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The Golden Goose Awards celebrate "the human and economic benefits of federally funded research by highlighting examples of seemingly obscure studies that have led to major breakthroughs and resulted in significant societal impact." The 2012 awardees.
posted by escabeche at 9:45 PM PST - 32 comments

The critically-acclaimed BBC production The Story of the Jews, written and presented by historian (and foodie) Simon Schama, can be viewed online by people with access to BBC iPlayer TV programs. It will be shown in the USA on PBS later this year. [more inside]
posted by Joe in Australia at 9:09 PM PST - 24 comments

The words and phrases that distinguish men and women on Facebook. A word cloud visualization taken from a new study exploring personality, gender and age in language used on social media, published in PLOS ONE. [more inside]
posted by dontjumplarry at 6:33 PM PST - 94 comments

Don't Be That Dude: Handy Tips for the Male Academic.
posted by goatdog at 5:53 PM PST - 103 comments

Dating tips for feminist men [more inside]
posted by eviemath at 5:08 PM PST - 101 comments

Google Web Designer is a free and neat little HTML5 animation authoring tool (system requirements)
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 4:27 PM PST - 34 comments

Chvrches' Lauren Mayberry: 'I will not accept online misogyny' "Being part of a band born on the internet means a daily sift through a barrage of sexually explicit abuse. Why are female musicians expected to put up with this?" [more inside]
posted by SansPoint at 3:57 PM PST - 102 comments

After appearing on the season premiere of Saturday Night Live (is that Colin Stetson back there on sax?), Arcade Fire aired a strange but alluring late night special called Here Comes the Night Time, featuring Bono, Michael Cera, James Franco, Ben Stiller, Zac Galifianakis, Bill Hader and a nightclub in Montreal. [more inside]
posted by Lutoslawski at 2:26 PM PST - 41 comments

The introduction of Carol, [James] Gandolfini's character, plays him as a figure of menace until the last possible moment, and we see a lot of him in silhouette. Allen held my hand, squeezing as hard as he could, and at one point, he said, very quietly, "He's very mad. Someone made him so mad." And then, even more quietly, "His kids must have been very bad."

As part of his Film Nerd 2.0 series, Drew McWeeny watches Spike Jonze's Where the Wild Things Are with his sons.
posted by Johnny Assay at 2:19 PM PST - 28 comments

Despite an amazing final lap challenge by Japan's Naoto Matsukura, USA's Steve Hartson wins the last of three "A-main" races to secure the International Federation of Model Auto Racing's (IFMAR) 2013 1/10th Scale Electric 4wd Offroad Championship! [more inside]
posted by mullacc at 11:06 AM PST - 51 comments

A Culinary Giant Perhaps like no other food writer, Marcella Hazan, helped intergrate a foreign cuisine into American culture with her no-nonsense and easy to understand approach. Mrs. Hazan passed way yesterday a the ripe old age of 89. Her simple tomato sauce is legendary - she made all of us better cooks and eaters.
posted by helmutdog at 10:17 AM PST - 87 comments

"Putin has long kept a veil of secrecy over his personal life. Thus, he startled the world with an abrupt announcement on state television in June that he was divorcing his wife, Lyudmila, after 29 years of marriage. The news revived long-running speculation that the 60-year-old president was seeing another woman, possibly the 30-year-old Kabaeva, a State Duma deputy with United Russia and one of the most decorated gymnasts in the history of rhythmic gymnastics."
posted by rhombus at 10:15 AM PST - 42 comments

NASA's abandoned plan for a re-usable, nuclear powered moon shuttle. [more inside]
posted by Chrysostom at 9:21 AM PST - 34 comments

A REDTAIL'S DREAM Two years ago, Minna Sundberg was an art student who aspired to write and draw graphic novels so she decided to create a 'practice comic' while still in school. It was a fantasy adventure based upon Finnish mythology - not like Norse Gods, the omnipotent entities here were spirit animals, including an irresponsible young fox spirit who messed up the Northern Lights (also known as 'Fox Fire') and pulled the population of a rural village into a Limbo-like 'dream bubble' between Life and the Afterlife. [more inside]
posted by oneswellfoop at 9:17 AM PST - 12 comments

Here are a glossary and alphabet for the Lingua Ignota, the secret language created by Hildegard of Bingen, the 12th century abbess, seer, doctor, and composer.
posted by Iridic at 9:13 AM PST - 6 comments

The 10 best ambient tracks, according to The Orb. May your Monday be chill.
posted by escape from the potato planet at 8:51 AM PST - 60 comments

Digital Covers for Over 400 Children's Books MeFi User Toekneesan has been digitizing covers from his children's book collection and posting them to his Flickr account. [via mefi projects] [more inside]
posted by jazon at 7:53 AM PST - 22 comments

"The Fantastic Four is the Great American Novel. It is therefore the modern Shakespeare.
The Fantastic Four is an allegory of the most powerful nation in the history of the world, during its triumphant phase: from its first man in space (1961) to the end of the cold war (1988-9). A nation is understood through its art, and the superhero comic is America's unique contribution to art." [more inside]
posted by MartinWisse at 6:58 AM PST - 66 comments

The RAND Corporation's National Security Research Division has released a 297-page report on the likely consequences of a collapse of the North Korean regime, within the Korean Peninsula, as well as to China, Japan, the US and others (PDF).
posted by acb at 6:26 AM PST - 62 comments

Baby elephant wants to play with a sleeping dog and is very persistent about trying to wake it up. [slyt | cute]
posted by quin at 6:17 AM PST - 35 comments

The data analysis group that used Facebook and set top TV data to help Barack Obama win the latest election is taking its talents to the private sector. (SL NYTimes)
posted by reenum at 4:47 AM PST - 16 comments

The open university have created a choose your own adventure game to explore some ideas in philosophy. [more inside]
posted by Cannon Fodder at 3:25 AM PST - 14 comments

Last week, Improv Everywhere set up the ACJW Ensemble Orchestra (of Carnegie Hall and The Juilliard School) in Herald Square in New York City and placed an empty podium in front of the musicians with a sign that read, "Conduct Us." [more inside]
posted by zarq at 12:12 AM PST - 41 comments

Inside the fall of BlackBerry: How the smartphone inventor failed to adapt. [more inside]
posted by modernnomad at 10:14 PM PST - 108 comments

We tend to think now of scurvy as mainly a punch line, if anything—“scurvy-ridden rats” is the kind of popular pirate epithet that appears in even the most G-rated family fare. Partly this is because now, fully understanding its mechanism, it seems a particularly ridiculous problem. But ask anyone who's suffered from it: it is a singularly horrid and terrible way to die.

