane, Cosmos: A Space-Time Odyssey will be aired on FOX and follow a similar format to the beloved Sagan classic, available here.
posted by 221bbs at 4:52 PM PST - 58 comments

Apparently, since 2012 there has been new series of Mysterious Cities of Gold (previously) in production. Acting as a continuation, as opposed to a reboot. No English versions available, yet. French trailer. French opening.
posted by mediocre at 2:55 PM PST - 34 comments

Swimming with humpback whales.
posted by mudpuppie at 2:51 PM PST - 33 comments

Drawn The Road Again , artist Chandler O'Leary's "illustrated road trip blog."

I’ve logged a lot of miles in my life, visiting as many patches of earth as possible and getting as much down on paper as I can. And for the first time, I’m putting these sketches out into the world. So here we are: I’ve collected all my drawings of crazy tourist traps and Paul Bunyan statues and hidden gems and panoramic vistas, and I’m sending them out like postcards. To you.

[more inside]
posted by shirobara at 1:18 PM PST - 19 comments

"There are a lot of people complaining about lousy software patents these days. I say, stop complaining, and start killing them. It took me about fifteen minutes to stop a crappy Microsoft patent from being approved. Got fifteen minutes? You can do it too." Software Patents previously: 1 2 3 4. Joel Spolsky previously: 1 2
posted by OnceUponATime at 1:04 PM PST - 34 comments

No. 16 makes the quadruple backflip look easy (YouTube), but robotic gymnastics don't always go so well (YT). [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 12:30 PM PST - 11 comments

Iowa State Fair officials have announced 10 new food options for the 2013 fair, in addition to the eight announced earlier this month. These include maple bacon funnel cake and deep fried prairie oysters, and join old favorites including deep fried butter on a stick, pork chop on a stick, and over 60 other foods (on a stick). [more inside]
posted by Wordshore at 12:22 PM PST - 123 comments

Goosebumps Books For Grown Ups
posted by The Whelk at 12:20 PM PST - 93 comments

Nate Silver will move FiveThirtyEight to ESPN when his contract with the New York Times expires in late August. Silver's new site will look to Bill Simmons' Grantland as a model for existing under ESPN's umbrella. His new move could be "genius," with a role at ABCNews and a larger audience, but did the New York Times know what it had in Silver? ESPN press release & Nate Silver 2.0 quote
posted by gladly at 12:06 PM PST - 64 comments

Stardock buys rights to Star Control from Atari and plans a reboot! In 1992, Accolade released one of the most greatestest, or at least silliest, space adventure games of totally forever: Star Control II. [more inside]
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 11:44 AM PST - 75 comments

The concept of 'Sad Rap' has recently been explored by two rappers: Little Pain (Soundcloud, YouTube video for "High Cry") in the United States, and Yung Lean (Soundcloud, personal site, and video of "Hurt" (the video is... amazing?)) of Sweden. Pain and Lean have been compared to Lil B for their similar outsider art perspective on the genre, with the distinction that sad rap tends to focus singularly on the emotion of depression. For further reading, Vice's Noisey music blog has been chronicling both Pain and Lean in these articles: Meet Little Pain..., Meet Yung Lean Doer.... The Strangest New Thing in Music or a Logical Next Step for Hip-Hop from Pigeons and Planes. Hip-hop blog Refined Hype has a reaction piece which questions the very concept of 'Sad Rap' as a genre: Stopping Little Pain & Sad Rap Before It Starts. Producer Suicideyear provides the low key, somber beats for both artists.
posted by codacorolla at 11:42 AM PST - 40 comments

Actor Dennis Farina, known for his roles as cops, crooks, and crooked cops, has died. [more inside]
posted by Rangeboy at 11:40 AM PST - 92 comments

America Has a Stadium Problem [more inside]
posted by tonycpsu at 11:33 AM PST - 52 comments

For 30 years, an ex-con drifter from Saskatchewan named Dennis Melvyn Howe has eluded police in connection with the abduction, rape and murder of a 9 year old Toronto girl. In 2008, an Idaho man named Robert James Miller wrote two long, bizarre posts on the forum at unsolvedcanada.ca. He claimed to have identified Howe and turned him in after seeing a 1998 episode of America's Most Wanted. The FBI is now investigating the possibility that Miller himself is Dennis Melvyn Howe. [more inside]
posted by mannequito at 11:28 AM PST - 15 comments

A (NSFW) Dispatch From The Smallest Penis In Brooklyn Competition
posted by capnsue at 10:39 AM PST - 45 comments

Enjoy 200,000 images of Saturn, its rings and moons taken by NASA's Cassini over 8 years compressed into 4 minutes of video.
posted by gottabefunky at 10:06 AM PST - 23 comments

The SCP Wiki catalogues dangerous or anomalous objects, people and concepts. [more inside]
posted by frimble at 9:35 AM PST - 141 comments

Online pornography to be blocked by default in the UK, announces Prime Minister David Cameron in a speech today. Internet users will have to contact their ISPs to opt out of the filter. Possession of pornography depicting rape will also be illegal. Here is the full text of the speech. Coverage by The Independent, the Telegraph, and a shortened video of the speech at the Guardian. [more inside]
posted by Drexen at 9:20 AM PST - 152 comments

Days after British and International news reporters and photographers started claiming space in front of the Lindo Wing at St. Mary's hospital, (some have been there since July 3, or 10 days before Kate Middleton's suspected due date of July 13), the "Royal Baby" is finally on the way now that the Duchess of Cambridge is reportedly in labor. Millions around the world wait for the birth of the newest addition to the Royal Family, who will be third in line to the throne of the British Monarchy, whether it's a boy or a girl.
posted by CrazyLemonade at 9:17 AM PST - 332 comments

Of all the occupational golden ages to come and go in the twentieth century—for doctors, journalists, ad-men, autoworkers—none lasted longer, felt cushier, and was all in all more golden than the reign of the law partner. Noam Schreiber on The Last Days of Big Law: You can't imagine the terror when the money dries up. Former law partner Steven J. Harper, author of The Lawyer Bubble, believes the profession to be in existential crisis. Another former partner weighs in. Libertarian law professor Richard Epstein presents a more sanguine view.
posted by shivohum at 9:08 AM PST - 52 comments

We Tracked Down Our Biggest Troll…and Kind of Liked Him
posted by the man of twists and turns at 8:25 AM PST - 21 comments

A team of economists from Harvard and UC Berkeley studying the effects of tax expenditures on economic mobility has released data showing that economic mobility in the U.S. varies dramatically between different geographic areas. The authors' website includes a summary of their findings. According the NY Times article on the study, which has a nifty map and tools to play with the data, the authors only found relatively small correlations between tax credits for the poor and higher taxes on the rich and economic mobility. However, the following four factors did correlate with greater economic mobility in a region: the size and dispersion of the middle class, more two-parent households, better schools, and more civic engagement (measured through membership in religious and community groups). Matthew Yglesias comments on the study at Slate. [more inside]
posted by Area Man at 7:42 AM PST - 50 comments

Why the Social Media Generation Never Really Breaks Up. [NSFW]
posted by josher71 at 7:21 AM PST - 99 comments

Tomohiro Anraki might be the next big Japanese pitcher, if he manages to survive high school baseball in Japan. [more inside]
posted by Ghidorah at 7:03 AM PST - 20 comments

People sometimes assume that because Chomsky is a leftist, he would find common intellectual ground with the postmodernist philosophers of the European Left. Big mistake. Slavoj Žižek Responds to Noam Chomsky: ‘I Don’t Know a Guy Who Was So Often Empirically Wrong’ Chomsky responds, "Žižek finds nothing, literally nothing, that is empirically wrong." [more inside]
posted by Obscure Reference at 6:57 AM PST - 92 comments

When Nada Al-Ahdal discovered that her parents had sold her she ran away. She is 11 years old, and this is her message. [more inside]
posted by Joe in Australia at 4:54 AM PST - 29 comments

The billionaire who is trying to go broke. Chuck Feeney is the James Bond of philanthropy. Over the last 30 years he’s crisscrossed the globe conducting a clandestine operation to give away a $7.5 billion fortune derived from hawking cognac, perfume and cigarettes in his empire of duty-free shops.
posted by zoo at 2:12 AM PST - 35 comments

"Fuck the Super Gameboy": Why the Super Gameboy was awesome and why it crashed and burned. By Christine Love, creator of Digital: a Love Story and Analogue: a Hate Story. [more inside]
posted by Pope Guilty at 7:55 PM PST - 54 comments

The Saga of Rex First conceived as a comic in the anthology Flight, Michel Gagne (previously, previously) created a 5 minute animated short of the work after a successful Kickstarter..
posted by zabuni at 5:51 PM PST - 1 comment

Every film mentioned by Edgar Wright and Quentin Tarantino in their Hot Fuzz commentary track
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 5:04 PM PST - 87 comments

There are many dying languages in the world. But at least one has recently been born, created by children living in a remote village in northern Australia. The language, called Warlpiri rampaku, or Light Warlpiri, is spoken only by people under 35 in Lajamanu, an isolated village of about 700 people in Australia’s Northern Territory. In all, about 350 people speak the language as their native tongue. Dr. O’Shannessy has published several studies of Light Warlpiri, the most recent in the June issue of Language.
posted by bookman117 at 4:14 PM PST - 20 comments

Some Mormons Search the Web and Find Doubt
"The church is grappling with a wave of disillusionment among members who encountered information that sabotages what they were taught about their faith."
posted by andoatnp at 4:02 PM PST - 123 comments

CSI: Italian Renaissance. "Inside a lab in Pisa, forensics pathologist Gino Fornaciari and his team investigate 500-year-old cold cases." [Via]
posted by homunculus at 3:30 PM PST - 10 comments

The "sadistic verses" are a genre of Russian schoolyard rhymes marked by extremely dark humor. For example, "Two lovers lay / In a field of tall wheat / Quietly, quietly comes the combine / Grandmother spits out the cloth / She has found inside her bread." Unfortunately, English compilations are a bit hard to find. Here's a blog post by a Georgian (US state) who moved to Moscow and collected a few, and here's a more scholarly PDF which also quotes many examples. [more inside]
posted by d. z. wang at 1:46 PM PST - 45 comments

Enigma breaker Alan Turing will be posthumously pardoned. Turing helped the Allies win WWII by developing the methods that broke the German Enigma code -- which didn't stop Britain from convicting him of gross indecency under anti-homosexuality legislation in 1951 and subjecting him to chemical castration. Two years later, he committed suicide by swallowing cianide. The British government has now "signalled that it is prepared to support a backbench bill that would pardon Turing."
posted by Annie Savoy at 1:46 PM PST - 55 comments

The story behind Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All. [more inside]
posted by ellieBOA at 12:49 PM PST - 39 comments

Giant rubber duckie artist appalled at imitation giant rubber duckie. “Shanzhai does not thrive on creativity, it thrives on reaching those people who can’t reach the original product, either without geographic proximity or monetary power.” (via)
posted by spamandkimchi at 12:32 PM PST - 17 comments

For a short while now, a mysterious older lady has been coming into the Coalition Drum Shop in La Crosse, Wisconsin, where she rocks out on the drums and then leaves. The folks at the shop only knew her as Mary, or Grandma Drummer (YouTube), whose song of choice is Wipe Out (YT). A local new station, WKBT, learned that the mysterious drummer is Mary Hvsida, a 63-year-old lady who has been drumming in bands since she was 16. They later reported that she started out in an all-girl rock band, and has been playing in various bands until 1990, when her last band broke up. She couldn't find another band to play in, so she sold her drums. She reminisces over old cassettes, and rocks out in the local drum shop from time to time.
posted by filthy light thief at 11:54 AM PST - 60 comments

China Miéville talks about Marxism and Halloween in a 39 minute audio recording from the Socialism 2013 conference organized by the International Socialist Organization. Miéville, Marxism, and the Fantastic previously (and many more)
posted by GenjiandProust at 11:47 AM PST - 29 comments

Tommy Des Brisay is a Canadian runner and para-athlete living with autism. While running, Tommy often chants "I think I can...", recites lines from Disney movies, or sings. He has a YouTube channel where he posts his dances with Disney princesses and mini documentaries about his life.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 8:10 AM PST - 3 comments

Why “Libertarian” Defenses of the Confederacy and “States’ Rights” are Incoherent

There is a strain of libertarian contrarianism that holds that the Confederate States of America were within their “rights” to secede from the Union. Such contrarianism on this particular topic is detrimental to the larger cause of liberty because the logic of this argument relies upon relinquishing individual rights to the whim of the state. Indeed, as there is no legal or moral justification for supporting the Confederacy in the Civil War, it is impossible that there could be a libertarian one.

[more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 7:32 AM PST - 349 comments

In The Realm of the Purple Emperor: As I’m sure many of His Majesty’s loyal followers will agree, there’s nothing we love more than to roll around in the mud, dust, dung, poo, shrimp paste, flies, spit and wee to get those highly coveted photographs. [more inside]
posted by Flitcraft at 6:55 AM PST - 9 comments

"They pay a lot of attention to detail." A DIY miniature world made out of household scraps.
posted by applemeat at 6:52 AM PST - 67 comments

Well, as the old links are all now dead, I guess that it's time to repost On Alfred Mainzer Cats Dressed As People Postcards... [more inside]
posted by y2karl at 6:29 PM PST - 30 comments

Through the use of Photoshop, Swiss photographer Gus Petro shows us what it would look like if Manhattan was dropped into the middle of the Grand Canyon.
posted by reenum at 5:06 PM PST - 65 comments

“What would happen if some of those ‘priests’ in white robes started chasing you at 60 miles an hour?” Frank asked. “What would you do?” And Sammy answered, “Seventy.” The Moulin Rouge: The Vegas Hotspot That Broke All The Rules. Smithsonian Magazine on the brief life but long-lasting legacy of Las Vegas' first racially integrated casino.
posted by goo at 3:19 PM PST - 11 comments

Bill Emmott, former editor of The Economist, is an Italophile who could no longer stand by and watch the country he loves so dearly go down the tubes. [more inside]
posted by rhombus at 3:05 PM PST - 28 comments

Chen Mingyuan has lived here all his life, but he still gets lost every time he drives into Wenzhou. “All the roads in this town were built by businessmen, so none of them make any sense,” Chen says as we back out of what we just discovered is a one-way street. For the last 30 years, private citizens in this southeastern China metropolis have largely taken over one of the least questioned prerogatives of governments the world over: infrastructure. Is Wenzhou, the richest city in China's richest province, a libertarian paradise?
posted by shivohum at 1:25 PM PST - 12 comments

18 years ago yesterday, on July 19, 1995, Clueless was released in theaters. Directed by Amy Heckerling and based on Jane Austen's novel Emma, it became known for its fashion and quote-ability, and has an 81% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. [more inside]
posted by skycrashesdown at 11:34 AM PST - 103 comments

If you look at the attendance of San Diego Comic-Con, you'll notice that it started shooting up in 2000, you might be tempted to think it was because Hollywood finally found Comic-Con. But you'd be wrong, and you'd be overlooking decades of movie promotions, from the first Superman trailer and the Alien promotion in the late 1970s, to the (mostly) cult films featured in the early 1990s. io9 has some images from the early days, and you can spend hours (or days) perusing through Comic-Con memories.
posted by filthy light thief at 11:02 AM PST - 29 comments

Comedian Stewart Lee gave an hour long talk earlier this year on the place of writing, or not writing, in standup comedy. Last week, the UK comedy website Chortle took some of his comments mentioning comedians who use writers, and stirred up a minor controversy. Lee has since released a statement to clarify the context.
posted by rollick at 10:33 AM PST - 19 comments

RIP Mel Smith, British comedian, actor, writer, director and producer. First coming to fame in the ground-breaking Not The Nine O'Clock News he went on to make Alas Smith And Jones with Griff Rhys-Jones. He produced many theatrical productions and directed several films including The Tall Guy and Bean. He also played the albino in The Princess Bride. (Previous) [more inside]
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 9:29 AM PST - 57 comments