- The Spoil of Mariners, Colin Dickey, Lapham's Quarterly.
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 9:47 PM PST - 28 comments

All Your Yesterdays is a sequel to All Yesterdays: Unique and Speculative Views of Dinosaurs and Other Prehistoric Animals, by John Conway, C.M. Kosemen [deviantart] and Darren Naish. The new book is compiled from submissions to the "All Your Yesterdays Contest" (winners here) and is available as a free pdf download (although they are accepting donations).
posted by brundlefly at 8:50 PM PST - 3 comments

Flexi discs are thin, flexible vinyl records designed for incorporation into books and magazines. Popular in both the USA and USSR during the 60s and 70s, production of these discs underwent a ten year hiatus in 2000 before being reintroduced. In January 2011 extreme metal magazine Decibel began incorporating flexis featuring rare and unreleased tracks from the most influential bands in the underground. All the Flexi-Series tracks may be streamed via SoundCloud.

Among the more bizarre entries in the series is a cover of The Specials tune Man At C & A by harsh industrial black metallers Anaal Nathrakh, which sounds very wrong and but really works, particularly if you listen to the original first. Other ear-catching tunes include a G.G. Allin cover by rotted meat enthusiasts Watain; the reintroduction of a revered institution in Godflesh after a 12-year hiatus; and a surprising acoustic rendition of Whispering World by Royal Thunder. [more inside]
posted by Existential Dread at 8:01 PM PST - 36 comments

Pete Seeger made a rare and surprise appearance at Farm Aid 2013, and brought a sharp new verse for an old classic. (SLYT)
posted by Capt. Renault at 7:01 PM PST - 22 comments

“I don’t think you’re gay,” he said. He then went through the same litany as Dr. F.—he didn’t believe I was a pervert, he just felt I was lost and confused and needed to be set on the right path. Dr. K. believed in behavioral modification. He told me to place a rubber band around my wrist. Every time I had “gay thoughts,” I was to snap the rubber band, causing pain. ­Eventually I would associate the thoughts with the pain. - Gene Stone on growing up gay, struggling with sex, anti-gay conversion therapy, and the doctor-mandated sex surrogate that finally helped him.
posted by The Whelk at 6:49 PM PST - 23 comments

In 1954, Life magazine published an article entitled "The Plague of Overweight" with a series of photos of a woman named Dorothy Bradley. The story features some now-familiar tropes about fat people ("197-pound Dorothy ... covered up embarrassment by being jolly and gregarious"; "Dorothy envies slim girl's milkshake"). It is also notable as an early appearance of the concept of an obesity "epidemic".
posted by dontjumplarry at 5:15 PM PST - 108 comments

The Dollar Baby (also sometimes referred to as the Dollar Deal) is a term coined by best-selling author Stephen King (Previously) in reference to a select group of students and aspiring filmmakers or theatre producers whom he has granted permission to adapt one of his short stories for only $1. [more inside]
posted by SkylitDrawl at 3:17 PM PST - 36 comments

The next best thing to neuticles Now available at popular dog parks Bring Quarters
posted by boilermonster at 2:35 PM PST - 46 comments

she++ is probably not the worst pun I've seen on c++ [more inside]
posted by curuinor at 2:28 PM PST - 14 comments

With the momentous series finale of Breaking Bad just hours away, fans of the show are hungry for something, anything to wile away the time before the epic conclusion tonight. So why not kick back and chew the fat with your fellow MeFites with the help of a little tool I like to call "The Periodic Table of Breaking Bad." [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi at 1:14 PM PST - 921 comments

Warning! The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased, entry for the United States of America
posted by Blasdelb at 12:30 PM PST - 49 comments

Mackie the Boston Terrier really likes (?) having his belly tickled. (SLYT)
posted by davidjmcgee at 10:35 AM PST - 25 comments

Mark Kermode (previously) discusses internet anonymity, the popularity of negative reviews, and 21st century film criticism in an excerpt from his new book.
posted by figurant at 9:43 AM PST - 26 comments

Bearing Arms: [New York Times] Articles in this series examine the gun industry’s influence and the wide availability of firearms in America. [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 5:49 AM PST - 233 comments

"It is made out of velcro-like fabric that lines the Russian food containers [that are] found here on the International Space Station."
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 5:06 AM PST - 37 comments

Further proof that Pygmy music is some of the most awesome on earth.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 3:02 AM PST - 20 comments

4 Rules to Make Star Wars Great Again An animated open letter to JJ Abrams (SLYT)
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 2:19 AM PST - 108 comments

As part of this weekend's Guardian series: 50 years of Doctor Who, six of the actors who have played The Doctor's companions - Louise Jameson, Freema Agyeman, Katy Manning, Carole Ann Ford, Billie Piper and Karen Gillan discuss their experiences on the show in video interviews. (Links to print interviews within.) [more inside]
posted by zarq at 11:25 PM PST - 26 comments

Grantland visits the set of Eastbound & Down on the eve of its fourth (and final) season. "The canon of post–Tony Soprano TV antiheroes is well established with your Walter Whites and your Don Drapers. Now, with Eastbound & Down sailing into the sunset, there is Kenny Powers. He was a crass, craven, and mean-spirited buffoon — and he was our buffoon. As he fumbled, fought, and fucked — his flabby arms protruding out of cutoffs, jorts hanging just so — he carried the mantle of the Ugly American. But this was neither a tribute nor a judgment. It was a love letter to this particular American way."
posted by porn in the woods at 6:44 PM PST - 15 comments

Last week, Kanye West sat down with BBC Radio's Zane Lowe for an hour-long interview, which Jimmy Kimmel promptly spoofed. Kanye has responded angrily via Twitter, writing "JIMMY KIMMEL IS OUT OF LINE TO TRY AND SPOOF IN ANY WAY THE FIRST PIECE OF HONEST MEDIA IN YEARS", among other things. Kimmel responds on his show. More on Kanye, previously.
posted by rcraniac at 4:44 PM PST - 418 comments

Walter Hickey at Business Insider looks at when you should buy a Powerball ticket and whether to take the lump sum or annuity if you win.
posted by reenum at 3:12 PM PST - 47 comments

Rise Above the LMS: " ... I no longer think of standard, traditional LMS platforms like Blackboard as software. Instead, I think of them as 'institutionware.' For as much as Blackboard may be about preserving itself as the top LMS option, it is also about preserving the traditional aspects of higher education. Even more recent social media ‘features’ are about containment; blogs and wikis are stuck in the Blackboard box and mark the introduction of new environments and tools for learning but only serve lectures and exams." James Schirmer talks about how the structure and design of learning management systems (Wikipedia article) in higher education often runs counter to good classroom instruction.
posted by codacorolla at 3:05 PM PST - 122 comments

This is one example of a phenomenon I noticed throughout this chart: natural rival franchises tend to have similar numbers of goon seasons. This would suggest that goon employment may be (in some instances) localized arms races between rivals, whose cyclical number of goons tends to reflect the other’s in some perverted game of Mutually Assured Terrible Hockey (MATH)... We also have a team like Detroit near the bottom of the list, with only 8.5 goon seasons in their history. Since 1985-86, the Wings have only had 4.5 goon seasons. They’ve only had 2 goon seasons since 1988-89. Coincidentally, they’ve been pretty damned swell at winning hockey games since that time. The Evolution of Goon Culture in the NHL
posted by mannequito at 3:00 PM PST - 23 comments

How many full-time minimum wage jobs would you need to afford two bedrooms in San Francisco?
posted by SkylitDrawl at 2:48 PM PST - 101 comments

Paris Fashion: Rick Owens’s Powerful Rejection of Conventional Beauty Big, athletic African-American dancers storm the runaway [more inside]
posted by TheGoodBlood at 2:36 PM PST - 32 comments

Old Marmaduke strips are terrifying.
posted by griphus at 1:24 PM PST - 30 comments

The history and technique of the siege, by fantasy author K.J. Parker.
posted by Chrysostom at 12:53 PM PST - 21 comments

The story of New Jersey's infamous Action Park is retold by visitors and those who worked there and Part 2

A more detailed look at the history of the park (previously)

posted by Blasdelb at 12:00 PM PST - 32 comments

In the 2012 superbowl half-time show, rapper M.I.A. flipped off the camera while performing with Madonna. On September 19, the Hollywood Reporter revealed that the NFL has been waging a "secret legal war" over the incident, demanding $1.5 million and an apology from M.I.A. This week M.I.A. responded with a video statement (transcript at Pitchfork):

So, now, they’re scapegoating me into figuring out the goalposts on what is offensive in America. Like, is my finger offensive, or is the underage black girl with her legs wide open more offensive to the family audience? That’s basically what it comes down to. It's a massive waste of time, a massive waste of money, it’s a massive display of powerful corporation dick-shaking. They want me on my knees and say sorry so they can slap me on my wrist. Basically, so they can say it’s OK for me to promote being sexually exploited as a female than to display female empowerment through being punk rock. That is what it boils down to, and I’m being sued for it.

[more inside]
posted by medusa at 11:25 AM PST - 134 comments

The New York Times magazine has published an excerpt from Dave Eggers' new book The Circle. It features a protagonist who has just begun work at one of the world's foremost tech companies, and things quickly turn slightly sinister. [more inside]
posted by mai at 10:56 AM PST - 25 comments

Yesterday, Superior Court Judge Mary Jacobson of the Mercer County Superior Court ruled in Garden State Equality et al. v. Dow that New Jersey's civil unions are inherently unequal in light of the SCOTUS Windsor ruling, and that plaintiff couples and those similarly situated should be allowed to marry beginning October 21st. [more inside]
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 8:11 AM PST - 26 comments

Looking for a unique wine? There are a few celebrities out there trying their hand out at being vintners. Sam Neill in New Zealand, "Brangelina" in France, Drew Barrymore in Italy, and Dan Aykroyd in Canada (just to name a few). There are plenty here in the states, too. Sonoma County certainly has its share with everyone from John Lasseter to the Smothers Brothers. And then there is the Hollywood wine granddaddy of them all.
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 6:08 AM PST - 27 comments

"It’s only got 178 transistors, but it’s an important proof-of-concept that’s poised to keep Moore’s Law right on track. The breakthrough, in which a basic computer was powered by microscopic chains of carbon atoms, means we may have finally found a viable alternative to silicon chips."
posted by marienbad at 5:58 AM PST - 25 comments

Earlier today, the leader of Golden Dawn and three deputies were arrested (BBC, Guardian, NYT) after the neonazi party was declared a criminal organisation. Two more deputies are wanted. The criminal investigation started after the murder of a 34-year-old rapper Pavlos Fyssas that sparked waves of protests and a police shakeup as the ties between Golden Dawn and the police are under investigation. Supporters of the neonazi party knifed a woman (video interview) the day after the murder of Fyssas and have caused violence against immigrants to skyrocket. The police connects Golden Dawn to 30 such attacks. This map of attacks on migrants provides more details about separate incidents. Previously: 1 2 3.
posted by ersatz at 5:00 AM PST - 54 comments

In 2003 there was the 2003 Harvard dialect survey. (Previous) which was taken up by Joshua Katz for a PhD project looking at regional dialect variation in the continental US (previous). Now he has created a quiz that takes this data and tells you where in the continental US they speak like you. For the ambitious, there's also the full 140 question version.
posted by MartinWisse at 3:19 AM PST - 171 comments

D.E. Wittkower is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Old Dominion University. He's contributed to a number of interesting tangents from more traditional philosophical subjects including author of Philosopher's Book of Questions and Answers , editor of Ender's Game and Philosophy, Facebook and Philosophy, Philip K. Dick and Philosophy, Mr. Monk and Philosophy, and iPod and Philosophy. All well and good, but I sincerely support his Philosophy of Lullaby.
posted by HuronBob at 2:37 AM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment

Gateway livestock The hazard of backyard chickens. The interweb loves its chickens: They're pets in the backyard, with their own magazines. Even the New Yorker says they're the "It" bird. But can you really handle chickens? Before you get overwhelmed and dump your new pets in the shelter, you might try renting. [more inside]
posted by BlueHorse at 8:35 PM PST - 53 comments

The Stanley Hotel, inspiration for the haunted Overlook Hotel in Stephen King's 1977 novel The Shining, has announced plans to dig up the pet cemetery on its grounds. [more inside]
posted by Lou Stuells at 8:32 PM PST - 44 comments