Helen Thomas (Previously and Previously and Previously), who covered ten different administrations in her 49 years in the White House Press Corps (and maintained her rabble rouser image with both Republican and Democratic administrations), has died at age 92.
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 8:47 AM PST - 155 comments

The First Post, The Old Familiar, The Famous Cock, The Cross Hands, The Good Companions, The Trusty Servant, The Two Headed Dog, The Mermaid, The Beehive, The King's Head, The Hole in the Wall, THE WORLD'S END
posted by memebake at 8:28 AM PST - 23 comments

Teju Cole (previously) live-tweeted on Friday his trip across the Slave Coast from Lagos, Nigeria to Ouidah, Benin.
posted by Cash4Lead at 7:58 AM PST - 3 comments

Saga, by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples , has swept the Eisners, taking home awards for Best Continuing Series, Best New Series and Best Writer. Here's why you should be reading it.
posted by Artw at 7:05 AM PST - 42 comments

Before the 1980 Act of Parliament which made O Canada the national anthem of Canada, the anthem was functionally God Save the Queen, but there was another patriotic song which served as the unofficial anthem: The Maple Leaf Forever. The song was written by poet Alexander Muir in October of 1867 to celebrate the confederation of Canada in July of that year and was famously inspired by a silver maple which stood in his front yard on Laing St in Toronto. Last night's storms brought the tree down, after a century and a half. [more inside]
posted by ricochet biscuit at 6:53 AM PST - 43 comments

Amazing photos of the London Underground in the 1980s. Second set. [more inside]
posted by litleozy at 4:51 AM PST - 40 comments

Robert Moog's personal archives of notes, plans, drawings and recordings were donated to Cornell University Library by his wife this week and will be housed in the library's Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections. The donation came as a surprise to non-profit Moog Foundation in Asheville, which led by one of his daughters and has spent the last 8 years preserving his archives of instruments, photos and papers, reel to reel tapes, recordings and prototypes, with preservation grants from the GRAMMY foundation and had been working towards opening a ""Moogseum"" with the archives. A personal statement from Moog's daughter on the Transfer of Bob Moog's Archives. [more inside]
posted by katinka-katinka at 4:14 AM PST - 31 comments

Chaconne from Johann Sebastian Bach's Partita no. 2 for violin (BWV 1004), played on the hammered dulcimer by Mihail Leonchik. Youtube.
posted by Anything at 1:26 AM PST - 22 comments

While perhaps not quite as errm climactic as yesterday's news of pitch dripping in Trinity College, physics news dripping out of Stockholm reveals that

The Super Kamiokande T2K group has verified with great certainty that neutrinos oscillate among 3 flavors in flight (which could help explain what happened to the antimatter in the universe), and

CERN has used the LHC to measure the decay time of the rare B sub s meson, ending a 25-year search.

posted by Twang at 12:06 AM PST - 9 comments

Times Higher Education compiles its annual exam 'howlers.'
posted by anothermug at 9:32 PM PST - 42 comments

Illustrator and artist Andrew DeGraff (Tumblr, blog, personal site) has made detailed "treasure maps" out of movies.
posted by the man of twists and turns at 9:09 PM PST - 7 comments

Quadcopter + GoPro + Los Angeles (SLYT) via Reddit.
posted by zabuni at 7:34 PM PST - 53 comments

Makers
 of War. "The arms manufacturers of Aleppo used to be ordinary men—network administrators, housepainters, professors. Then came the bloody Syrian crisis. Now they must use all their desperate creativity to supply their fellow rebels with the machinery of death." [Via]
posted by homunculus at 7:25 PM PST - 18 comments

From Slate's 'Behold' photo blog: This Is What Fracking Really Looks Like. See more of photographer Nina Berman's documentation of Pennsylvania’s Marcellus Shale region at her website collection called fractured: the shale play.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 6:26 PM PST - 57 comments

The International Olympic Committee has issued a statement acknowledging the new anti-gay laws signed by Vladimir Putin last month. The Sochi Olympic Games are set to open on February 7. [more inside]
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 6:10 PM PST - 79 comments

Porpentine (previously) has deployed her impressive hacking skillz to circumvent copy protection and made available an edutainment game from times past: Ultra Business Tycoon III (NFO file) [content warning for suicide, violence] [more inside]
posted by juv3nal at 6:05 PM PST - 45 comments

The release today of the documentary Blackfish has SeaWorld, the setting of the documentary, in an unusually aggressive yet defensive public relations battle with the makers of the film. The film centers on the orca that perform in captivity at SeaWorld, and explores the 2010 death of Dawn Brancheau by the actions of the orca Tilikum. In January, the documentary series Frontline explored the world of captive cetaceans, particualrly at SeaWorld in their film, A Whale of a Business. [more inside]
posted by Toekneesan at 6:02 PM PST - 37 comments

Philosopher Grace Lee Boggs speaks on reimagining work, food, and community in Detroit. [more inside]
posted by HuronBob at 5:26 PM PST - 5 comments

Challenge: draw a dinosaur body on cardboard and have your pet stick his head through it. The Best Western Denver Southwest facebook page is having a contest for pets as part of dinosaur drawings.
posted by dog food sugar at 5:13 PM PST - 24 comments

The making of a Steinway piano in 1929 and nearly 80 years later. via Kottke. [more inside]
posted by nadawi at 4:20 PM PST - 16 comments

#splitsontrees (SLYT)
posted by petsounds at 3:57 PM PST - 16 comments

"The high street is becoming a no-go area for kids, which is really unfair. Why shouldn't they be able to go into a supermarket, or a newsagent? The people who make the displays aren't thinking about it from a child's point of view. I don't think David Cameron goes to a supermarket with his kids very much." Following the No More Page 3 campaign and a backlash against lads mags, the Guardian asks readers to send in and comment on sexualised images of women on the high street. But is this just another form of censorship, hypocrisy, or even sexual repression?
posted by mippy at 3:26 PM PST - 215 comments

Portraitlandia, a series of portraits of residents of Portland, Oregon (one nude). [more inside]
posted by Nelson at 3:06 PM PST - 42 comments

Mary Butts (1890-1937) was a British modernist novelist whose frequently overlooked writing has had a cult following largely composed of fellow writers such as Robin Blaser and Robert Duncan. [more inside]
posted by larrybob at 2:10 PM PST - 6 comments

A SPOOKTACULAR ADVENTURE - Alex Roberts' charming mostly-ghostly obscenity-laden, Choose Your Own Adventure game is just filled to bursting with spooks, ooks, and skeletons.
posted by The Whelk at 2:02 PM PST - 15 comments

What the Pope Really Meant in His Twitter-Indulgences Announcement [more inside]
posted by Shouraku at 1:44 PM PST - 67 comments

HuffPo presents the worst Canadian album covers [more inside]
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 12:58 PM PST - 84 comments

A new brain study questions the existence of sexual addiction. The study, posted in the Socioaffective Neuroscience & Psychology, concludes that so-called "hypersexuality" does not appear to explain brain differences in sexual response.
posted by mrgrimm at 12:55 PM PST - 11 comments

An unusually sustained heatwave oppresses the UK, as temperatures have climbed above 82 degrees Fahrenheit for 11 days, the longest hot spell since 2006. Roads melt in England and Wales, rail lines buckle in England and Scotland, hospital admissions spike and wildfires burn. Swimming-related, army training and heat-related, deaths have increased. The Met Office currently hold a Level Three Heat Advisory for several regions (Level Four is "National Emergency"), while tabloids indulge in traditional "England is hotter than {exotic place}" headlines. [more inside]
posted by Wordshore at 11:44 AM PST - 253 comments

In the spirit of the classic* Satan-worshiping Winnie the Pooh clip [YT, some NSFW language], the voice actor Jim Cummings read some of Darth Vader's lines from Star Wars in the voice of Winnie the Pooh [YT, SFW] [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 10:41 AM PST - 12 comments

Paintings by Picasso, Matisse, Monet and others burned by art thief's mother.
posted by xowie at 9:57 AM PST - 142 comments

"My Immortal" has now been brought to life in the only way that could possibly do it justice. My Immortal is classic fanfic which has now been filmed. Special fangz (get it, coz Im goffik) to ONTD 4 helpin me wif da link and spelling.
posted by h00py at 9:54 AM PST - 16 comments

A new biography of Timothy Leary by R. U. Sirius emphasizes a Transhuman Leary and his SMI²LE (Space Migration + Intelligence Increase + Life Extension) material. Excerpted and discussed on Kurzweil dot net. [more inside]
posted by bukvich at 9:44 AM PST - 24 comments

While at Cal Arts, before blogs and websites freely shared content, as animation students we would watch short films in a dark cage like room called the Palace. Projected onto the wall we screened “rare” short films, on bulky ¾ inch video cassettes or on mystical DVDs that a teacher had brought in. Of all the shorts we watched in the dingy palace there was one that was etched in my brain as both brilliant and completely insane. It was called “The Big Story,” and it starred three stop motion versions of Kirk Douglas: one as the young up and coming hero, another as the star in his prime, and the third the wise but curmudgie old man. [more inside]
posted by timsneezed at 9:26 AM PST - 10 comments

A Life-Or-Death Situation. "As a bioethicist, Margaret "Peggy" Pabst Battin fought for the right of people to end their own lives. After her husband’s cycling accident, her field of study turned unbearably personal." Via.
posted by zarq at 8:55 AM PST - 26 comments

A while back folk duo Paul and Storm created a song 'Write Like The Wind' urging G R R Martin to finish A Song Of Ice & Fire aka Game Of Thrones as soon as possible. During a recent live performance of said song the duo experienced an interruption. MLYT (previous)
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 8:41 AM PST - 106 comments

A 45 minute interview with pro wrestler Bully Ray. Also known as Bubba Ray Dudley of the Dudley Boys. [more inside]
posted by vrakatar at 8:18 AM PST - 13 comments

Once upon a time, the telephone was a strange, intimidating invention. So in 1974, the fine folks at the phone company made a short film to help children overcome their telephone-related fear and uncertainty. Taking their cues from children's entertainment, they tried to create a fun-filled land of song and dance, not unlike, say, Sesame Street. The end result was not exactly successful along those lines (it turns out that not even a catchy song can make the white pages exciting), but is no less compellingly, weirdly watchable for it. Come with us (and with Telly, a strange, merry man who kind of comes off like one of the Telephone Elves of the Eschaton) to the magical land of Telezonia.
posted by FAMOUS MONSTER at 8:06 AM PST - 38 comments

A junior doctor writes about the experience of watching the slow deaths-by-old-age of the elderly. (see also How Doctors Die).
posted by Another Fine Product From The Nonsense Factory at 7:39 AM PST - 40 comments

The secret history of football's TV first down line.
posted by Chrysostom at 7:30 AM PST - 28 comments

At age 99, Mr. Newton still gets up and goes to work 3X a week. The company doesn't need him to do the work, and in fact the company didn't actually hire him. He showed up at age 86 on a Monday after the property had been sold. He worked for the previous owner, and he came with the property.
posted by COD at 7:02 AM PST - 83 comments

"The mystery of mayonnaise... is how egg yolks, vegetable oil, vinegar (wine's angry brother) salt, sugar (earth’s primal grin-energy), lemon juice, water, and naturally, a pinch of the ol’ calcium disodium EDTA could be combined in such a way to produce a condiment so versatile, satisfying, and outright majestic, that mustard, ketchup and their ilk must bow down before it (though, at two bucks a jar, mayonnaise certainly doesn't put on airs) or else slink away in disgrace. Who but the French could have wrought this gastronomic miracle? Mayonnaise is France's gift to the New World's muddled palate, a boon that combines humanity's ancient instinctive craving for the cellular warmth of pure fat with the modern, romantic fondness for complex flavors: mayo (as the lazy call it) may appear mild and prosaic, but behind its creamy veil it fairly seethes with tangy disposition. Cholesterol aside, it projects the luster that we astro-orphans have identified with well-being ever since we fell from the stars." [more inside]
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 6:45 AM PST - 153 comments

Why Every Hollywood Movie Seems Exactly The Same. - A look at the book that's become Hollywood's new bible.
posted by empath at 5:45 AM PST - 264 comments

The Drone That Killed My Grandson — Dr. Nasser al-Awlaki, Fulbright scholar, founder of Ibb University and former president of Sana University, served as Yemen’s minister of agriculture and fisheries from 1988 to 1990. His 16-year-old grandson Abdulrahman (an American citizen born in Denver, Colorado) was killed by an American drone strike in Yemen on Oct. 14, 2011, two weeks after his father Anwar was killed by a previous drone strike.
posted by cenoxo at 5:17 AM PST - 79 comments

The Charlotte Hornets are back! This may signal a return to the iconic teal and purple color scheme made so popular by Starter jackets. 
posted by reenum at 4:59 AM PST - 31 comments

Unicef Sweden have developed a machine that turns sweat into drinking water. They are asking participants in the Gothia Cup to hand in their sweaty clothes to produce water and are hoping they will "drink some sweat to support clean drinking water. The expectation is to gather sweat from more than 70 different nations". The goal is to raise awareness about the lack of clean water in the world, with the main purpose of raising money for water purification tablets for children. 780 million people still lack access to clean drinking water. [more inside]
posted by arcticseal at 12:53 AM PST - 19 comments

Neil Degrasse Tyson waxes eloquent about Isaac Newton [chopped YouTube link, full length video 'SciCafe: Life the Universe and Everything' here] [more inside]
posted by mysticreferee at 12:31 AM PST - 8 comments

"10. Mild Non-Injurous Physical Contact: (i.e.,“a little bit of smacky face“) Unlike other forms of contact that lead to physical injury, sexual contact is unlikely to leave scars and is more likely to induce guilt that can be taken advantage of by a good interrogator." (NSFW) [more inside]
posted by artof.mulata at 11:40 PM PST - 13 comments

Viscera Cleanup Detail is a free PC game that casts as a space station janitor mopping up after a hero who left the station encrusted with gore. Via Gamers With Jobs' podcast on 'mundane games'. It's actually the third game about a space janitor, after Space Quest and Space Station 13.
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 10:21 PM PST - 49 comments

Why are we so afraid of chemical weapons? [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 9:05 PM PST - 43 comments

Ellen Raskin (1928-1984) is best known as a writer, author of The Mysterious Disappearance of Leon (I mean Noel) and the Newbery Award-winning The Westing Game. But she always considered herself an artist first. Raskin designed over 1,000 book covers, including the iconic original cover of A Wrinkle In Time, the edition of Dubliners you probably read in college, and the New Directions edition of a Child's Christmas in Wales (Raskin did the woodcuts on the inside, too; further appreciation here.) More Raskin covers are collected in this flickr set from Bennington College. [more inside]
posted by escabeche at 8:19 PM PST - 29 comments

"We were basically incorporated to be a sewer." The small village of Monsanto, Illinois was incorporated in 1926 to be a low-regulated tax haven for Monsanto Company's chemical plants. These days it's named Sauget, after the family which runs virtually every aspect of it—its real estate, its minor league baseball team (which plays on Sauget Field), and several of its nightclubs, of which there are so many that they are collectively known as the Sauget Ballet. The town's pollution has led to numerous lawsuits, and inspired the song Sauget Wind by alt-country group Uncle Tupelo. [more inside]
posted by Rory Marinich at 7:57 PM PST - 19 comments

How Kiyoshi Izumi Built the Psych Ward of the Future by Dropping Acid.
posted by homunculus at 7:09 PM PST - 5 comments

What Three Words has changed the complex numbers of zip codes and post codes, longitude and latitude, into three English words. [more inside]
posted by The otter lady at 7:05 PM PST - 83 comments

A healthy, inexpensive, environmentally friendly solution for housing millions of retiring baby boomers is staring us in the face. We just know it by a dirty name. How The Trailer Park Could Save Us All.
posted by SkylitDrawl at 5:30 PM PST - 90 comments

Why would a liberal education, the deeper acquaintance with a number of diverse modes of symbolic production, enhance our freedom? University of Chicago sociology professor Andreas Glaeser, in his 2005 Aims of Education Address to incoming students, muses: How About Becoming a Poet?
posted by shivohum at 3:42 PM PST - 6 comments

Detroit, the cradle of America’s automobile industry and once the nation’s fourth-most-populous city, has filed for bankruptcy. (NYT) The decision to file for bankruptcy makes this "the largest municipal bankruptcy filing in American history in terms of debt." (Previously) [more inside]
posted by Roger_Mexico at 2:29 PM PST - 135 comments

Having a rough day? Have a live look in on these future labrador service puppies. With a webcam hosted by Explore.org (previously, with bears), Warrior Canine Connection is a non-profit that specializes in training service dogs for wounded veterans. [more inside]
posted by disillusioned at 1:57 PM PST - 35 comments

"20 Minutes Into The Future" (full length film on YouTube) was a sci-fi telefilm with a dinstinctly dystopian/cyberpunk flair produced by Channel 4 in 1985 primarily known introducing the character Max Headroom. The character portrayed by Matt Frewer though popularly believed to be a fully computer generated personality, became something of a pop culture phenomenon. In the UK, hosting a music video block with no wraparound intro, which eventually evolved into more proper chat program The Original Talking Max Headroom Show. In the US, the characters popularity led to Max Headroom (full episode 1x01 "Blipverts") a sci-fi television series with a distinctly dystopian/cyberpunk flair that aired on ABC for two seasons 1987-1988.
posted by mediocre at 1:57 PM PST - 67 comments

Reflecting upon 14 years of blogging and observing internet communities, Anil Dash proposes 10 Rules of the Internet, based upon the lessons that he learned during that time. (via ★interesting; anildash previously on Metafilter)
posted by schmod at 1:42 PM PST - 95 comments

Donald Fagen and Walter Becker have given an interview to Rolling Stone to promote Steely Dan's upcoming tour. Becker and Fagen developed a reputation for messing with the media in the '70s, and Becker keeps the practice alive in this interview. [more inside]
posted by banal evil at 1:39 PM PST - 60 comments

Can Photojournalism Survive in the Instagram Era? (single link Mother Jones via) "It is no accident that so much of the most important work by photographers [on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan] has been on veterans as they return to the United States—one has more freedom in how one photographs."
posted by spamandkimchi at 1:30 PM PST - 1 comment

A photo essay on the Allen Gilbert School of Undressing , as featured in the 15 Feb 1937 issue of LIFE Magazine (now LIFE.com). Burlesque empresario Allen Gilbert wanted to help save American marriages from the evils of ... sloppy undressing on the part of the wife. His answer? A specialized school to teach women to improve their "disrobing methodology." At least, that's what Gilbert claimed; in reality, the school -- and the LIFE spread (you should pardon the phrasing) -- were elaborate promotions for his new burlesque revue, "Sex Rears Its Ugly Head." "Joke or no joke, however, one thing is as true today as it was three-quarters of a century ago: whether one wants to make a buck publishing magazines, staging burlesque shows or fostering adult education, sex sells."
posted by Annie Savoy at 1:29 PM PST - 24 comments

The three most exciting words in science concern one of the longest running experiments of all time that finally produced a recordable result.
posted by z11s at 1:20 PM PST - 41 comments

Download The Stories: Five Years of Original Fiction on Tor.com Nearly 4000 pages of some of your favorite authors for free. [Past offers not valid in all countries. Sorry if yours is one of these.]
posted by cjorgensen at 12:44 PM PST - 29 comments

Quinologie: the cinchona and issues in the present state of science and commerce (1865). The book has 23 hand-colored and extremely detailed plates of the many different barks of the cinchona tree, the world's original source of quinine. Don't get too excited - it's literally just some pictures of bark. Pictures begin on page 51.
posted by Think_Long at 12:19 PM PST - 9 comments

"University of Minnesota undergrad Daniel Crawford did something very clever: He took surface air temperature data and converted them into musical notes, one for each year from 1880 to 2012, and played them on his cello." Direct Vimeo link.
posted by brundlefly at 12:02 PM PST - 20 comments

How far in advance was the coup in Egypt planned? After the army overthrew the Muslim Brotherhood president, gas shortages that had crippled Morsi's popularity magically disappeared, and a local billionaire bragged about secretly financing the opposition. The coup was predicated on enormous street protests that seemed to represent another revolution, but one analysis suggests that the army and opposition massively exaggerated the scale of the protests in order to justify the seizure of power. Egyptian liberals however, defend the overthrow, saying that 'democracy is not reducible to the ballot box.'
posted by A Fine Mess at 11:52 AM PST - 65 comments

The term EGOT, popularized by 30 Rock, refers to winning an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar, and a Tony award. Only eleven people have done it. Composer Alan Menken, just nominated for an Emmy, could become the 12th. 30 Rock, oddly enough, happens to be nominated in the same category. [more inside]
posted by troika at 11:10 AM PST - 51 comments

To imagine the scale, picture this: almost every city in Western Europe and North America destroyed. Not reduced, not scaled down. People-don't-live-here-anymore-just-ruins destroyed.

Between about 1200 and 1150 BC, civilization in the northeastern quadrant of the Mediterranean collapsed. Mycenae and the other Iliad-era Greek city-kingdoms; the Hittite Empire; the Levantine possessions of New Kingdom Egypt—cultures which had flourished for five hundred years fell and dispersed within a single lifetime, their palaces razed, their every city toppled, burned, and abandoned. [more inside]
posted by Iridic at 10:42 AM PST - 93 comments

District 9 director Neil Blomkamp talks to WIRED about Elysium, District 10, Halo, his desire to buy a skyscraper and almost casting Eminem or Ninja from Die Antwood in Elysium's Matt Damon role.
posted by Artw at 10:35 AM PST - 46 comments

Nolan Bushnell was a co-creator of Pong and Atari, and he also sold Atari arcade machines. When he noticed that he sold the arcade machines for $1,500 to $2,000 but the new owners would earn twice that much in the life of the machines, he started thinking of how to make an arcade destination that wouldn't compete with his arcade machine clients. His solution: a pizza parlor, with an arcade for the kids and an pneumatic-powered animatronic coyote mascot to fool the parents it was restaurant with free entertainment. The coyote became a rat named Chuck, and what was code-named Coyote Pizza was briefly renamed Rick Rat's Pizza, but the marketing department thought the name wasn't such a great idea, and instead we got Chuck E. Cheese's Pizza Time Theater. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 10:34 AM PST - 38 comments

Japan's gory horror comedies. [more inside]
posted by dortmunder at 10:01 AM PST - 13 comments

Summertime At The Jersey Shore: Asbury Park, c. 1979
posted by boygeorge at 9:55 AM PST - 14 comments

Killing in Cairo: the full story of the Republican Guards' club shootings
posted by lalochezia at 9:47 AM PST - 3 comments

Erin Faulk (@erinscafe on Twitter) tells the surprisingly compelling tale of going on a quest to find Matt Damon in Morocco, just cuz. (SLStorify)
posted by dry white toast at 9:35 AM PST - 25 comments

Minneapolis photographer highlights Somali-American success stories

For years, any time photographer Mohamud Mumin turned to local television channels or to newspapers for news about the Minneapolis Somali community, what he found left him disappointed.

Mumin said the media highlights the dark side of the community and abandons the many success stories and positive contributions Somali immigrants are making in their new home -- a remark many in the community agree.

“There are many great things the community is doing,” he said. “Why can’t I see those stories in the media? Why only the negative ones?”

Mumin, 36, recently took matters into his own hands. In 2010, he began capturing the images of 13 Twin Cities Somali-American men, documenting their stories in “The Youth/Dhallinyarada,” a multimedia project that focuses on the effort these men are making to improve the lives of those around them. (“Dhallinyarada” means “the youth” in Somalia.)

[more inside]
posted by jillithd at 9:21 AM PST - 4 comments

Catherine Bennett is a Credible Likeable Superstar Role Model. Taking time out from her work as a palaeontologist, Bennett has released two songs to date: debut single Apathy and a follow-up, Animal Kingdom. [more inside]
posted by jack_mo at 8:57 AM PST - 2 comments

Between 1959 to 1970, late English film director Ken Russell (The Who's Tommy and Women in Love) created art documentaries for the BBC, many of them unusual adaptations of artists' lives. The documentaries included The Debussy Film, Dante's Inferno, Isadora, Song of Summer, and Always on Sunday. Bonus: Ken Russell in Conversation and Ken Russell at Work. Previously.
posted by seemoreglass at 8:55 AM PST - 3 comments

"It's his charm. It's his gift. It's his political liability, and it's part of an American conundrum. We beg for authenticity, and then when we get it, oh man, it's hilarious. [Vice President Joe] Biden can be fantastic when he's on his game. At the 2012 Democratic National Convention, his speech got higher Nielsen ratings than either Bill Clinton's or Obama's. He killed the debate against Ryan, pumped air back into a campaign deflated after Obama's miserable first performance against Romney. Watching those performances, it's almost impossible to see him as a person once crippled by speech."
posted by zarq at 8:24 AM PST - 75 comments

The Encyclopedia of Ethical Failure [PDF, there is a Word file direct from the DoD] is 167 pages of stories of elaborate frauds, scams, and abuses of power in the US government. Interestingly, the sarcasm-filled document is also published by the US government, to help illustrate how government workers get in trouble. Freakonomics radio has a amusing and interesting discussion with the Encyclopedia's editor and founding editor [link goes to transcript]. [more inside]
posted by blahblahblah at 8:22 AM PST - 12 comments

What would happen if Sterling Archer was Captain of the USS Enterprise? (SLVimeo)
posted by jason_steakums at 7:24 AM PST - 43 comments

The Iowa Supreme Court has ruled that it is legal to fire someone for being too attractive. An Iowa dentist fired his assistant because his (unreciprocated) feelings of attraction to her might have tempted him to try to start an extramarital affair. The Iowa Supreme Court, an all-male body, determined that it was not a case of sex discrimination because it was based on feelings rather than gender. Many disagree, seeing it as a clear case of cultural, institutional, and even religious sexism (the firing was advised and encouraged by the dentist's pastor.)
posted by kyrademon at 5:46 AM PST - 263 comments

Nine Traits of the Veteran Unix Admin, Network Admin (from InfoWorld via /.)
posted by JoeXIII007 at 4:58 AM PST - 84 comments

Scientists working at England’s Bristol Robotics Laboratory have developed a technique for converting urine into electrons, enough to power a cell phone.
posted by twoleftfeet at 4:15 AM PST - 40 comments

On 7 November, Florida rock band The Red Jumpsuit Apparatus begins its Australian tour in Brisbane…or Gold Coast…or Toowoomba…or Gympie. Dubbed the 'Choose our Adventure Australian Tour', the band will play where the most fans commit to attend, in a new spin on crowdfunding/crowdsourcing. Six shows are scheduled for the tour - but the band is leaving it up to the fans to decide (by 'pledging') where they will play on each date, using Australia’s GiggedIn startup. "When you pledge on GiggedIn, you enter your card details but you won’t be charged unless we confirm that the gig goes ahead in your city. If your winning city wins, your card will be charged and tickets will be sent to your email." [more inside]
posted by paleyellowwithorange at 11:53 PM PST - 11 comments

The woman composer is dead. Or is she? [more inside]
posted by daisystomper at 10:30 PM PST - 10 comments

In 2007, the arcade cabinet industry was still bringing in $4 billion per year, although down from $8 billion in 2004. By 2012, revenues for coin-operated machines dropped to $35 million. The decline correlates well with the advent for the smart phone, which seems to have created less need for coin-operated distractions in the venues in which arcade games still resided. This opened the door for a novel new idea that the market seems poised to support: All You Can Arcade, which allows you to "have your favorite arcade games delivered to your living room for only $75 per month. ... No delivery or pickup fees, and keep the games as long as you want." It's like Netflix, but for bigger things.
posted by SpacemanStix at 10:22 PM PST - 52 comments

"Here's an idea: BMO, from Adventure Time, is expressive of feminism" PBSIdeachannel's Mike Rugnetta gives the rundown on how BMO's existence is a skilled potrayal of 3rd wave feminism.
posted by FirstMateKate at 10:20 PM PST - 33 comments

Tywin Lannister's Dinner Party, an extremely awkward recut of an episode in Game of Thones, third season (no spoilers).
posted by the man of twists and turns at 8:50 PM PST - 31 comments

Food Police: The Rick Steves Episode Dastardly doings in Rome. (Single Link Vimeo Post).
posted by potsmokinghippieoverlord at 8:22 PM PST - 19 comments

Here is a follow up to a previous post: An interview with AD Harvey, the man behind the Dickens meets Dostoevsky hoax. [more inside]
posted by unliteral at 8:15 PM PST - 5 comments

Derek Black the infamous Don Black's son, today renounced White Nationalism, saying in a .pdf document sent to the Southern Poverty Law Center "I acknowledge that things I have said as well as my actions have been harmful to people of color, people of Jewish descent, activists striving for opportunity and fairness for all, and others affected." Stormfront has long been seen as the leading white supremacist Web site on the internet, often considered the first.
posted by eparchos at 5:55 PM PST - 66 comments

The AP has obtained e-mails showing that Mitch Daniels sought to censor academic materials while in office. [more inside]
posted by dubusadus at 5:14 PM PST - 39 comments

As the pornography course is about to be opened in Spring 2014, we've came up with a selection of course-books for the upcoming students. [NSFW] By Pavel Fuksa and Karolina Galácz
posted by chavenet at 4:57 PM PST - 21 comments

"I quickly realised that none of the fashion sites I looked at ever featured a turbaned Sikh man," he says. "I wanted to give the turbaned Sikh man a fair representation within the fashion world, and also show the blend of British and Sikh identities together." Pardeep Singh Bahra of street fashion blog Singh Street Style, profiled in the Guardian.
posted by DarlingBri at 4:54 PM PST - 31 comments

This escalator takes people both up and down. Megan Lee of the Casper Star Tribune updated her earlier report on escalators in Wyoming with a trip to the Hilltop National Bank (and Amusement Park.) Watch her escalate with abandon in the video.
posted by vespabelle at 4:41 PM PST - 29 comments

For the past several months, manatees, dolphins, and pelicans have been dying by the hundreds in Florida's Indian River Lagoon. [more inside]
posted by junco at 3:42 PM PST - 22 comments

Basil Pao (鲍皓昕) is a photographer, among other things. He's probably most famous for his involvement with Michael Palin's travel series. He was featured in the fifth episode of Michael Palin's Around the World in 80 Days*. After that, he became the stills photographer for subsequent series of Palin's travels (Pole to Pole, Full Circle, Sahara, Himalaya, New Europe and Brazil, so far). [more inside]
posted by jiawen at 3:27 PM PST - 5 comments

You know how you had heard there was a cool video out there showing the growth and construction on Capitol Hill rendered in 3D animation and you were all, eh, I'll watch it once somebody puts it on the same page as the Game of Thrones theme so that I can get the full experience? Well now you have no more excuse.
posted by Navelgazer at 1:46 PM PST - 16 comments

The New York Times is reporting that state health insurance regulators have approved 2014 prices for individual health insurance (SLNYT) in New York State that are on average 50% lower than 2013 rates. [more inside]
posted by medusa at 12:57 PM PST - 148 comments

The Rise and Fall of a Racist Corner of Reddit
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 12:49 PM PST - 294 comments

Leonard Cohen sings "Save The Last Dance For Me" in Hamburg
posted by The Whelk at 12:46 PM PST - 22 comments

What abortions should be like. A safe, comfortable place. Kind people (Maya Angelou, maybe, and Billy Joel playing piano). A room to cry if you need to. Another room with "all the little things you like, the things you use when you want to feel beautiful, if you’d care to go in. Or ... healthy. Or handsome. Or safe, or strong." A swan boat to take you home. And lovely, fragrant melon slices.
posted by Annie Savoy at 12:44 PM PST - 43 comments

The cover of the Rolling Stone has been a cultural touchstone for a long time. Now, the dreamy, tape-it-to-the-bedroom-wall worthy image of terrorist eye-candy, Jahar Tsarnaev, rocks the magazine's legendary cover real estate. Teenage girls swoon, others fret.
posted by thinkpiece at 11:46 AM PST - 225 comments