SNL 1977 - Lorne Michaels "raised his middle finger at [Elvis] Costello and kept it up until the unapproved song was over."
From wikipedia: Costello wanted to play "Radio Radio" on SNL. Columbia Records, however, was interested in having an already-established song performed on SNL, to increase interest in the band before the American release of My Aim Is True and This Year's Model. In the event, Costello began the SNL performance by playing "Less than Zero." However, after a few bars, he turned to the Attractions, waving his hand and yelling "Stop! Stop!," then said to the audience, "I'm sorry, ladies and gentlemen, there's no reason to do this song here," possibly referring to the fact "Less than Zero" was written as a reply to British fascist politician Oswald Mosley. However, SNL music director Howard Shore attributes the move to Costello's bucking pressure by his music company to play "Less than Zero" on the show.[1] He then led the band in a performance of "Radio Radio." Obligatory Weird Al cover. ViaBoingBoing
posted by FiveNines at 8:07 PM PST - 62 comments

Jason Kottke turned 40 today. Some of his friends threw a party on his blog. [more inside]
posted by zarq at 6:53 PM PST - 27 comments

"As anyone who is familiar with 13th and 14th century illuminated manuscripts can attest, images of armed knights fighting snails are common , especially in marginalia. But the ubiquity of these depictions doesn’t make them any less strange, and we had a long discussion about what such pictures might mean."
posted by exogenous at 6:18 PM PST - 90 comments

When German soldiers arrived in Paris in the summer of 1940, there were so few of them that they had to win hearts and minds. The untold story of one young couple.
posted by gaspode at 6:18 PM PST - 7 comments

"this is not a bad dick pic, but it suffers from some classic mistakes. the first is that you’ve gone for basically a full-tilt bird’s eye view, which makes me feel like i’m you and i’m looking down on my own dick. the second is that the lighting/flash is highlighting the head of your dick in a slightly alarming, “whoah there” way, and your dick pic, like most dick pics, would benefit from some softer lighting." [NSFW]

Critiquing your dick pics with love, where "the size of your dick is not determinative of your ability to take a good dick pic, and i will never grade you down on the basis of your size."
posted by youarenothere at 6:13 PM PST - 99 comments

"Her wood carvings were made from ironing boards, breadboards, old ships' timbers and in one case an old wooden toilet seat. Her jewellery was made from a cut-up caravan." (Obituary.) There's not much on the web about this woman, but what there is, is gold. [more inside]
posted by glasseyes at 3:51 PM PST - 7 comments

"In trying to understand conspiracy theorists, I used to think that what conspiracy theorists were really doing on some level was grieving, their fantasies a form of displaced love for JFK, but I’ve come to think the love involved is mostly self-love, their self-congratulatory assertion of superiority over mere facts."

What Does the Zapruder Film Really Tell Us?
Documentary filmmaker Errol Morris deconstructs the most famous 26 seconds in film history.
posted by Atom Eyes at 3:10 PM PST - 150 comments

General Motors is literally tearing its competition to bits ...so its 3D scanning can reverse-engineer others' vehicles, increasing speed to market. 'All this technical innovation makes it easier for GM to react to competition faster and push innovations out rapidly. Still, it doesn't guarantee that GM will execute in a way that makes people want to buy the company's vehicles.' 'The capabilities that come from GM's benchmarking efforts bring another sort of risk with them—GM could learn from its competitors too well and become indistinguishable from them. It's a problem that plagues today's auto industry, where you often can't tell vehicles from different manufacturers apart in a parking lot without looking at the name plate.' [more inside]
posted by VikingSword at 2:35 PM PST - 27 comments

So Breaking Bad isn't the only series having it's final episode this weekend. The IT Crowd hits end of program with a one off special.
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 12:38 PM PST - 120 comments

Are Elvish, Klingon, Dothraki and Na'vi real languages?

Dictionaries: Elvish, Klingon, Dothraki [pdf] and Na'vi
Phrases: Elvish, Klingon, Dothraki and Na'vi
posted by desjardins at 12:30 PM PST - 41 comments

Klubok, or Ball of Yarn, made in 1968, is a short animated film based on a Russian folk tale about a poor old woman and what happens after she finds a magic ball of yarn one cold winter's night. The movie was directed by Nikolai Serebryakov and the music was created by Eduard Artemiev.
posted by orange swan at 12:25 PM PST - 7 comments

Truman Capote Interviews Manson Family Member Bobby Beausoleil, via Dangerous Minds.
posted by latkes at 12:16 PM PST - 8 comments

The first time I tried a Jetstream, it was one of a friend’s pens, and I completely derailed all conversation around me to drool wide-eyed at the writing experience and reverently whisper ‘WHERE DID YOU GET THIS PEN?’ - The web's leading pen bloggers on what is the best pen.
posted by Chrysostom at 12:04 PM PST - 201 comments

If the Federal Government shuts down on October 1st, the DC city government is supposed to shut down as well. In a bid to keep the city functioning, Mayor Vince Gray has declared all city employees "essential." Non-voting Rep Eleanor Holmes Norton and the DC GOP are also petitioning Congress to keep the city open. The District's budget comes from local taxes, but needs Congressional approval to spend it's own money.
posted by troika at 11:31 AM PST - 374 comments

At the end of a long work week, maybe you could use a bit of relaxation. Pleasantly soothing, delightfully literal, PianoAndRain.com does what it says on the tin. [autoplay sounds, in case it wasn't obvious]
posted by vytae at 10:43 AM PST - 29 comments

"On September 19th, the Census Bureau released the American Community Survey (ACS) estimates of poverty and income. Based on a much larger survey sample than the older Current Population Survey, the ACS affords a closer look at state, regional, and local income patterns (like health and education spending). It is not a pretty picture." --Neat Data visualizations of the survey info from Dissent Magazine.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 10:27 AM PST - 8 comments

The Rockpalast archive. Some 670 concerts.
posted by muckster at 10:14 AM PST - 14 comments

A Day In the Life of a Troubled Male Antihero
posted by overeducated_alligator at 8:25 AM PST - 96 comments

Ask A Native New Yorker: How Guilty Should I Feel About Being A Horrible Gentrifier? Passionate response from a Bushwick native.
posted by The Whelk at 8:18 AM PST - 203 comments

"[Lucas] understood the nature of play—and games—but we didn't have the time with him that we needed," said one person familiar with high-level meetings at LucasArts. “It never felt like people at the top cared about making great games,” said another person connected to LucasArts. “A lot of awesome projects never went anywhere because, ‘it’s not gonna make enough money.’”