The town of Deer Trail, Colorado is considering hunting licences for federal drones. Deer Trail is a small town in the plains of Colorado east of Denver, and claim they are the home to the worlds first rodeo (though that's open for interpretation). They've decided they don't want drones, and offer a bounty for licensed hunters who bag a federal drone. The mayor of the town shows the proper technique for hunting them...
posted by Eekacat at 11:45 AM PST - 43 comments

Thrift Lab. Leukemias, urine drug screens, cytology, grossing, frozens, and managing the blood bank... to Thrift Shop by Macklemore & Ryan Lewis. By UF Pathology.
posted by finite at 11:08 AM PST - 7 comments

Utah State Sen. Aaron Osmond (R-South Jordan) has introduced a proposal to abolish compulsory education for children in his home state. [more inside]
posted by divined by radio at 11:05 AM PST - 186 comments

Internet legend Brad Neely, known for his songs about Washington and JFK, his explanation of Sodom and Gomorrah, and, of course, his masterful Harry Potter dub Wizard People, Dear Reader, has a show on Adult Swim, China, IL, that co-stars him (voicing his old characters), Greta Gerwig, and wrestling legend Hulk Hogan, who voices an extraordinarily violent and manly dean at "America's worst college." Four episodes are available for free streaming:

Rewind, Pause, Play — Ronald Reagan travels through time to shit in a professor's mouth.
Dean vs Mayor — The dean loses control of his college to the town's God-fearing mayor.
Baby Boom — A scientist (voiced by Arrested Development's Jeffrey Tambor) accidentally creates an enormous baby that kills people.
Coming out of the Casket — A recently-dead history professor comes back to life to hit on people. [more inside]
posted by Rory Marinich at 10:03 AM PST - 29 comments

On July 1, 1913, a group of automobile enthusiasts and industry officials established the Lincoln Highway Association "to procure the establishment of a continuous improved highway from the Atlantic to the Pacific, open to lawful traffic of all description without toll charges," and to be a lasting memorial to Abraham Lincoln. The Lincoln Highway efforts started about three years before the first federal road act would provide funding to states to improve the broad network of roads. Never officially finished, the first transcontinental highway eventually became renumbered as various interstate and US routes. To celebrate its centennial, there was a cross-country tour in June. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 9:55 AM PST - 33 comments

The Cookbook of Unknown Ladies: Historian re-discovers a 300-year-old cookbook. [more inside]
posted by not_the_water at 9:36 AM PST - 10 comments

For several years now, Tom Scott, a young man in Britain, has mostly done silly, entertaining things on YouTube, things like, "Two Drums and a Cymbal Fall off a Cliff," "The Matt Gray High Five Face Off," "Robocoaster Challenge: Reciting Shakespeare while attached to a giant robot arm," "Google Glasses: A New Way to Hurt Yourself," and "Welcome to Life: the singularity, ruined by lawyers" (previously). But recently, he's done a series of videos that are interesting more than they're silly: eight videos which introduce linguistic concepts like phonotactics, clusivity & evidentiality, and the contrast between descriptivism and prescriptivism (he's decidedly the former, fyi).
posted by ocherdraco at 9:33 AM PST - 11 comments

Darius McCollum was recently arrested in New York for stealing a Trailways bus. Evidently he drove the bus to a Manhattan hotel where he picked up a flight crew and drove them to JFK Airport. On the way back to a New Jersey bus depot, he was pulled over by the cops. This wasn't the first time Mr. McCollum was arrested while (unlawfully) transporting the public. In fact, it was the 29th time. [more inside]
posted by mark7570 at 6:53 AM PST - 58 comments

Ken Levine's network notes for Under The Dome, perhaps not the best example of Stephen King's TV work.
posted by Artw at 6:42 AM PST - 164 comments

The Mighty T is a super cute animated short film describing the work going on at the Ben Towne Center for Childhood Cancer Research. It's purely PR, but it's a well done short animation for a great cause. Directed by Colin Hesterly, who also directed the adorable When I Grow Up [more inside]
posted by DigDoug at 6:30 AM PST - 2 comments

Originally I used the word stonegaze to describe a crowd response after one of our first shows. It was like they had all just spent 30 minutes staring at Medusa. Shortly after that I used it again to describe our sound and it stuck.

Dallas, TX band True Widow are a collaboration between a woodworker, a screenprinter, and a makeup artist. They're Cormac McCarthy fans. Together, they make heavy, hypnotic, jam-based music that takes as much from slowcore and shoegaze as it does from stoner rock. Their new album Circumambulation is now streaming via Pitchfork. [more inside]
posted by Sonny Jim at 6:22 AM PST - 10 comments

Everyone knows that this book isn't real. What this Goodreads entry presupposes is...
posted by Legomancer at 5:56 AM PST - 24 comments

Rainn Wilson, former beet farmer and paper salesman, interviews friends in the back of his traveling magical van. Questions focus on belief, the meaning(s) of life, life after death, and other oft-overlooked topics. Features exploding blenders, beards intertwining, suspenders, chess-related nightmares, chicken burgers, and more. (youtube channel) (previously)
posted by captain cosine at 2:40 AM PST - 5 comments

An essay on race, fear, imagination, and beekeeping
posted by Joe in Australia at 11:33 PM PST - 19 comments

One song, made up of 26 different music genres from A - Z [more inside]
posted by Leisure_Muffin at 10:50 PM PST - 21 comments

The Fermi Paradox poses the question, if intelligent ETs exist why haven't they shown up yet. Now a new mathematical study shows that self-replicating probes using sling-shot maneuvers (paper) could explore the entire galaxy in just 10 million years. Perhaps they're already here, hiding, waiting for our technology to reach a level that can de-cloak them.
posted by Long Way To Go at 10:11 PM PST - 135 comments

Thomas Oliver - Jurassic Park Theme (Weissenborn Instrumental)
posted by Brocktoon at 8:49 PM PST - 7 comments

In 2002, now-disgraced stock analyst Jack Grubman (previously) was the central figure in a preschool-placement scandal in New York's famously Wall Street connected 92nd Street Y.
The Price Of Perfection
posted by the man of twists and turns at 8:47 PM PST - 32 comments

Raven Asks Human for Help with Painful Quills After Porcupine Attack
posted by flapjax at midnite at 8:31 PM PST - 107 comments

At 9:45am on July 14, 2013, Alison Bradley met her mom on the steps of LA's City Hall and had a beer. Why? She'd just (unofficially) broke the previous World Record for a a Transamerica Run by a Female. Running mostly unaccompanied, Bradley covered 2,800 miles in 68 days (and burned through 6 pairs of shoes), starting at New York's City Hall. Why? Cancer research. [more inside]
posted by grabbingsand at 8:17 PM PST - 16 comments

Quine Relay. A quine is a program that produces its own source code as output. This is what happens when you write a program that outputs the source of a program in another language, that outputs the source of a program in another language, and so on through fifty different languages until you get out the source of the program you started with.
posted by invitapriore at 8:02 PM PST - 41 comments

Joel Schroeder, with the help of Kickstarter, has finally finished a documentary about Calvin and Hobbes and its creator, Bill Watterson. It's scheduled to be released on Nov. 15, 2013.
posted by reenum at 5:59 PM PST - 34 comments

Writer Ann Morgan set herself a challenge – to read a book from every country in the world in one year. She describes the experience and what she learned. Here is her blog
posted by dfm500 at 5:34 PM PST - 26 comments

Every Grunt from Home Improvement (SLYT, 14:37).
posted by codacorolla at 3:59 PM PST - 45 comments

Dear Daily Mail [NSFW]. Recently the Daily Mail covered Amanda Palmer's breast being "left on show" while she was on stage at the Glastonbury festival. Amanda responds with a (sung) open letter.
posted by litleozy at 3:53 PM PST - 192 comments

Spin magazine's GIRLY SHOW: The oral history of Liz Phair's 'Exile in Guyville.' It's 20 years old now. [more inside]
posted by purpleclover at 2:45 PM PST - 61 comments

Movies in movies: A montage (SLYT).
posted by feelinglistless at 2:30 PM PST - 16 comments

Symposium Magazine bills itself as "where academia meets public life". Its promotes long-form, accessible articles about a variety of topics.
posted by shothotbot at 1:53 PM PST - 6 comments

"A quarter of a century ago this week, John McTiernan’s action masterpiece Die Hard was released into theaters, and it's not an understatement to say that we're still reeling from the impact .... For the past few months, I’ve been watching and/or rewatching almost every major action movie made since then in an attempt to come up with the best ones. The good news is that a lot of awesome action movies have been made over the past 25 years. The bad news? Not all of your favorites will be on this list." [more inside]
posted by Mothlight at 1:49 PM PST - 237 comments

What if the movie Titanic was translated into Japanese with a crappy online translator then translated back into English? Japanese Titanic, that's what.
posted by Cat Pie Hurts at 1:11 PM PST - 25 comments

Pink Floyd's The Division Bell tour in 1994 was the highest-grossing tour in rock music history to that date, and featured spectacular special effects. For the first time since 1975, the band played the entirety of The Dark Side of the Moon in many of the tour's shows. On October 20, 1994 the concert at the Earls Court Exhibition Centre in London was filmed, and the subsequent documentary P•U•L•S•E: Live at Earls Court was released in 1995. Fullscreen. Widescreen. [more inside]
posted by zarq at 12:39 PM PST - 43 comments

Dynamic target tracking camera system keeps its eye on the ball - motorized mirrors track a moving object of interest every thousandth of a second, reflecting its image into a camera
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 12:36 PM PST - 23 comments

Talia Castellano , the 13-year-old terminal cancer patient whose makeup tips made her a YouTube star, an honorary Cover Girl and a guest on Ellen DeGeneres's talk show, has died at age 13. [more inside]
posted by DRoll at 12:19 PM PST - 56 comments

Here is a video of a dog + some water. Here is another video of a dog + some water. Here is a third video of a dog + some water.
posted by mudpuppie at 11:32 AM PST - 29 comments

Curiosity piqued by the music behind Avatar: The Last Air Bender, Avatar: The Legend of Korra, or Kung Fu Panda: Legend of Awesomeness? If so, then you may already be fan of the work of Jeremy Zuckerman, one half of the music and sound design production company, Track Team. [more inside]
posted by Atreides at 11:09 AM PST - 16 comments

In the fifth round of the NFL Draft, the NY Jets selected a guard/tackle from the University of Virginia. His name is Oday Aboushi. While not a first round pick, Aboushi has garnered a lot of media attention. Why? Oday Aboushi is a Muslim Palestinian. MLB.com's New Media Coordinator Jonathan Mael compared Aboushi to Aaron Hernandez,the former New England Patriots tight end charged with murder. [more inside]
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 10:57 AM PST - 45 comments

“Imagine having a fishbowl on your head with a half a litre of water sticking to your face, ears and nose. Then imagine you can’t take the fishbowl off your head for a minimum of 20 minutes, feel the panic?”

ISS astronaut Luca Parmitano developed a water leak in his helmet shortly after beginning a spacewalk, but is fine now.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 10:39 AM PST - 62 comments

Oorah is a non-profit Jewish organization providing year-round activities and educational opportunities to Jewish children and families (including funding for Kars4Kids. But they also have some amazing videos on YouTube.
posted by shakespeherian at 10:25 AM PST - 26 comments

The mad doctor is (temporarily) out. Five years ago this week, Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog went live, in three separate acts. Since then, there has been confirmation of plans for a sequel dating back to April 2009 -- and July 2011 -- but something always seems to come up... though Mr. Wheadon did have time to perform live, singing commentary on his project, which led to the recording of "Commentary" in 2010, reuniting the cast. Felicia Day, Jed Whedon, and even Nathan Fillion seem a little bit less busy, however... welding kid-toting robots and preparing for the zombie apocalypse.
posted by markkraft at 10:21 AM PST - 19 comments

Giant Concrete Arrows That Point Your Way Across America
posted by Confess, Fletch at 10:15 AM PST - 44 comments

I'm here today to help prevent Egypt from becoming a commodity owned by one person. A 12-year-old Egyptian comments on the political situation in his country. (SLYT)
posted by shivohum at 10:05 AM PST - 9 comments

Washington DC's Botanic Gardens is livestreaming the blossoming process of its corpse flower. The corpse flower, aka titan arum, is well known for smelling absolutely awful. [more inside]
posted by troika at 10:01 AM PST - 28 comments

McDonald's has a new website dedicated to showing employees how to properly budget their paychecks. Death and Taxes takes a look and concludes: "McDonalds' suggested budget for employees shows just how impossible it is to get by on minimum wage." It also notably excludes heat, food and gas.
posted by DarlingBri at 9:43 AM PST - 298 comments

Black holes are one of the most interesting, mysterious and cool things in the universe. So, why dont we make one in a lab? [more inside]
posted by TheLittlePrince at 9:04 AM PST - 101 comments

"You are you" looks at a gender nonconforming camp for boys. [more inside]
posted by yeoz at 8:23 AM PST - 66 comments

Nintendo's Famicom (the Japanese counterpart to the NES) launched in Japan three decades ago this week. Ars Technica and NintendoLife have posted tributes and history lessons of this console.
posted by porn in the woods at 8:20 AM PST - 15 comments

Corey Feldman is probably most widely recognized as a child star of the 1980s, but since then he has branched out into music. Yet with two group albums and two solo albums, his only music video appearances have been cameos (Katy Perry's "Last Friday Night" [Funny or Die] and Mac Miller's "S.D.S." [YouTube]). That is, until now: "Ascension Millennium" (YT) is the first song off his forthcoming album, and it's "a musical journey through his 'Feldmansion' in this Day in the Life Adventure," complete with an appearance from his pal Sean Astin from "The Goonies" and tributes to Michael Jackson. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 7:58 AM PST - 58 comments

Quimps, Plewds, And Grawlixes: The Secret Language Of Comic Strips [more inside]
posted by Tevin at 7:46 AM PST - 10 comments

It's finally Ironic. Rachael Hurwitz fixes the lyrics to Alanis Morisette's "Ironic" to make them, y'know, actually ironic. (SLYT.)
posted by dnash at 7:20 AM PST - 88 comments

Last month, New York PBS affiliate WNET launched a subway ad campaign that promoted several fake but totally plausible reality shows, to poke fun at the state of Cable TV. To follow up on the successful campaign, yesterday, the network released 3 TV spots with a similar theme. (Kinda previously...)
posted by schmod at 6:24 AM PST - 56 comments

A clever bit of constrained writing in song from Matilda the Musical and Tim Minchin. [more inside]
posted by Gordafarin at 6:14 AM PST - 5 comments

Paring down history and films to their bare essentials (requires Flash). [more inside]
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 6:03 AM PST - 2 comments

There have been some high profile examples of sexism in the UK media this summer. Are we seeing a groundswell of strong female voices calling out sexism? Big Brother has in the past caused the UK media to focus on uncomfortable issues such as bullying and racism. Following the removal of a housemate for aggressive behaviour towards a fellow female housemate, how will the conversation continue this summer? [more inside]
posted by Ness at 5:46 AM PST - 18 comments

Pining for Audrey Hepburn's unfulfilled destiny as a flight attendant? Ever wanted to hear Judy Garland sing the Cream of Wheat jingle, or appear on Hollywood Hoarder, or go to the Piggly Wiggly with her daughter? The Punchy Players are here to answer your prayers! Meet co-creators Chris and Jeff, who have been goofily re-imagining Old Hollywood icons since 2009.
posted by mykescipark at 11:57 PM PST - 12 comments

Comic creators Matt Fraction (Casanova) and Mike Allred (Madman) make their ultimate summer playlist and discuss everything from Brian Wilson to robots.
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 11:03 PM PST - 11 comments

"In reality, it's surprisingly hard to stop someone who really wants to murder you, especially if he has easy access to a gun. Restraining orders don't create a magic force field around the victim. Shelters help, but they are underfunded and depend on the victim giving up substantial rights to hold a job (which gives the abuser the ability to find you), have a social life, or even speak to family members," writes Amanda Marcotte, before summarising a Domestic Violence High Risk Team model of monitoring and escalating controls on the abuser, not the abused. Plus, the approach appears to be making a difference. [more inside]
posted by Athanassiel at 10:20 PM PST - 40 comments

A truck carrying 119 gas cylinders caught fire after colliding with a bus carrying 28 people on Moscow's Ring Road. The truck driver had minor injuries and everyone else escaped unharmed. Then the cylinders began exploding.
posted by stbalbach at 9:51 PM PST - 56 comments

DC has uploaded tons of DC Nation animated shorts to YouTube Including My Little Pony creator Lauren Faust's Super Best Friends Forever (previously). Not yet included: Robert Valley's super awesome 70s Wonder Woman.
posted by Artw at 9:05 PM PST - 24 comments

Deafheaven are a black metal/shoegaze/post-rock/emo/ambient/pop-metal/what-have-you band from San Francisco. The band consists of vocalist George Clarke and guitarist/songwriter Kerry McCoy and are signed to Deathwish Inc. [more inside]
posted by gucci mane at 8:49 PM PST - 43 comments

our highly speculative proposal for the reconfiguration of the political geography of the United States to better conform to the spatial distribution of various water resources, such as rivers, aquifers, and man-made infrastructures.