How LucasArts Fell Apart (SLKotaku article) [more inside]
posted by zombieflanders at 8:10 AM PST - 53 comments

Why are there so few black managers in English football? Sol Campbell thinks he'll have to leave England and go abroad to find his opportunities.
posted by josher71 at 8:07 AM PST - 6 comments

40 days before her wedding, an Atlanta woman named Tamara Fowler cancelled the event. Since her parents, Carol and Willie Fowler had already paid for the 200-person reception, the family decided to host 200 of Atlanta's homeless population for a four-course meal.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 7:59 AM PST - 23 comments

Steve Ballmer bid farewell to Microsoft employees today after nearly 14 years as CEO, and he did it in his usual understated fashion. [more inside]
posted by entropicamericana at 7:00 AM PST - 50 comments

Line Mode Browser 2013: An emulator of the first cross-platform web browser. (Previously)
posted by Cash4Lead at 6:37 AM PST - 22 comments

Got $11,500 to throw away, a lot of free time, and an unbearable urge to burn all the heretics? Games Workshop is selling the Ultramarines chapter. All of them. Almost 1200 miniatures, unpainted, unassembled, just in time for your three year retreat from all human contact. That's okay, the people you would have hung out with are probably cultists anyway. ^{via i09}
posted by Ghidorah at 6:08 AM PST - 47 comments

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has released its latest update. [more inside]
posted by smoke at 2:13 AM PST - 151 comments

Sharon Lee and Steve Miller's Agent of Change and Fledgling are now available as free downloads. Starting points in the Liaden Universe, a space opera series notable for its romance elements and convoluted publication history, their particular sequences (among others) in the same setting take noticeably different approaches to common themes such as complicated manners, familial obligations, and meeting a soulmate. Not to mention humanoid turtles. And occasional cats. [more inside]
posted by Monsieur Caution at 1:56 AM PST - 13 comments

DARPA has funded the next generation of bionic legs and DIY brain scanners. Next up: drone submarines and a hypersonic spaceplane. [more inside]
posted by StrikeTheViol at 8:34 PM PST - 21 comments

It's been determined that near-Earth Asteroid J002E3 is actually the third stage of the Saturn V used by Apollo 12. It was in solar orbit, but recently was captured temporarily by the Earth and made 6 orbits, then escaped again. Animation here.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 7:51 PM PST - 65 comments

Decrypting Rita is a sci-fi comic with robots. It's pretty cool. Decrypting Rita is a slice-of-life comic with regular people. You might like it. Decrypting Rita is a fantasy comic with dragons and hat ladies. It's a little experimental. Decrypting Rita is set 120 minutes into the future, in the here and now, in your teenage brother's D&D campaign, in a place called the Skylands. It's also scrolly. Decrypting Rita is a comic by mefi's own egypturnash. It's worth reading. [via mefi projects]
posted by ocherdraco at 5:00 PM PST - 16 comments

More reasons why you might not keep your friends around if they acted like your pets. [more inside]
posted by paleyellowwithorange at 4:55 PM PST - 20 comments

True facts about the sea pig.
posted by anothermug at 4:55 PM PST - 30 comments

Unleashing Genetic Algorithms on the iOS 7 Icon - In the pursuit of something just a bit tighter than Marc Edwards' superellipse approximation, Mike Swanson applies genetic algorithms to the task of making a better button-making script.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 4:20 PM PST - 19 comments

Catachresis is an 8-bit-looking indie flash game of cosmic horror and some bureaucracy and bickering with colleagues. The launch trailer provides a selection of the reactions you will likely experience while playing it.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 4:17 PM PST - 25 comments

"Once upon a time, playing a GTA game was like sitting next to your offensive Republican uncle at Christmas dinner. He was definitely a dick but also smart and interesting, and his heart was fundamentally in the right place. These days Uncle GTA is a billionaire with an unchanged shtick, and he seems a hell of a lot more mean-spirited than before."
—A letter to Niko Bellic about Grand Theft Auto V
posted by Atom Eyes at 2:15 PM PST - 154 comments

In 1971 Jean Garetto and Pierre Codou began to dream of a radio station that could calm even the drivers stuck on the Paris Périphérique. It would play wonderful, unexpected music chosen by people who knew their onions. The tracks would be drawn from diverse genres and chosen to seque enchantingly. There would be no jingles, commercials or self-aggrandising DJs - not even defined programs - just some announcers chosen for their mellifluous voices but paid to mostly stay quiet. The result was - and is - FipRadio. Fans have included residents of Brighton in the UK who enjoyed an illegal re-transmission of the station for many years - and journalist David Hepworth who describes the thrill of hearing "a voice you want to marry whispering words you can't understand". Listen! [more inside]
posted by rongorongo at 1:55 PM PST - 29 comments

VOYAGER: a web comic by Jed McGowan [via]
posted by brundlefly at 1:53 PM PST - 5 comments

"Not enough gay men realize there’s an HIV-prevention pill."
posted by showbiz_liz at 1:21 PM PST - 41 comments

The very fact that reading and writing are in jeopardy, or simply evolving, means that to try to put the brakes of old criteria on a changing situation is going to be either obstructive or boring. In our critical age of almost manic invention, the most effective criticism of what, in the critic’s eyes, is a bad book would be to simply ignore it, while nudging better books toward the fulfillment of what the critic understands to be each book’s particular creative aim.

Lee Siegel buries the hatchet-job.
posted by RogerB at 12:29 PM PST - 50 comments

The 10 Most James Franco Lines in James Franco’s New Novel
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 12:13 PM PST - 56 comments

Wax Nostalgic, a Tumblr featuring tiny sculptures made from crayons.
posted by Chrysostom at 12:02 PM PST - 7 comments

I am a birdsrightsactivist and fight against antibird sentiment. tree
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 11:18 AM PST - 61 comments

What’s going on in Colorado is an outstanding case study in what happens when a black market becomes a legal one, and it’s something we probably won’t see again in any of our lifetimes.
posted by latkes at 10:52 AM PST - 168 comments

Listen up: Here's a story about Eiffel 65's 'Blue'. (Direct link to the music video.)
posted by kmz at 10:14 AM PST - 58 comments

Looting the Pension Funds: All across America, Wall Street is grabbing money meant for public workers. By Matt Taibbi. [more inside]
posted by homunculus at 10:10 AM PST - 46 comments

A High School football coach in Roosevelt, Utah has suspended the entire football team. Roosevelt Utah, might not be a big place, but they have big ideas.
posted by whimsicalnymph at 9:41 AM PST - 83 comments

Yoga International, publishers of a similarly-titled magazine, recently migrated to an all-online content. As part of their new technology platform, they have been providing online yoga instruction utilizing a visual recording of a standard yoga classroom set-up. YogaGlo, providers of on-line yoga classes, sent Yoga International a cease-and-desist letter claiming that their recently filed patent application covers the type of view being filmed for an on-line yoga class, and that Yoga International is in violation. [more inside]
posted by scblackman at 9:35 AM PST - 20 comments

"If a record takes more than a week to make, somebody's fucking up." Take a moment to read the letter that Steve Albini sent to Nirvana prior to the recording of 1993's In Utero. It puts everything in context, encapsulates the spirit of the album, and makes a case for it better than a thousand 20th anniversary encomiums could. [more inside]
posted by naju at 9:26 AM PST - 61 comments

New Scientist magazine has posted a nifty interactive infographic that illustrates how many Earth-like planets might exist, based on observations from the Kepler Space Telescope. The orbital observatory has catalogued 151 exoplanets based on examination of 0.28% of the sky. [more inside]
posted by Gelatin at 8:24 AM PST - 34 comments

The male 'Duck-billed Platypus' has venomous spurs on its hind legs. [more inside]
posted by panaceanot at 7:44 AM PST - 40 comments

Canadian Meredith Fitzmaurice did not expect to win last weekend's Run for Heroes Marathon, mostly because she was aiming for a 1:28 half. [more inside]
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 7:40 AM PST - 20 comments

"Often the protagonist of an Important Novel of the Latter Half of The 20th Century is male, and is a thinly veiled version of the author. So thin of a veil. A veil so thin is it possible to discern whether the author was circumcised. Also, he often displays a particular stomach-turning combination. He regards women as, one the one hand a mere necessary evil, not things one would be inclined to befriend or discuss life with, and on the other hand, beings of terrible power that make one very angry indeed." -- Belle Waring takes aim at a particular kind of novelist, the canonical important American late 20th century novelist and his 21st century would-be heir. (More background: it's all Jonathan Franzen's fault.)
posted by MartinWisse at 7:26 AM PST - 55 comments

Re-creating ridiculous family pictures. Guess what we'll be doing at the next family gathering.
posted by kinnakeet at 6:56 AM PST - 22 comments

The Doubleclicks, of geek-girl anthem "Nothing To Prove" [previously], have just released a "A Love Song for Internet Trolls" to kick off the start off their weekly song Wednesday project. [via]
posted by quin at 6:51 AM PST - 5 comments

"The majority of fossil discoveries worth publishing about can either strengthen previous studies or dish out little parcels of new data. These allow us to slowly piece together the history of life on Earth, but do not significantly rock the boat. But every now and then you are confronted with a jaw-dropping specimen, a fossil that says, “forget the textbooks, THIS is how it happened…” Momentous discoveries like Lucy the Australopithecus and the first batch of Chinese feathered dinosaurs that unleashed a tsunami of new information, bringing sudden clarity to our view of the distant past, and forcing us to rethink what we thought we knew about evolution. Now joining their ranks is a little armoured fish called Entelognathus, described in Nature by an international team of researchers led by Prof. Zhu Min at IVPP, Beijing." [more inside]
posted by Akhu at 6:46 AM PST - 11 comments

"Oh damn - you must've got one of them combustible heads, I read an article all about them - You're On Fire" - Official video from They Might Be Giants. [more inside]
posted by memebake at 4:59 AM PST - 33 comments

"Our brother asked us to be his best men for his wedding. We knew the hardest thing would be doing a traditional best man’s speech, because we would cry too much. So instead, we made a music video - a plea not to leave us! Which he did, regardless." Presenting We Are Brothers by Baddy Paris and Rufus Starlight in the tradition they know best, 80s glam rock.
posted by Leucistic Cuttlefish at 4:48 AM PST - 19 comments

1. “It is strange, in my opinion, that the insurance market has evolved so, that so few individuals understand the fundamentals of the medical insurance plans they are insured under."
2. Among the 19% polled who are uninsured, nearly four in 10 don't realize the law requires them to get health insurance next year. Among young people, whose participation is seen as crucial for the exchanges to work, just 56% realize there's a mandate to be insured or face a fine.
3. Health policy is an extremely personal and complicated topic... Observing historical patterns of attempted healthcare reform and backlash towards these reforms, we may begin to understand what is keeping such a prominent and promising nation from enlisting a social contract of health.

posted by four panels at 12:16 AM PST - 156 comments

One day in February several years ago, William D. Drake – a distant cousin of famous folk musician Nick Drake – released two very different albums at once. There was Yew's Paw, a collection of strange and lovely piano music, such as the bouncy, joyful Pipistrelle, the sometimes-misty, sometimes-urgent At the End of the Harbour Wall. (Not to mention the aptly-named Short & Sweet Like A Donkey's Gallop, which is 17 satisfying seconds long.) Then there was Briny Hooves, a set of rock/folk/pop songs which are all confounding and fantastic. Wolves is an angry elegy that's nonetheless incredibly catchy; equally catchy is Serendipity Doodah. Ugly Fortress is a softer, Beatlesy sort of tune, The Fountains Smoke is a lovely folk duet, and Requiem for a Snail is exactly what it claims to be. Perhaps its two most affecting moments are Sweet Peace, a gently dark number that grows and grows, and Seahorse, which is very reminiscent of Robert Wyatt's (also wonderful) Rock Bottom. Both albums are worth a listen, and both can be streamed freely from Bandcamp—Yew's Paw, Briny Hooves, and Drake's more recent album The Rising of the Lights.
posted by Rory Marinich at 10:13 PM PST - 11 comments

"It took just a week for nearly 300 students who got iPads from their Los Angeles high school to figure out how to alter the security settings so they could surf the Web and access social media sites."
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 7:47 PM PST - 139 comments

The Collected Poems of the Affordable Care Act
posted by SkylitDrawl at 7:06 PM PST - 13 comments

Slavoj Žižek on John Carpenter's They Live, from the upcoming film The Pervert's Guide to Ideology. Slavoj Žižek delivers a Q&A on the film at TIFF.
posted by Sticherbeast at 6:49 PM PST - 26 comments

Are our schools becoming more segregated? In 1954 "Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka" desegregated schools in the United States... but, it appears that the country is losing ground in this effort. According to an article in Aljazeera America: "African-American and Latino students are less likely to attend racially and ethnically diverse schools today than at any other time in the last four decades. This, almost 60 years after the landmark Supreme Court ruling that desegregated schools, represents a major setback for one of the core goals of the civil rights movement."
posted by HuronBob at 6:38 PM PST - 24 comments

FDA-approved foot cream is found to permanently eradicate HIV from cell cultures. [more inside]
posted by cairdeas at 5:27 PM PST - 57 comments

Fireman Saves Kitten, captured with a GoPro. (SLYT)
posted by kbanas at 4:58 PM PST - 77 comments