[more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 8:42 PM PST - 14 comments

Debo Band's Ethiopian pop music mixes traditional folk music with American soul and funk rhythms. Listen to their critically acclaimed self-titled album from 2012 for gems such as Akale Wube, Not Just a Song, Asha Gedawo, And Lay and Habesha.
posted by Foci for Analysis at 8:26 PM PST - 7 comments

Someone is cleaning up part of the Gum Wall, a 100-foot (ish) stretch of Post Alley (between Pike St. and Union St.) beneath the Seattle's Pike Place Market. (wikipedia) Begun in 1993 around the entrance to the Market Theater, the city's most unhygienic visitor attraction is a brick alley covered on both sides, from toe to a considerable heights, with wads of chewed gum. [more inside]
posted by Sunburnt at 7:32 PM PST - 53 comments

For their new album and new tour, Pet Shop Boys have recorded and are performing a cover of Bruce Springsteen's 2008 song The Last To Die.
posted by hippybear at 6:42 PM PST - 32 comments

"The diet of the average American is almost entirely dependent on the existence of a vast, distributed winter--a seamless network of artificially chilled processing plants, distribution centers, shipping containers, and retail display cases that creates the permanent global summertime of our supermarket aisles." -- The Atlantic
posted by jim in austin at 5:44 PM PST - 31 comments

Jack Handey Is the Envy of Every Comedy Writer in America. The New York Times profiles funny guy Jack Handey as his first work of fiction, The Stench of Honolulu, goes on sale tomorrow. (Read the first three chapters here.) Handey, of course, is best known for his Deep Thoughts, and for his SNL sketches, including the classic Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer. He's also a hilarious essayist: some of my favorites include What I'd Say to the Martians, Ideas for Paintings, My Nature Documentary, The Plan, and How I Want to Be Remembered.
posted by Rory Marinich at 5:35 PM PST - 85 comments

If anything can turn Westerners on to entomophagy for sustainable protein (or just the perfect beer snack), surely it's an attractive, well-designed kitchen appliance. Introducing LEPSIS, a modular terrarium for growing grasshoppers as a food source in an urban home. Nominated for the 2013 INDEX: Award.
posted by naju at 4:58 PM PST - 76 comments

The 14th moon of the planet Neptune has been confirmed. New Scientist: "...its existence is an enigma. The object, known for now as S/2004 N1, is the first Neptunian moon to be found in a decade. Its diminutive size raises questions as to how it survived the chaos thought to have created the giant planet's other moons." [more inside]
posted by Wordshore at 4:16 PM PST - 12 comments

Noted anti-vaccination activist Jenny McCarthy is going to replace Elizabeth Hasselbeck as The View's newest panelist. So, now, she can take her anti-vaccine roadshow to the masses. Even though she admitted that her son never had autism. A Slate columnist is even trying to petition The View to not hire Ms. McCarthy.
posted by reenum at 3:47 PM PST - 187 comments

The Flying Man. A short film about superheroes, criminals, and the idea of justice.
posted by Adridne at 2:35 PM PST - 30 comments

FUDSMENU: A journey in food-taste.
posted by emjaybee at 2:31 PM PST - 37 comments

Love is abundant, and every relationship is unique. Love and respect instead of entitlement. Find your core set of relationship values. Heterosexism is rampant and out there, but don’t let fear lead you. Build for the lovely unexpected. Fake it til’ you make it. Trust is better. Change through communication. Customize your commitments. The Short Instructional Manifesto for Relationship Anarchy by Andie Nordgren.
posted by davidjmcgee at 2:07 PM PST - 43 comments

The terrible and wonderful reasons I run long distance
posted by garlic at 1:39 PM PST - 102 comments

For the first time since the 1950s, Boston's Charles River opened for public swimming. [more inside]
posted by zizzle at 11:57 AM PST - 57 comments

Boring day job? Watch a grizzly bear hunt for salmon at Brooks Falls or the Lower Brooks River in Katmai National Park, Alaska. [more inside]
posted by mudpuppie at 11:30 AM PST - 129 comments

The Nazis called them “Night Witches” because the whooshing noise their plywood and canvas airplanes made reminded the Germans of the sound of a witch’s broomstick. Ms. Popova was a member of the 588th Night Bomber Regiment of the Soviet Air Forces during WWII. Composed entirely of women, most in their teens and early 20's, the Night Witches flew over 23,000 missions with only 40 2-woman crews. Popova herself flew over 850 missions and was shot down several times.
posted by bluejayway at 10:40 AM PST - 67 comments

New Netflix original series "Orange is the New Black", based on a memoir by Piper Kerman about her year in a women's prison, and created by Jenji Kohan of Weeds, has been garnering heaps of critical praise. Plus, it's super gay. Of the show's "naïve yuppie" lead character, Jenji Kohan says "I don't think I could have sold a show about black and Latina and old women in prison, you know? But if I had the girl-next-door coming in as my fish out of water, I can draw a certain audience in through her that can identify with her, and then I can tell all of these stories once she's in, once we've signed onto this journey. She's just a great entry point for a lot of people."
posted by showbiz_liz at 10:28 AM PST - 180 comments

Operation Easter: The hunt for illegal egg collectors
posted by tavegyl at 10:21 AM PST - 26 comments

Mark Holman was a severely disabled teenager who had been living in an institution since his mother became ill. Upon her death, her lawyer petitioned for his guardianship before Judge Kristen Booth Glen, who asked a simple question: when did you last see Mark? "I haven't seen him since he was eight or nine," responded the lawyer. "His mother used to bring him to our office with his brother, just to show him my face and so forth and so on, so I haven't seen him probably since 1995 or 1996." Appalled by both the poor standard of care in Mark's case and the breathtaking lack of regulations compelling anything better, Judge Glen set about writing an opinion that would change the way trusts for people with disabilities are managed in New York State in very, very significant ways.
posted by KathrynT at 9:55 AM PST - 42 comments

Cory Monteith, star of Glee, was found dead yesterday in a Vancouver hotel room. Although it will take some time for the autopsy results to become available, the police do not suspect foul play, and most media outlets have been referring to Monteith's history of substance abuse as a likely cause of his unexpected death. Unlike many other young stars, his struggle with addiction began long before fame hit, as he first recounted to Parade Magazine in 2011. This past March, he voluntarily checked into rehab for a second stint. After the release of the article, he spoke with George Stroumboupoulos to discuss his reasons for disclosing his past mistakes in such a public way. Early during the show's first season, Monteith recorded a video diary of his first trip to New York City.
posted by a fiendish thingy at 7:43 AM PST - 65 comments

"It's a lesson that many of us got from out folks at some point, often before we got that other uncomfortable parent-child conversation about the birds and the bees. Don't move suddenly. Answer questions clearly, and with yes, sir and no, sir. Don't raise your voice. If you're handcuffed, don't say anything until we [your parents] get there. The details differed depending on where you lived and your parents' particular concerns, but the point was for us to get through any encounter with the police without incident." [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 7:41 AM PST - 50 comments

Bladerunner Speedrun: 60 seconds of animated goodness. [more inside]
posted by quin at 7:29 AM PST - 29 comments

Tekhnika Molodezhi was the Popular Mechanics of the Soviet Union. The magazine, whose name means Technology for the Youth, had illustrations of everything from space stations, computerized farming, transport of the future, friendly robots, to more abstract images. If you don't want to hunt through the archive, Mythbuster's Tested website has a gallery of 201 great images from the magazine.
posted by Kattullus at 5:47 AM PST - 24 comments

"The music industry is being taken over by the back door. And if we don't try and make it fair for new music producers and artists, then the art will suffer. Make no mistake. These are all the same old industry bods trying to get a stranglehold on the delivery system." [more inside]
posted by we are the music makers at 4:35 AM PST - 126 comments

So you see, I am not making a brief against reading the classics of Western literature. Far from it. I am against taking these startling epiphanies of the irrational, unspoken, unthought-of side of human life into the college classroom and turning them into the bland exercises in competition, hierarchy and information-accumulation that are these works' mortal enemies. An essay by Lee Siegel (SLWSJ)
posted by chavenet at 11:41 PM PST - 127 comments

In his series Zoo Portraits, Barcelona artist Yago Partal digitally clothes animals.
posted by paleyellowwithorange at 10:59 PM PST - 20 comments

Spooktacular is a blog dedicated to preserving the history of the Horror Host, old and new.
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 9:58 PM PST - 18 comments

My dad made me a pbj 2.0 when you close it you get 9 different flavor combos. ¹

My brother uploaded the pic of the PBJ 2.0 yesterday, here's another creation my dad always made for us, the "chick-check" apple ² [more inside]
posted by not_on_display at 9:09 PM PST - 101 comments

Explore the world of custom motorcycle making through the stories of three independent builders in Portland, Oregon [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 8:38 PM PST - 10 comments

New York was the closest to drive to, but they’d both need to be there for the license and return for the wedding. Out, they decided. California and Washington, and the knot of northeastern states that have legalized same-sex marriage, were too far. Maryland required only one partner to come for the license. Then a 48-hour waiting period. It was an hour and 10-minute flight. This might work, they decided: A destination wedding in Baltimore.
posted by hoyland at 6:02 PM PST - 53 comments

It has been mentioned before around these parts, but COMEDIANS IN CARS GETTING COFFEE is now into Season Two, and it's just wonderful. Concept: Each episode, Seinfeld picks up a friend in one of his many, many cars, they go get coffee, and along the way they talk. And that's it. My favorite episode: Alec Baldwin.
posted by JPowers at 3:58 PM PST - 92 comments

What we saw was... something else. A drugged-out looking dancer in a white thong, white athletic socks, and white sneakers marching in place on a lighted platform. Just marching, marching. Sometimes he would lift his stiff arms and make grabby hands at the old dudes watching him. The best part was the CD player was broken, so "Don't Cha?" by the Pussycat Dolls played on repeat. Marching, marching, marching. One Star Yelp Reviews Of Strip Clubs
posted by mannequito at 3:37 PM PST - 117 comments

A survey by a high-end estate agent has revealed that there are more domestic servants in the exclusive London district of Mayfair now than 200 years ago, and indeed, in the élite London neighbourhoods which have been bought up by absentee oligarchs, often only the lights in the servants' quarters are on at night. For those who fancy a life of serving the super-rich, there are courses to prepare them for catering to their masters' exacting whims. But it's not all rosy at the top; the prices of luxury goods (including foie gras, Patek Philippe watches, paintings by artists such as Cézanne and Rothko) in the basket used to calculate the Affluent Luxury Living Index have been rising at a rate exceeding inflation.
posted by acb at 11:15 AM PST - 51 comments

Cat-Scan.com is one of the strangest sites I've seen in some time. I have no idea how these people got their cats wedged into their scanners, or why.
posted by FelliniBlank at 9:57 AM PST - 139 comments

A month after its release, Naughty Dog's sweeping interactive epic The Last of Us is being hailed as one of the best games of all time, with perfect scores even from notoriously demanding critics. Inspired by an eerily beautiful segment from the BBC's Planet Earth, the game portrays an America twenty years after a pandemic of the zombiefying Cordyceps fungus (previously), leaving behind lush wastelands of elegant decay teeming with monsters and beset by vicious bandits, a brutal military, and the revolutionary Fireflies. Into this bleak vision of desperate violence journey Joel, a gruffly stoic Texan with a painful past, and his ward Ellie, a precocious teenager who may hold the key to mankind's future. Boasting tense, immersive gameplay, compelling performances from a diverse cast, a movingly minimalist score from Oscar-winning Gustavo Santaolalla, and an array of influences from Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men to Cormac McCarthy's The Road, it's already being slotted alongside BioShock Infinite and Half-Life 2 as one of modern gaming's crowning achievements. And while it's hard to disentangle plot from action, you don't have to buy a PS3 to experience it -- YouTube offers many filmic edits of the game, including this three-hour version of all relevant passages. And don't miss the 84-minute documentary exploring every facet of its production. [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi at 9:56 AM PST - 81 comments

"It's almost tragic that the most badass escaped slave story most people know is Django Unchained. Because in real life, not only did slaves frequently escape, but they often did it without help from free whites, and without murdering several hundred people. Instead, what they had was cleverness and the audacity to try ridiculous plans that by all rights should never have worked." [SLCracked but a decent effort]
posted by marienbad at 9:56 AM PST - 25 comments

What happens when the executive director of your lobbyist organization is hosting the national conference with a technical theater degree burning a hole in his pocket? A bewildering and Christopher Guestian piece of musical theater called "I'm In Payroll."
posted by Shadax at 9:27 AM PST - 21 comments

"Just setting up my twttr". This Was First archives the first posts on some of the world's biggest websites. (Metafilter is sadly absent from the archive.)
posted by Bora Horza Gobuchul at 12:55 AM PST - 27 comments

After more than 16 hours of deliberating, a six-woman jury in Florida has acquitted George Zimmerman in the murder of Trayvon Martin. Many commentators are outraged by what they see as another failure of the criminal justice system to deliver justice for an African-American. Others point out that this verdict depended on the unique nature of the law in Florida.
posted by mai at 11:51 PM PST - 1967 comments

How being a writer helped me rewrite a sexist trope...for real. Submitted for your approval: a writer (Chris Brecheen) uses his narrative skills to turn the tables on an everyday creeper.
posted by ShutterBun at 10:36 PM PST - 166 comments

Shooting The Messengers

So, what guides a journalist's decisions in these unlovely places? The frequently repeated maxim that "no story is worth dying for" rings a little hollow. The awkward truth is that, in this field, personal bravery is simultaneously discouraged and rewarded.

[more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 8:34 PM PST - 2 comments

The Thread Wrapping Machine
posted by Confess, Fletch at 7:22 PM PST - 30 comments

The pseudonymous author behind the critically-acclaimed mystery novel The Cuckoo's Calling has been outed. And it's J. K. Rowling.
posted by Rory Marinich at 6:43 PM PST - 140 comments

Does giving gifts to strangers make you happier? The people behind redditgifts think so, and are trying to monetize it.
posted by reenum at 6:03 PM PST - 5 comments

Forensic Topology. "In his 2003 memoir Where The Money Is: True Tales from the Bank Robbery Capital of the World, co-authored with Gordon Dillow, retired Special Agent William J. Rehder briefly suggests that the design of a city itself leads to and even instigates certain crimes—in Los Angeles’s case, bank robberies. Rehder points out that this sprawling metropolis of freeways and its innumerable nondescript banks is, in a sense, a bank robber’s paradise. Crime, we could say, is just another way to use the city."
posted by homunculus at 5:35 PM PST - 13 comments

This Atlantic article about the EPI Family Budget Calculator tries to calculate the required income to live a comfortable yet modest lifestyle in various parts of the US.
posted by COD at 4:49 PM PST - 45 comments

Clocks By Time: for when you absolutely, positively need to find multiple photos of clocks from around the world displaying every conceivable time. [more inside]
posted by showbiz_liz at 2:19 PM PST - 18 comments

Scorekeeping at baseball games is becoming a lost art. Many other traditions are vanishing from professional baseball as well. "Other traditions lost from our list included boiled hot dogs taken from tepid water and slathered with mustard by vendors, and dugout agitators formerly known as “bench jockeys,’’ and bad-breathed managers such as Billy Martin and Earl Weaver kicking dirt on umpires, while league officials look at it as entertainment."
posted by Xurando at 12:53 PM PST - 65 comments

STLTransit: A YouTube channel presenting visualizations of transit activity in various cities.
posted by Alvy Ampersand at 11:28 AM PST - 5 comments

We've seen the cast of AMC's Mad Men be Mean Girls and an international spy agency, but what if the gang moved across the street to 30 Rockefeller Plaza? (via)
posted by The Whelk at 10:19 AM PST - 51 comments

"So long as you stop thinking in terms of crafts and aim to practice a trade instead, there is more work for humans than people realize... When people talk about saving work or jobs, they mostly talk about saving sexy, income-generating conspicuous production packaged as creative work, in a debt-fueled de facto leisure society." Writer and speaker Venkatesh Rao weighs in on the difference between "Sexy Jobs and Schlub Jobs," and what it means for the future of work. For a slightly different take, see The Death of the 'Prestige Economy'…
posted by verb at 9:28 AM PST - 56 comments

The dog "basically just sat in that Quebec shelter for over a year and no one looked at it... And overnight here – I post about it, 8 people show up - and it gets adopted the next day." Fred Ni, who blogs at Pound Dogs, talks with the Toronto Standard.
posted by dobbs at 8:52 AM PST - 55 comments

In the mood for some ginormous LEGO dioramas from beloved films? Of course you are! Besides the usual suspects of Lord of the Rings, Star Wars and Batman, there are some equally impressive projects to be found based on Logan's Run, The Fifth Element, 300, Mothra, and even The Wizard of Oz.
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 8:38 AM PST - 17 comments

New technology has changed scholarship. Whereas previous generations of experts have sought to reconcile the differences between quarto and Folio, current thinking highlights the difficult relationship between the various incarnations of Shakespeare's texts, something made easier by the availability of rare Shakespeare quartos in digital databases such as Early English Books Online. The scholar Eleanor Prosser thus detects "considerable evidence" for the elimination of metrical and stylistic "irregularities" in the Folio: short lines are lengthened to 10 syllables, verbs agreed with subjects, double negatives resolved. In addition, a range of unusual words are added to the text, words not used elsewhere by Shakespeare. Prosser concludes: "somewhere behind the Folio … lies a conscientious and exacting editor with literary pretensions", albeit one "more experienced in the transcription of literary than of theatrical works". But who was it?

—Who edited Shakespeare? by Saul Frampton. [more inside]
posted by Kattullus at 8:21 AM PST - 36 comments

Jost Amman (1539 – 1591) was a Swiss artist, best known for his woodcut illustrations. He was a prolific artist, with some 1,500 prints attributed to him, in the era when engravings were replacing woodcuttings. Amman also made stained glass (Google books preview) and jewelry, but there are more examples of his woodcut illustrations, as found on the colored cover of this bible from 1564, and the black and white images of biblical scenes. Amman's most widely know work is "the book of trades," Eygentliche Beschreibung Aller Stände auff Erden (Google books; PDFs of sections of the book). Ptak Science Books has 25 images with (most) job titles in English, and here is a full index of English titles, linking back to Wikimedia Commons. But that's only half of the book. The other part is the descriptions of the jobs, which are short poems by Hans Sachs, some of which are translated on the Victoria and Albert Museum.
posted by filthy light thief at 7:00 AM PST - 2 comments

Five Reasons Why I Am Not An “Artist”, an essay by Tom Ellard (formerly of 1980s industrial electropop band Severed Heads and now an academic and media art practitioner in Australia; previously), touching on areas such as artificial divisions between art and technical practice, the politics of the role of the artist and the conflict between creative exploration and artistic recognition and success.
posted by acb at 5:10 AM PST - 25 comments

Should You Feel Guilty About Wearing Vintage Fur? [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 8:30 PM PST - 117 comments

99 Problems An illustrated guide to some of Jay-Z's "99 Problems" (YT, NSFW).
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 5:30 PM PST - 148 comments

What Comes After The Twink?
"Somewhere along the way "twink" has stopped being just a cutesy, mildly negative stereotype and become something more malignant: An easy shorthand for a lot of vicious stereotypes about gay people, a way to covertly make fun not just of someone's mild gender variance but really their "gayness" as well."
posted by andoatnp at 4:59 PM PST - 147 comments

By making a very precise measurement of the muon g-2 value and comparing the results to its predicted value, researchers at Fermilab hope to uncover evidence of new, undiscovered particles and forces. This continues work done at Brookhaven National Laboratory a decade ago. To do so, Fermilab needs their 50-ft ring magnet and its fragile, precisely assembled superconducting coils. After six months of planning, the magnet was slowly hauled on an eight-axle trailer through the streets of Long Island, loaded onto a barge, and tugged down the Atlantic coast and into the Gulf of Mexico, where it will go up the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway to the Mississippi and then through Illinois waterways before it's trucked again through suburban Chicago. Fermilab has a photo and video gallery and is posting updates. [more inside]
posted by hydrophonic at 4:32 PM PST - 23 comments

Plagued by the realities threatening many retail stores, Sears also faces a unique problem (alternate link): [CEO Eddie] Lampert. Lampert runs Sears like a hedge fund portfolio, with dozens of autonomous businesses competing for his attention and money. An outspoken advocate of free-market economics and fan of the novelist Ayn Rand, he created the model because he expected the invisible hand of the market to drive better results. If the company’s leaders were told to act selfishly, he argued, they would run their divisions in a rational manner, boosting overall performance.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 4:05 PM PST - 119 comments

Singing the Lesbian Blues in 1920s Harlem.

In Jazz Age speakeasies, dive bars, and private parties, blue singers had the freedom to explore alternative sexuality, and on a rare occasion, they even expressed it in song.

posted by immlass at 3:28 PM PST - 11 comments

Regular Expression Crosswords Do you like regular expressions? Do you like crosswords puzzles? Then you're going to (hate|love) this.
posted by boo_radley at 3:24 PM PST - 53 comments

"The trick is to find a craft that's both fun and educational, and something that the whole family can enjoy together."
posted by rollick at 3:02 PM PST - 9 comments

Malala Yousafzai, sixteen-year-old Pakistani education activist, has delivered her first public address since she was shot in the head and neck by Taliban gunmen in October last year. Yousafzai's speech at the UN headquarters in New York today is available in full as text or video. She has been credited with bringing the issue of women's education to global attention, a crucial concern given that a quarter of young women around the world have not completed primary school.
posted by EXISTENZ IS PAUSED at 1:55 PM PST - 39 comments

(Links in English except where marked with '*' (Spanish)) Amnesty International urges Chile to allow an 11-year old to abort a pregnancy due to rape after President Sebastián Piñera, who has a strong anti-abortion position, congratulates the girl's "mature and profound" decision to continue with her pregnancy (CNN.cl video)*. The Association* of Chilean Physicians also speaks in support of making an exception as well as liberalizing existing laws. This case highlights the discrepancies between the political elite's conservative ideals and reality in a country of extreme and highly institutionalized inequality. [more inside]
posted by ipsative at 1:01 PM PST - 24 comments

Meet Atlas, a humanoid robot that can run, climb stairs, and walk through rubble. [more inside]
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 11:32 AM PST - 88 comments

Mental Floss tackles 50 Science Misconceptions. [slyt]
posted by quin at 11:04 AM PST - 51 comments

The Sad and Rapid Decline of the Ball Cap: Including photos of the 67 hats that survived of the author's 90s-era Hat Collection. [more inside]
posted by Potomac Avenue at 10:40 AM PST - 82 comments

How to protect yourself if you come across a curious bear.
posted by dirtdirt at 10:10 AM PST - 81 comments

"But The Shining speaks to what makes Kubrick such an interesting and, for a lot of people, troublesome filmmaker, because he does not give you what you want. At all. He does not give you a Vietnam movie set in the jungle, and he does not give you a horror movie that is just like Stephen King’s The Shining. He doesn’t even give you scares for a long time, [just] ominous foreboding. And it takes people a while to figure out, “Oh, maybe I don’t know what I want. Maybe this is better.” - Mefi's Own Jon Hodgman talks about Full Metal Jacket with Scott Tobias for "The Last Great Movie I Saw."
posted by The Whelk at 10:03 AM PST - 75 comments

Some wonderfully enterprising nerd has created a mod for the real-time grid-based 3D dungeon crawler Legend of Grimrock (twice previously) based on the the Dungeons & Dragons module Tomb of Horrors (previously, funny SA rundown here). It's available via nexusmods and Steam Workshop. Have a nice weekend.
posted by cog_nate at 9:46 AM PST - 58 comments

RIP Alan Whicker globe trotting reporter and 'television natural'. In a career that spanned 60 years he presented the BBC/ITV documentary series Whicker's World for nearly 30. He was the inspiration for the Monty Python Whicker Island sketch. (previously) [more inside]
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 9:42 AM PST - 15 comments

"It's a shame we don't share the same courage in our convictions as this little 10-year-old Dutch lad, who - with a little help from his Dad when it came to the words (come on you boys in red, Eindhoven we love you), proudly led the PSV crowd in a chant during a recent pre-season friendly against FC Eindhoven..." (SL Youtube) [more inside]
posted by beisny at 9:31 AM PST - 13 comments

In 1931 a 17-year old girl faced off against baseball Hall of Famers Babe Ruth and Lou Gherig. They both struck out swinging. Was Jackie Mitchell for real?
posted by Chrysostom at 9:29 AM PST - 31 comments

Sean Demory’s short story The Ballad of the Wayfaring Stranger and the Dead Man’s Whore is built round the mythology and atmosphere of classic American murder ballads like Knoxville Girl and In the Pines. It spooked the bejaysus out of me, and may do the same for you…
posted by Paul Slade at 9:11 AM PST - 3 comments

Creating a military-industrial-immigration complex.
In a world where basic services are being cut, an emerging policing apparatus in the borderlands is flourishing. Since September 11, 2001, the United States has spent $791 billion on “homeland security” alone, an inflation-adjusted $300 billion more than the cost of the entire New Deal.
posted by adamvasco at 8:01 AM PST - 32 comments

New Yorker cartoon editor Bob Mankoff picks his 11 favourite cartoons.
posted by anothermug at 7:37 AM PST - 133 comments

Finding the Quiet City. Related Article and all 728 submissions
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 7:28 AM PST - 6 comments

"Are We on the Threshold of the North American Decade" is the title the new course taught by four star general and Visiting Professor at CUNY, David Petraeus. For his two courses at CUNY, Petraeus will be paid over $150,000, which is much more than CUNY's average adjunct salary of $3,000 per course. [more inside]
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 7:19 AM PST - 66 comments

You Can't Do Simple Maths Under Pressure (autoplay music)
posted by slogger at 7:11 AM PST - 37 comments

"Pre-Columbian origins of Native American dog breeds, with only limited replacement by European dogs, confirmed by mtDNA analysis." [more inside]
posted by ChuckRamone at 6:59 AM PST - 11 comments

Every Pixar movie is connected. I explain how, and possibly why. Several months ago, I watched a fun-filled video on Cracked.com that introduced the idea (at least to me) that all of the Pixar movies actually exist within the same universe. Since then, I’ve obsessed over this concept, working to complete what I call “The Pixar Theory,” a working narrative that ties all of the Pixar movies into one cohesive timeline with a main theme.
posted by Blasdelb at 6:47 AM PST - 50 comments

I regret to inform you that my wedding to Captain Von Trapp has been cancelled. Comedian and author Melinda Taub's piece in McSweeney's, a letter from Baroness Elsa Schraeder to the guests of the wedding she thought she was going to have. Related: An Update on the Problem of Maria. A memo from the Reverend Mother to The Nuns. [For those not in the know]
posted by entropone at 6:43 AM PST - 31 comments

Sex Pistols vs Ce Ce Peniston. Music from an alternate, better, universe.
posted by unSane at 5:44 AM PST - 11 comments

As machines take over more of our work, we are going to have to find other ways of letting people fulfil these human needs. Forcing them to send 500 CVs out every week is not a good start. In stripping out inefficiencies and pushing digital goods to near-free prices, the Internet kills middle-class jobs. Digitization has already largely de-monetized academia, film, music, journalism, and lots more besides. More industries will feel the pain, including the legal professions, real estate, insurance, accounting, and the civil service, all of which are built on inefficiency, and all of which will be stripped of jobs in the years to come. As it becomes clear to those with established positions that there are no jobs for their children, they’ll push for a more radical solution.
posted by Happy Dave at 4:04 AM PST - 112 comments

1931's top investigative journalist, Mr Chomondley-Warner, aims to find out whether professional players are a good thing for association football by pitting Liverpool's 1991 team against Arsenal's 1931 squad. [more inside]
posted by mippy at 3:38 AM PST - 8 comments

The rise of video-on-demand services like Netflix and dedicated cable-TV channels has created a new industry in low-budget B-movies; meet Asylum Films, an outfit in California following in the footsteps of historical B-movie auteurs like Roger Corman, Menahem Golan and Uwe Boll, with films with titles like Sharknado, Transmorphers, Sex Pot and Abraham Lincoln vs. Zombies. Asylum's new B-movies are made quickly and cheaply to ride the coattails of the big studios' fads, filling gaps in the market for more films about, say, adorable puppies, alien battleships or apocalypses. The films are made to a strict formula, are played entirely seriously, with no hint of irony or knowingness, and are designed primarily to pad out rental lists and appeal to recommendation engines, though the producers point out that often mainstream Hollywood fare is often no less hackneyed and formulaic. (Previously...)
posted by acb at 3:36 AM PST - 114 comments

Blanka Is A Troll (SLYT x2 Combo)
posted by Uther Bentrazor at 11:36 PM PST - 14 comments

Stereophoto maker lets you make anaglyphs and stereo animated gifs, like these. (You can control the point of focus with your mouse in the flash versions.) Instructions for making it work on a Mac.
posted by klangklangston at 10:42 PM PST - 8 comments

Useful visual lessons in the art and etiquette of holding your violin and bow, illustrated by stock photos. You can also use some random violin, it doesn't have to be yours, or even used to produce music. Because violins are apparently very sexy props that show how very sexy you are. You don't need to already know how to hold a violin to appreciate this tumblr.
posted by Athanassiel at 9:59 PM PST - 42 comments

To kick off the celebration of Sub Pop Records 25th anniversary, Mudhoney played a live set on top of the Space Needle today. Performance begins at about 21:00. [more inside]
posted by Slarty Bartfast at 9:26 PM PST - 30 comments

Photographer Gideon Mendel's stunning portraits of flood victims in the UK, India, Haiti, Pakistan, Australia, and Thailand. (via)
posted by spamandkimchi at 8:26 PM PST - 2 comments

Willy Pogany, born in 1882 in Hungary, was an artist and illustrator in the first half of last century, who worked on everything from children's books to books of poetry, history, magazine articles and ads, and much, much more. [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 8:15 PM PST - 6 comments

Wretched Refuse is a blog mocking ugly upcyling projects.
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 7:02 PM PST - 27 comments

With a vote of 127 to 31, Ireland has passed a law allowing limited rights to abortion when the mother's life is at risk or she is at risk of suicide. Amendments to include rape and incest were defeated. Last year, almost 4,000 women travelled to the UK for abortions, including termination of more than 1,000 non-viable fetal abnormality pregnancies. [more inside]
posted by DarlingBri at 6:12 PM PST - 50 comments

Our Solar System Has a Tail Shaped Like a Four-Leaf Clover: New Findings from IBEX.
posted by homunculus at 5:09 PM PST - 10 comments

The Shemp Surprise. [more inside]
posted by flapjax at midnite at 4:24 PM PST - 18 comments