Genius: The Nickelback Story. "In addition to masterminding Nickelback's ascent, Chad Kroeger, 37, has found ways for his band to make money onstage and off, through licensing, merchandising, and product-placement agreements. He's also helped groom many other acts, including some that the haters might even like."
posted by paleyellowwithorange at 4:53 PM PST - 36 comments

How The Economic Machine Works by Ray Dalio[1] actually makes a case against austerity[2] and for redistribution, but also for money printing (and, arguably, for bailouts), while stressing the need to keep making productivity-improving public and private investments. However, it could be equally entitled: How The Industrial Age Political-Economy Doesn't Work Anymore, viz. Surviving Progress (2011)... [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 3:11 PM PST - 28 comments

Hocus Pocus (SLYT) - the story of a woman who grew up without happiness and a girl who didn't know it. Written by Shikemoku, sung by Gumi and Hatsune Miku. Warnings for: singing robots, high-pitched Japanese voices, English subtitles, and references to child abuse and abduction. [more inside]
posted by anthy at 2:11 PM PST - 1 comment

I know full well to my great & abiding dismay the compulsive fascination that the eldritch & uncanny may exert upon the imagination of an introspective & sensitive scholar. From Charlie Stross (cstross): Equoid, a Laundry novella available free to access from Tor.
posted by topynate at 12:45 PM PST - 51 comments

Percussive Maintenance (SLYT)
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 12:09 PM PST - 40 comments

PTSD and Gene Kelly's lost wartime star turn: For the last six decades or so, a copy [of "Combat Fatigue Irritability"] has been filed away, along with thousands of other films, at the National Library of Medicine. The only people it has been lost to are the public and Gene Kelly’s devoted and still numerous fans. But now the National Library of Medicine is featuring Combat Fatigue Irritability in Medical Movies on the Web, and the film will be given a well-deserved, though very belated, New York premiere, on October 5, 2013, at the New York Academy of Medicine. [more inside]
posted by theatro at 11:20 AM PST - 8 comments

Celebrate Banned Books Week by perusing The comics that corrupted our kids - but mind your eyes! Meanwhile the American Library Association’s list of this year’s most challenged books is led by another comic,  Captain Underpants.
posted by Artw at 10:44 AM PST - 42 comments

"The midi-trigger’s connected to the laptop, the laptop’s connected to the PA" Mommy and baby yoga, music and sign language classes are apparently so over. Some parents are instead giving baby disc jockey classes a spin.
posted by capnsue at 10:13 AM PST - 33 comments

In 1914, Captain Robert Campbell was taken captive by the German Army. In 1916, he got word that his mother back in England was dying. He was given a laissez-passer to visit her on condition that he return to captivity as soon as practicable. An officer and a gentleman, he did exactly that. [more inside]
posted by IndigoJones at 10:00 AM PST - 56 comments

“Honey, you’re 300 sandwiches away from an engagement ring!”

The blogger behind 300Sandwiches.com talks about the genisis of her blog and the quest for her that engagement ring, one sandwich at a time.
posted by fontophilic at 9:50 AM PST - 341 comments

The most Irish island in the world. Booker Prize winning author Anne Enright travels to the edge of Newfoundland. (single page version, may trigger printer).
posted by rollick at 9:04 AM PST - 66 comments

Highschool kids cover Tool's "Forty Six & 2" (SLYT) [more inside]
posted by Kadin2048 at 8:53 AM PST - 47 comments

Gawker has some revelatory excerpts from a new New Yorker article [behind paywall] digging into the extraordinarily high-profit world of the EDM DJ in Vegas nightclubs. [more inside]
posted by Potomac Avenue at 8:33 AM PST - 159 comments

The 2008 USC-Notre Dame football game at the LA Coliseum was not a great one for the Fighting Irish. They lost to USC 38-3, en route to a disappointing 6-6 record for the season. Notre Dame had only 4 first downs and 91 total yards on offense (!!!). But the game turned out to be a fateful one for the Band of the Fighting Irish, Notre Dame's 167 year-old marching band. Playing a triumphant show at USC for the first time ever, the band did a medley that included the OK Go song "Here it Goes Again," which became famous when the very fun low-budget video of the rock band's members performing on treadmills went viral. The Notre Dame band's performance that day included the marching band making two gigantic treadmills on the field, and band members reenacting some of the video's moves. Little did they know that this would lead to their star turn in a music video. [more inside]
posted by AgentRocket at 8:31 AM PST - 6 comments

On the 21st September 2013 it is International Peace Day. We are making an event called ‘The Fallen’ on the D-Day landing beach of Arromanches in northern France that illustrates what happens with the absence of peace. It was on the 6th June 1944 that a total of 9,000 civilians, German forces and Allies lost their lives. Our challenge is to represent those lives lost between the times of the tide with a stark visual representation using stencilled sand drawings of people on the beach. Each silhouette represents a life and when it is washed away its loss. There is no distinction between nationalities, they will only be known as ‘The Fallen’.
posted by chavenet at 7:48 AM PST - 20 comments

Justin Timberlake and Jimmy Fallon do #hashtags
posted by beagle at 7:33 AM PST - 33 comments

Norwegian animators Twintrash have created the animated short "What Does The Fox Say," based on "The Fox" music video by Ylvis. [previously | via] [more inside]
posted by quin at 6:45 AM PST - 22 comments

“It’s a lot less embarrassing,” he says. “You don’t have to put yourself out there.” And unlike panhandling in Pensacola, using an app like Bitcoin Tapper won’t put him on the wrong side of the law. This past May, Pensacola — where Angle has lived since April — passed an ordinance that bans not only panhandling but camping on city property. -- Homeless, unemployed and surviving on bitcoins (and food stamps).
posted by MartinWisse at 6:26 AM PST - 19 comments

Effective 12/31, it will no longer be manufactured. I was more surprised to learn that the VW Bus was still being manufactured in 2013.
posted by COD at 5:55 AM PST - 65 comments

Why do we so seldom see people smiling in painted portraits? [more inside]
posted by The Girl Who Ate Boston at 5:41 AM PST - 23 comments

From prison to pro football (~soccer) but hampered by a dark past: how Ilombe Mboyo's rise destroyed the scheme that saved him. Can football help rehabilitate a criminal?
posted by bdz at 2:54 AM PST - 18 comments

An earthquake in Balochistan (also spelled Baluchistan), a mountainous province of Pakistan, has killed many people and reportedly flattened many houses in Awaran, the worst-affected district. The force of the earthquake raised the sea bed near the port of Gwadar, creating a new island. Early estimates of casualties are notoriously inaccurate, but a preliminary report by Max Wyss of WAPMERR suggests there will be several thousand deaths.
posted by Joe in Australia at 11:56 PM PST - 17 comments