"All of us in TV have had people try to sabotage one of our reports before, so I figured if they want to be on TV so badly, I'll put them on TV." Parts 1 and 2, and related.
posted by mudpuppie at 4:11 PM PST - 33 comments

"By then, somehow, he'd taken me around my waist, and we were strutting around the room. My hands were ice cold. I was shaking. My reactions were shot. The entire time were together, there was no doubt in my mind that he was controlling me, taking my energy and giving it back, manipulating the space around us. I felt like my internal ship was on fire and useless. I loved it. And him. And this." Jerry Saltz visits Jay-Z's performance art piece at the Pace Gallery in Chelsea: performing his new song, "Picasso Baby", for six hours. To one person at a time.
posted by Marisa Stole the Precious Thing at 3:40 PM PST - 34 comments

That's it. The Internet is done. Courtesy of The Nerdist, Lando Calrissian (Billy Dee Williams) hits up Karaoke Night with a stirring version of "West Coast" at everyone's favorite hive of Star Wars scum and villainy, the Cantina on Tatooine! Also: Making-of.
posted by Madamina at 3:35 PM PST - 14 comments

Terran Trade Authority - Spacecraft 2000-2100AD
posted by Artw at 3:16 PM PST - 50 comments

"The country has cheaper medical care, smarter children, happier moms, better working conditions, less-anxious unemployed people, and lower student loan rates than we do. And that probably will never change." In The Atlantic, a comparison of some of the socio-economic aspects of Finland and the USA. [more inside]
posted by Wordshore at 3:15 PM PST - 54 comments

Zachary Quinto would just like his damn dog now, please. (slyt)
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 2:44 PM PST - 17 comments

"During his days as Harvard’s influential president, Dr. Charles W. Eliot made a frequent assertion: If you were to spend just 15 minutes a day reading the right books, a quantity that could fit on a five-foot shelf, you could give yourself a proper liberal education. Publisher P. F. Collier and Son loved the idea and asked Eliot to compile and edit the right collection of works. The result: a 51-volume series of classic works from world literature published in 1909 called Dr. Eliot’s Five Foot Shelf, which would later be called The Harvard Classics." (Via) [more inside]
posted by zarq at 2:07 PM PST - 88 comments

This was not the act of a fringe contingent. The letter—which, until now, has never been published in its entirety—is signed by 154 staffers, including J.D. Salinger, Calvin Trillin, John McPhee, Jamaica Kincaid, Saul Steinberg and Janet Malcolm. There are a few notable abstentions, including John Updike and Charles McGrath, who would soon be named Gottlieb's deputy. At the bottom, it reads "cc: S. I. Newhouse."

The Letter: Robert Gottlieb's Tenure as the New Yorker's Managing Editor, Elon Green, The Awl (SLTheAwl)
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 1:23 PM PST - 12 comments

In an idle moment, you've probably drummed on a desk with your pen. But chances are middle schoolers could show you some skills. Masters like Shane Bang and many less well-known practitioners are pushing the old idea of pen-as-drumstick - Pen Beats, aka Pen Tap - to new heights. [more inside]
posted by Miko at 12:56 PM PST - 16 comments

DeAnne Smith and Her Kitten Perform a Nerdy Love Song (some lyrics NSFW)
posted by exogenous at 12:52 PM PST - 20 comments

Tomorrow, public radio show This American Life airs its 500th episode. Started in 1995 by Ira Glass, with the initial title Your Radio Playhouse, the show is a popular reference point here on the blue, covering everything from the minute goings-on of ordinary people, to allegedly unearthing the secret recipe for Coke, to the 2008 financial collapse. Ahead of the occasion, Ira Glass talked to Buzzfeed about the episodes that stand out in his mind. [more inside]
posted by dry white toast at 12:36 PM PST - 70 comments

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announced a reorganization of the company today to focus on devices and services. Ballmer said that the goal was to have "One Microsoft" where "our strategy will focus on creating a family of devices and services for individuals and businesses that empower people around the globe at home, at work and on the go, for the activities they value most". [more inside]
posted by wcfields at 11:21 AM PST - 208 comments

U.S. District Judge Denise Cote has found that Apple conspired with publishers to fix the prices of ebooks. Publishers Weekly describes Apple's defeat as "a major blow". Writing before the ruling, Roger Parloff at Fortune Tech delved into Apple's "agency model" for ebook sales and noted that Amazon's business model is "the missing piece... of this jigsaw puzzle". Philip Elmer-Dewitt reviews Judge Cote's findings. (Review the decision and other trial information yourself here.) Michael Clarke at Scholarly Kitchen explains why he considers this a loss for the public.
posted by Going To Maine at 11:09 AM PST - 49 comments

Originally set forth in 1980, the Sikorsky Human Powered Helicopter Competition is deceptively simple: keep a human-powered helicopter aloft at 3 meters within a 10m by 10m square for 1 minute. The prize? $250,000. In the past 33 years, great progress has been made (Davinci III, Yuri I, Gamera I, Gamera II Previously), but no one has succeeded until Aerovelo's Atlas.
posted by Betelgeuse at 11:01 AM PST - 53 comments

The American Institute of Architects’ Code of Ethics [pdf] states that “Members should uphold human rights in all their professional endeavors." Raphael Sperry, president of Architects, Designers and Planners for Social Responsibility (ADPSR), wants to amend the code further so it reads "Members shall not design spaces intended for execution or for torture or other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment, including prolonged solitary confinement." From Architect Magazine: “Should Architects Design Prisons?” [more inside]
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 9:32 AM PST - 39 comments

1. Visit the website of British Vogue.
2. Enter the Konami code (↑ ↑ ↓ ↓ ← → ← → B A).
3. Be delighted.
posted by ocherdraco at 8:43 AM PST - 39 comments

The Andaman and Nicobar Islands are a string of 572 islands that run roughly north-south in the Bay of Bengal between Myanmar and Indonesia, but are formally a part of the Republic of India. Of the hundreds of islands, less than 40 are inhabited. While you can travel and visit some of the islands, but as of 2005, there are also a few that India has declared closed to outsiders to preserve these distinct cultures, living much as they have for hundreds to thousands of years, remaining distant from all outsiders. The most extreme example are the Sentinelese people who live on North Sentinel Island (Google maps). [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 8:42 AM PST - 38 comments

Dave Shumka's account of being shot after a comedy show is equal parts hilarious and terrifying. (Starts at 4:25) [more inside]
posted by roll truck roll at 8:20 AM PST - 28 comments

Korean Photoshoppers Make the Internet a Better Place (Kotaku) On June 26, a Korean language Facebook page called "We Do Phoshop" appeared online. The site solicited Photoshop requests, and the ensuing 'shops weren't exactly what askers had in mind. Or what anyone had in mind, for that matter.
posted by KokuRyu at 8:13 AM PST - 34 comments

The new documentary "Terms And Conditions May Apply," about the privacy overreach of major tech companies, presents its trailer on a cleverly written page of terms and conditions.
posted by mark7570 at 8:11 AM PST - 10 comments

The journalistic practices of the Washington Post and Walter Pincus.
What the Snowden Affair Reveals About US Journalism. The Snowden Effect: definition and examples.
It's as if Corporate Media is at War on Independent Journalism.
Back in June as the story broke it was noted that If Edward Snowden Is in Trouble, So Is Journalism,
and from zdnet The real story in the NSA scandal is the collapse of journalism.
So what does the Snowden Affair Reveal About US Journalism.
It should definitely force media self-examination.
posted by adamvasco at 7:31 AM PST - 44 comments

This guy's here to help.
posted by 256 at 6:20 AM PST - 48 comments

How To Fold a Julia Fractal. A beautiful interactive introduction to complex numbers, fractals and waves. (Requires WebGL). To Infinity And Beyond is a similar introduction to calculus.
posted by empath at 4:17 AM PST - 31 comments

After a six-month hiatus, Surveillance Camera Man (previously) is back with a new video, and a site of his own. (via waxy) [more inside]
posted by progosk at 3:48 AM PST - 55 comments

Seeking Sexual Surrogates is a short (5:28) documentary by NYT's Stefania Rousselle looking at sexual surrogacy for the disabled in France, where the practice is illegal. And continues, regardless. [more inside]
posted by 2N2222 at 1:09 AM PST - 13 comments

If Films Were Reviewed Like Video Games
posted by cthuljew at 11:51 PM PST - 63 comments

"Back in the golden age of the compact disc, 1994, Jos Smolders [discogs.com link] released Music for CD Player, a collection of 99 short tracks intended for the listener to sequence. He’s now released a sequel in the form of an 1,100-track album, titled Music for FLAC Player. Yes, that is 1,100 tracks, the overwhelming majority of which are one second or less in length, and all but 30 or so of which are under 45 seconds. [more inside]
posted by Doleful Creature at 10:35 PM PST - 16 comments

Let us come together this, July the eleventh, to celebrate the feast of Saint Olga, Olga the Beauty, descended of the Izborsk princes, Princess of Rus, Holy Equal-to-the-Apostles Olga. Please, allow me to tell you the tale of this fine Christian woman, sainted in both the Roman Catholic and Russian Eastern Orthodox Churches. [more inside]
posted by maryr at 10:06 PM PST - 51 comments

Trailer for the newest indie romance movie about a guy who falls in love with a girl who's just not...quirky or anything.
posted by Pater Aletheias at 9:00 PM PST - 82 comments

For Petra fans: The Making Of Back To The Street. A 3 minute excerpt from a 30 minute home video documenting the making of the 1986 album. Includes a brief tour of the studio and accommodation, and features (at 1:02) some isolated vocal and instrumental tracks from the song 'Whole World'.
posted by paleyellowwithorange at 8:13 PM PST - 12 comments

Photographer Dietmar Eckell has taen a series of pictures of wrecked airplanes. It's called "Happy Endings," and no one was killed in any of the 15 crashes.
posted by the man of twists and turns at 8:11 PM PST - 8 comments

Boris The Bear was the second original series to be released on the Dark Horse Comics imprint. A meta-referential comedic take on the the independant comics of the era, the series was about a comic book obsessed bear who, three or four frames into the first issue learned he was in fact a robot. What proceeded was one of the all time greatest mass-slaughters of popular comic characters. Copyright be damned.
posted by mediocre at 7:46 PM PST - 21 comments

The Republican Party is in a bind on immigration; after being saddled last year with a presidential nominee who notoriously suggested "self-deportation" as a solution to the issue and earning a mere 27% of the Latino vote, it was widely expected that the Republicans would find a way to appeal to that important—and growing—voting bloc. They may well yet, but it currently appears that the bill recently passed by the Senate is most likely dead on arrival in the House, to the satisfaction of certain voices on the right. But compare the rhetoric of 2013 with the remarks made by then-candidates Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush at a forum in 1980 and consider how far the Republican Party has shifted...
posted by Bromius at 7:21 PM PST - 53 comments

The World Ends with a Handshake: Unraveling the Apocalypse of 'Southland Tales' A writer meets Richard Kelly, writer/director of Donnie Darko, and talks about his flop Southland Tales and its enduring cult of fans.
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 6:03 PM PST - 49 comments

Toshi Seeger has passed. In the fullest sense of the word, the partner of Pete Seeger, and of some seventy years, has passed away. Pete once said that without Toshi, "the world would not turn nor the sun shine.” She was 91.
posted by Capt. Renault at 5:08 PM PST - 49 comments

This is a video I’ve wanted to dish for years--a video that contextualizes Disneyland within the political and cultural events of the early 1950s. “Disneyland Voce” is distilled down from a dozen home movies, all shot in 1955, during the first five months that Disneyland was open to the public. Here’s one reason I love home movies: they reveal the vacation experience as taken by the average guest. Disney has produced reels of film documenting the park during its early years (most notably “Disneyland U.S.A.” in 1956 and “Gala Day at Disneyland” in 1959), but professional footage presents the park under ideal conditions. Home movies lay down the scenery as a typical guest would have experienced it. If you’ve ever wondered what it was like to visit Disneyland when it first opened, buckle into your DeLorean and hit the play button on YouTube. [more inside]
posted by mudpuppie at 4:10 PM PST - 18 comments

In an interview with Entertainment Weekly for this month's cover story, Andrew Garfield, the current star of the rebooted Spider-Man movie series, offered a new take the character's love interest:

“I was kind of joking, but kind of not joking about MJ,” he tells EW. “And I was like, ‘What if MJ is a dude?’ Why can’t we discover that Peter is exploring his sexuality? It’s hardly even groundbreaking!…So why can’t he be gay? Why can’t he be into boys?” Garfield even has an actor in mind: “I’ve been obsessed with Michael B. Jordan since The Wire. He’s so charismatic and talented. It’d be even better—we’d have interracial bisexuality!”

[more inside]
posted by zombieflanders at 3:47 PM PST - 127 comments

"Is it possible to kill 1 million people and then forget about it? Or if it has been erased from consciousness, is there an unconscious residue, a stain that remains?" Filmmaker Errol Morris writes about Josh Oppenheimer’s documentary film The Act of Killing [trailer]. The film, which was produced by Morris and Werner Herzog, is an examination of the Indonesian mass killings of 1965-66, in which between 500,000 and 1 million people died. It is getting amazing reviews. Previously.
posted by (Arsenio) Hall and (Warren) Oates at 2:59 PM PST - 26 comments

Visualizing the Bechdel test. Datawankery and female representation in film.
posted by shakespeherian at 2:37 PM PST - 82 comments

"We have not learned, even, to live with our fellow man. Instead we have perfected more means to annihilate him -- to wipe him (and ourselves) from the face of the Earth." A 1974 letter from Lieutenant Colonel Clyde S. Shield, lead test pilot for the Manhattan project, to his newborn grandson.
posted by DarlingBri at 1:49 PM PST - 9 comments

Music review site Pitchfork has branched out. Today marks the debut of The Dissolve, which will be dedicated to film. With talent acquired from Slate, NPR and the AV Club, the website is starting with a high pedigree.
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 1:31 PM PST - 73 comments

On Monday, Toronto received over 100mm of rainfall, leading to severe flooding, power outages, and hundreds of thousands of stranded drivers and transit users. Uber, a startup that matches taxis with passengers, instituted "surge pricing" - did they break the cardinal "don't be an asshole" rule?
posted by modernnomad at 1:28 PM PST - 151 comments

What makes you put down a book? A Goodreads infographic on the what, when, and why of abandoning a book, and what keeps people reading.
posted by Cash4Lead at 1:23 PM PST - 104 comments

"In life, things happen twice if you're lucky. There's the father you get and the father you choose." [more inside]
posted by zarq at 1:06 PM PST - 10 comments

ENRG and the Electrobots perform a scene and sing a song in the pilot episode of Steve Gadlin's Star Makers.
posted by EXISTENZ IS PAUSED at 12:29 PM PST - 4 comments

There is a lot about Kundalini Yoga and White Tantric and Solstice that is very unbelievable. Does a turban really hold your brain together? Does one day of White Tantric Yoga really equal years worth of meditation? If you revolve your life around Solstice, as Yogi Bhajan says, will everything really be taken care of? I laugh at all of it, but I keep coming back, so I either believe it, or I want to...
posted by showbiz_liz at 11:29 AM PST - 18 comments

Coffitivity is a website that allows you to listen to the sounds of a coffee shop on your computer. The New York Times's Well Blog has the details.
posted by Going To Maine at 10:37 AM PST - 50 comments

As Andrew Haldane, director of stability at the Bank of England, put it in a historical overview a few years ago, ‘there is one key difference between the situation today and that in the Middle Ages. Then, the biggest risk to the banks was from the sovereign. Today, perhaps the biggest risk to the sovereign comes from the banks. Causality has reversed.’ Yes, it has: and the sovereign at risk is us. The reason for that is that in the UK bank assets are 492 per cent of GDP. In plain English, our banks are five times bigger than our entire economy. (When the Icelandic and Cypriot banking systems collapsed the respective figures were 880 and 700 per cent.) We know from the events of 2008 and subsequently that the financial sector, indeed the whole world economy, is in an inherently unstable condition. Put the size together with the instability, and we are facing a danger that is no less real for not being on the front page this exact second. This has to be fixed, and it has to be fixed soon, and nothing about fixing it is easy.

- "Let's Consider Kate," John Lanchester, London Review of Books (via)
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 10:23 AM PST - 29 comments

In response to a listicle on pop-punk where "most of the picks were just early 2000s-era crapcore Warped Tour bands" the Jaded Punk Blog has a more 'authentic' list,"36 Pop-Punk Albums You Need To Hear Or Just Go Fucking Die.". A list which seems to beg the question "What is pop-punk? Is this more like this, or more like this? [more inside]
posted by Potomac Avenue at 10:13 AM PST - 121 comments

How does your EVE Online alliance top losing 400 billion ISK to corporate espionage? Why, by losing 309 billion ISK on a single ship of course! [more inside]
posted by Gin and Comics at 9:51 AM PST - 159 comments

I came to Twitter because I had a book to sell, and my misgivings about the whole enterprise meant that I would never be any good at it. A phrase comes to mind: I was “pissing into the void.” For 1 year, 4 months and 22 days—or 508 days total—Twitter became part of my daily thinking ritual. Writer Benjamin Anastas says Goodbye to Twitter Village. VQR editor Jane Friedman comments.
posted by shivohum at 9:18 AM PST - 34 comments

Somebody make them stop - they're so soft!! Because everyone needs a little (slyt) adorbz in their life.
posted by ericbop at 9:07 AM PST - 30 comments

"People who watch me dance today sometimes assume I've been dancing for many years. I made this video so you could see the awkward body that started just one year ago." (SLYT) Via Kottke
posted by holmesian at 9:02 AM PST - 43 comments

Have you found it difficult to find information about a specific shipwreck when you only have its location, date or vessel's name? How about a find information on maritime accidents 3 weeks ago, 6 months ago, or even last year? Shipwrecklog.com was created to solve these issues. We designed our site and tools to make researching recent and historical maritime accidents easier. If you'd prefer to track active ships, you might enjoy Marine Traffic (prev: 1, 2), which tracks ships by way of their Automatic Identification Systems (prev. And as can be expected from any *spotter website, there's also a gallery of images from users. For even more sea-faring information, check Sailwx (prev), where you can track ships by type, locate bouys, and see tides, currents and weather.
posted by filthy light thief at 7:56 AM PST - 12 comments

30,000 prisoners in California have launched a hunger strike to protest the conditions under which "segregated" prisoners are being detained.

The Five Core Demands:
1. Eliminate group punishments and administrative abuse.
2. Abolish the debriefing policy and modify active/inactive gang status criteria.
3. Comply with the recommendations of the US Commission on Safety and Abuse in America's Prisons (pdf) recommendations and end long-term solitary confinement.
4. Provide adequate and nutritious food.
5. Create and expand constructive programming. [more inside]
posted by anotherpanacea at 7:47 AM PST - 83 comments

The New York Times' lead editorial on the Moral Monday arrests (Previously on Metafilter), ending federal unemployment benefits, failing education programs, racial discrimination, and new abortion laws.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 6:57 AM PST - 173 comments

Houseplants of Gor, an extract from a sadly unpublished entry in Dave Langford's favourite exploitative bondage sci-fi pulp series. Not written by John Norman.
posted by MartinWisse at 3:42 AM PST - 47 comments

The Mathematics of the Manhattan Project
posted by empath at 3:07 AM PST - 40 comments

For all those times you spent bored under the merchandise sign at an urban jazz festival, sweating, wrapping your head in striped garments, ripping the soles off your shoes in a primal fury, this man would like to dance for you.
posted by mannequito at 2:55 AM PST - 11 comments

They came from test tubes. They came pale as ghosts with eyes as blue-white as glacier ice. They came first out of Korea. N-Words - a science fiction short story by Ted Kosmatka. Audio version.
posted by Artw at 11:37 PM PST - 28 comments

Gene Wilder sat down with Robert Osborne at 92Y on June 12 for a rare public appearance. He spoke about the Willy Wonka remake, working with Richard Pryor and Mel Brooks, Gilda Radner, Young Frankenstein, and more. SLYT
posted by ColdChef at 10:52 PM PST - 31 comments

40 Signs you are a Buzzfeed Writer Running Out of List Ideas
posted by Frayed Knot at 7:21 PM PST - 68 comments

Home Sweet Home "'I told him I did live my life forward, but sometimes I couldn’t help thinking about the past, and it was rewarding,' he says. 'Nostalgia made me feel that my life had roots and continuity. It made me feel good about myself and my relationships. It provided a texture to my life and gave me strength to move forward.' The colleague remained skeptical, but ultimately Dr. Sedikides prevailed. That lunch in 1999 inspired him to pioneer a field that today includes dozens of researchers around the world using tools developed at his social-psychology laboratory, including a questionnaire called the Southampton Nostalgia Scale. After a decade of study, nostalgia isn’t what it used to be — it’s looking a lot better."
posted by bookman117 at 7:20 PM PST - 13 comments

The Lonely Redemption Of Sandy Lewis

“The complicity on Wall Street is sickness!” Mr. Lewis says. He fixes you with his laser stare. “If you think the big firms are being honest” — his tone slides streetwise — “well, sweetheart, go think something else!” The temptation is to dismiss Mr. Lewis, 73, as a crank, except he once ruled as an eccentric genius of arbitrage, with a preternatural feel for the tectonic movements of the markets. He has railed for decades about venalities now on daily display. Rude truth is his currency.

[more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 6:37 PM PST - 7 comments

The Dorfbahn Serfaus is arguably the tiniest subway system in the world (technically, an underground funicular), built to alleviate congestion in the tiny ski resort town of Serfaus, Austria (pop. 1,081). The line is just 1.3 km long with 4 rather picturesque stops. Bonus video (German).
posted by en forme de poire at 5:03 PM PST - 22 comments

The first official gameplay video for Grand Theft Auto V has been released. The highly anticipated open-world game, which lets you control 3 different characters, will be released in September for the PS3 and XBox 360.
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 5:01 PM PST - 109 comments

Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me. With drummer Jody Stephens as their sole surviving original member, "the definitive story of the greatest band that never made it" is finally in theaters around the U.S. and on iTunes. One of rock's most mythic acts, the music fanatic's secret handshake, and (in the words of Robyn Hitchcock) a letter written in 1971 that didn't arrive till 1985 -- whatever metaphor best conjures up the mixture of beauty, chaos, and tragedy that defines the band, newcomers and long-standing members of the cult also shouldn't miss Don’t Lie to Me: An Oral History of Big Star. [more inside]
posted by scody at 4:52 PM PST - 38 comments

In 2009, ESPN producer Lisa Fenn worked on a story about two high-school wrestlers, Leroy Sutton and Dartanyon Crockett. Sutton was hit by a train when he was a child and had both his legs amputated; Crockett is legally blind. After the story aired, Fenn stayed in Sutton and Crockett's lives, and the three formed a surprising, enduring bond. [more inside]
posted by Charity Garfein at 3:13 PM PST - 26 comments

Badass Digest and the A.V. Club both have some choice perspective to offer concerning Orson Scott Card's public statement about the boycott of the "Ender's Game" film.
posted by Ipsifendus at 2:38 PM PST - 318 comments

Lorenzo Triburgo has photographed what he calls "Transportraits". He shoots his transgender subjects from a slightly upward-facing angle in order to portray a sense of heroism. Triburgo painted the backgrounds of his portraits himself after learning how from Bob Ross's The Joy of Painting.
posted by deborah at 2:02 PM PST - 15 comments

Janelle Monae's latest music video/single is a 60s-esque, funkadelic, symbol-heavy, all-white fur and all-female hammer to the head - THE DANCE APOCALYPTIC
posted by The Whelk at 1:29 PM PST - 117 comments

The SFMOMA has launched the Rauschenberg Research Project, an online database of the Rauschenbergs in their permanent collection. Each piece of art is available in high resolution (click 'download' for the high-res image), along with commentary, interviews, essays, maps, contact prints, or other pertinent information, including its ownership history, any markings on the piece, and its exhibition history. All the files related to a particular piece can be downloaded in one go (bottom link of every page).
posted by flibbertigibbet at 1:11 PM PST - 10 comments

In "Can We Stop Worrying About Millennials Yet?", editorial cartoonist Matt Bors highlights the absurdity of blaming millennials for inheriting a lousy economy.
posted by tonycpsu at 12:54 PM PST - 169 comments

Does elevator music make you buy more stuff? Skeptoid's Brian Dunning explores the history and science of the insidious beast that is Musak. Can carefully crafted, topically tempoed, thoughtfully themed music cause consumers to part with more of their money?
posted by Annie Savoy at 12:27 PM PST - 35 comments

Boxer puppy tastes a lime wedge. (SLDogV)
posted by mudpuppie at 12:23 PM PST - 32 comments

Edward Gorey’s Vintage Illustrations for H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 11:24 AM PST - 12 comments

How the rise of Fox News helped Republican candidates Is Fox News primarily reinforcing Republicans or persuading Democrats? [more inside]
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 10:48 AM PST - 74 comments

There's no sexism in gaming: "Furthermore, reasonable people would see that asking to put male soldiers in the Call of Duty series is simply not do-able. Since the age of the Amazon, women have waged wars, because they have a higher pain threshold than males and have more stamina in every area of war. Who would take a male Battlefield seriously? Including men would simply cloud the matter; when crawling through tunnels, as is often necessary in war, our eyes would fall on the male backside - from then on women would be irreparably compromised."
posted by Phire at 10:40 AM PST - 144 comments

In an essay for The New Inquiry, Moira Weigel and Mal Ahern consider The End of Men, global recession era capitalism, and ironic sexism.

"Mancession Lit portrays the Man-Child as pitiful, contrasting him with women who are well-adjusted and adult. But it rarely acknowledges the real question that this odd couple raises. Namely, are women better suited to the new economy because they are easier to exploit?"

posted by GameDesignerBen at 9:57 AM PST - 106 comments

It is with great sadness that the Trenton Thunder pass along news that 13-year-old team bat dog, Chase That Golden Thunder, passed away on Monday. [more inside]
posted by josher71 at 9:48 AM PST - 12 comments

They're called Pirsig Pilgrims, the motorcycle enthusiasts who follow the route from Minnesota to California that inspired Robert Pirsig's surprise 1974 chart-busting book, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance."
posted by seemoreglass at 9:27 AM PST - 53 comments

There are 50 symbols currently allowed on the gravestones of US military personnel. The Wiccan pentacle was only approved in 2007 after a fight that invoked President George W Bush's views on the faith, though other symbols, such as Thor's Hammer, have been added with less of a fight. Most recently a Sandhill Crane was approved for the first same-sex spouse member buried in a military cemetery. Military gravestones are very light on symbolism, however, compared to older religious gravestones or, say, the Victorians.
posted by blahblahblah at 9:22 AM PST - 60 comments

For the sixth year in a row, green algae have invaded the beaches of Quingdao, China (video). This year's algal bloom covers 28,900 km² (about the size of Massachussets or Albania), more than twice the 2008 record (13,000 km²). Bonus: two research papers (PDF) dealing with the identification of the species (Ulva prolifera) and the origin (possibly aquaculture ponds on land) of the 2008 bloom (5 years ago on MeFi).
posted by elgilito at 8:43 AM PST - 11 comments

How easy is it to fake mental illness? [more inside]
posted by not_the_water at 8:12 AM PST - 44 comments

German media company Sky Deutschland is looking at ways to promote its app. One of the ways it is considering is advertising directly inside people's heads, through bone conduction. The ads would be heard by commuters leaning their heads against train windows and would be otherwise inaudible. Ad agency BBDO said it had received "highly encouraging first reactions" from commuters who tested the kit; feedback from the public at large has been less than enthusiastic.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 7:52 AM PST - 90 comments

Tomorrow, the 2013 Ashes series (England verses Australia) begins with the start of the first match at Trent Bridge (Nottingham). Though England and Australia have battled since 1861, the Ashes were first contested in 1882. Australia lead England 31-30 in series victories. England start as strong favorites with the bookmakers. Glenn McGrath cautiously predicts a 2-1 Australia series win, whilst Ian Botham predicts a 10-0 wipeout for England over the two series. The 2013 Ashes will be streamed live to 53 countries over YouTube. With Britain in the grip of unusual summer weather (sun), much play is likely. [more inside]
posted by Wordshore at 6:25 AM PST - 126 comments

Here is L0pht Heavy Industries testifying before the United States Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs, Live feed from CSPAN, May 19, 1998. Starring Brian Oblivion, Kingpin, Tan, Space Rogue, Weld Pond, Mudge, and Stefan von Neumann. This is the infamous testimony where Mudge stated we could take down the Internet in 30 minutes. Although that's all the media took from it, much more was discussed. See for yourself. (59:04)
posted by Blasdelb at 3:45 AM PST - 16 comments

The meaning of life according to Boomhauer. (Original scene.)
posted by MartinWisse at 3:07 AM PST - 33 comments

In the 1920s and 1930s, endurance marathons were all the rage. Most folks know about marathon dancing and eating contests, but people would step up to test their endurance in every arena possible. One of least successful was the The Noun and Verb Rodeo, sometimes called the World Champion Gabfest, (1928), where "[p]rofanity was grounds for disqualification, but no points were awarded for style, diction, grammar, or even for making sense. All that mattered was that an individual kept talking." [more inside]
posted by julen at 2:32 AM PST - 24 comments

Gustav Jens Tech Tips. Start with the basics, then works your way through programming HTML, CSS, Java, LUA and Python . For anyone interested in learning programmings.
posted by zoo at 1:25 AM PST - 39 comments

"Curiosity is the principle motivator of all important work." Distinguished historian Edmund S. Morgan died on Monday at the age of 97. [more inside]
posted by colfax at 1:23 AM PST - 8 comments

“What I wanted was for kids to see a movie where they don’t need to aspire to be in an army to aspire for an adventure. And I used very deliberate language that is a reference to westerns. I don’t have captains, majors, generals. I have a marshal, rangers . . . it has the language of an adventure movie. I want kids to come out of the movie and say, I want to be a Jaeger pilot! I really think that would be my dream come true.” - Guillermo del Toro on being a monster loving pacifist. Designer Wayne Barlowe talks about Pacific Rim's creatures. But has maneuvering at Legendary doomed the film before it has even opened?
posted by Artw at 9:43 PM PST - 385 comments

The first thing you notice about Glasgow trio Sparrow & The Workshop is how unGlaswegian they sound. That's mostly down to lead singer Jill O'Sullivan, [Belfast-born, Chicago-raised] with a Joni Mitchell-via-Nashville voice, a stunning instrument that often justifies the price of admission on its own. When she sings about the devil, darkness and violence, fever, rapture and fear, it's the old American west she evokes, not Glasgow's West End. Behind the voice is a rhythm section that's not afraid to step forward: baritone harmony vocals; pounding drums, clicks and whips; pained, plaintive and passionate folk-rock melodies. That's from the Clash Music review of Crystals Fall (Grooveshark stream), the debut from the trio. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 9:28 PM PST - 3 comments

Martin Machado's short and serene documentary about his experiences working on a container ship. [more inside]
posted by Monsieur Caution at 9:02 PM PST - 19 comments

An oral history of the "American Pie" film franchise
posted by paleyellowwithorange at 8:56 PM PST - 16 comments

This week the US government began furloughs of over half a million employees, reducing their pay and work hours by 20%. Members of a corresponding Facebook group who will be out of work one day a week had some ideas regarding how to set up out-of-office email auto-replies.
posted by exogenous at 8:27 PM PST - 72 comments

Bulletproof Security is a paramilitary security company. They have provided security to Habitat for Humanity and Empire CAT among others. [more inside]
posted by Pogo_Fuzzybutt at 7:35 PM PST - 40 comments

When Douglas Engelbart (previously) read a Vannevar Bush essay on a Philippine island in the aftermath of World War II, he found the conceptual space to imagine what would become our Internet...
posted by jim in austin at 5:59 PM PST - 7 comments