Psychological reactance is an aversive affective reaction in response to regulations or impositions that impinge on freedom an autonomy. It is experienced whenever a free behavior is restricted. [more inside]
posted by curuinor at 11:05 PM PST - 74 comments

The Coolest Year In Hell
posted by Ad hominem at 10:28 PM PST - 19 comments

Why I Hate the Goldberg Variations, by Jeremy Denk, whose new (lovely) recording of the Goldberg Variations is now streaming on NPR. Also by Denk: Hannibal Lecter's Guide to the Goldberg Variations, which explores the famous cannibal killer through the lens of Bach. This is Your Brain on the Goldberg Variations, which gets in-depth on just how the Variations vary.
posted by Rory Marinich at 9:43 PM PST - 30 comments

metropho.rs (You can zoom in)
posted by gwint at 9:32 PM PST - 20 comments

If you are searching for the definition to a sexual term and find Urban Dictionary a bit to cluttered with (non-sexual) entries of questionable validity or juvenile jokes among friends and people you don't know, yet the sex dictionary doesn't have enough entries, you may find sex-lexis enlightening, from a bit ginger to zucchini (NSFW, natch).
posted by filthy light thief at 8:46 PM PST - 26 comments

Educators, prepping for World Space Week, Oct 4-10? Be sure to include the very excellent space documentary The Mars Underground in your plans. It's free! [more inside]
posted by humannaire at 8:18 PM PST - 4 comments

UPDATE: The headline, subhead, and lead to this story are not meant be taken seriously. Together they are, in the parlance of journalism, "the thing that gets people to read the article." The Christian Science Monitor website published a brief article summarizing a study that examined the effects of newborn baby smell on women's brains. Its lead sentence: "If you're like most normal people, you've briefly considered eating a baby or two." Via Romenesko
posted by oneswellfoop at 8:09 PM PST - 47 comments

Notable transhumanist and futurist FM-2030 (née Fereidoun M. Esfandiary) was really, really into the future.
posted by edwardog at 7:57 PM PST - 7 comments

The Strangest Names in American Political History is a compendium of ludicrous nomenclature among America's political figures, from Arphaxed Loomis to Zerubbabel Snow (with stops for Outerbridge Horsey, Supply Belcher, and Odolphus Ham Waddle).
posted by snarkout at 7:04 PM PST - 47 comments

Dirty Dancing is A SUBVERSIVE MASTERPIECE and here are four reasons why. "While I loved it as a mushy romance starring a relatable heroine and a dreamy guy, a huge portion of the plot flew right over my tiny unworldly preteen head. But it was only as an adult that I realized how RADICALLY subversive and politically bananas this movie really is." [more inside]
posted by juliplease at 6:28 PM PST - 60 comments

In 1956 EC Comics attempted to re-publish the pre-Code comic Judgement Day, originally published in 1953 in Weird Fantasy #18, prior to the founding of the Comics Code Authority. The CCA "objected to" the story because of "the central character being black.".
posted by exogenous at 6:16 PM PST - 13 comments

Nathan Rabin reviews the Kiss autobiographies for the A.V. Club. The memoir of Kiss drummer Peter Criss is endearingly needy and sleazy: "Makeup To Breakup positively vibrates with rage toward Criss' former bandmates, Kiss' management, and everything Kiss represents." Gene Simmons' Kiss And Make-Up lets The Demon speak for himself: "To critics who ask how he could have treated core members of his group so coldly, he responds, "Would you want to be in a group with Criss and Frehley?"" Spaceman Ace Frehley offers his bland version of Kiss’ story in No Regrets: "For better or worse, No Regrets, Frehley's curiously underwhelming 2011 memoir, is the product of an author who can also now assure himself that no matter how debauched or crazy he might get, at least he isn't Ace Frehley-in-the-'70s-level debauched or crazy."
posted by paleyellowwithorange at 4:51 PM PST - 72 comments

Fans and critics alike held their breath in anticipation of the tidal wave of exploratory, open-ended gaming that was supposed to follow, waiting to be drowned in a sea of new worlds. And then, nothing. The legacy of Myst, 20 years later [more inside]
posted by Frayed Knot at 4:38 PM PST - 64 comments

How a Kids’ Cartoon Created an Real-Life Invasive Army. At the peak of their popularity following the animated series Araiguma Rasukaru, Japan imported more than 1,500 North American raccoons annually... Raccoons compete both for food and for territory with the native raccoon dog (tanuki) and the red fox, and push native owls out of nesting spots in hollow trees. Ever since raccoons attacked a reproductive colony of grey herons in Nopporo Forest Park in 1997, the grand birds have not returned to their historic breeding grounds. [more inside]
posted by spamandkimchi at 3:13 PM PST - 52 comments

From a purely economic perspective: Is college worth it?
posted by Westringia F. at 2:43 PM PST - 66 comments

"A camera trap intended for Siberian tiger research in southeastern Russia instead captured a golden eagle swooping on a yearling sika deer on December 1, 2011." ... "There were no large carnivore tracks in the snow, and it looked like the deer had been running and then just stopped and died," Kerley said in the statement. She and her colleagues pieced together the attack from these three images, culled from more than 7,000 collected by the camera trap over five months." Pictures.
posted by semaphore at 2:17 PM PST - 32 comments

On April 11, 1994, a red-headed wandering swordsman appeared on the pages of the Weekly Shōnen Jump. It was ten years after the end of the Boshin War, and Himura Kenshin no longer answered to the assassin's name Hitokiri Battosai. At his side, he wielded a sakabato, a katana with the cutting edge along the inside of the blade, in his heart an oath to never kill again, and on his cheek, two intersecting scars that formed an "X." In the the years that followed, Nobuhiro Watsuki's creation, Rurouni Kenshin, jumped from the pages of the weekly magazine onto television screens and finally into theater screens as a live action movie. [more inside]
posted by Atreides at 1:58 PM PST - 21 comments

A new study from Harvard Law School (get the full paper here) reports that nearly half of the links cited in Supreme Court opinions are rotten (sometimes cleverly so). A new web-service built through collaboration by many of the largest libraries in the world, Perma, currently in Beta, will enable users to create citation links that will never break.
posted by Lutoslawski at 1:55 PM PST - 19 comments

Why Popular Science is shutting off comments.

A politically motivated, decades-long war on expertise has eroded the popular consensus on a wide variety of scientifically validated topics. Everything, from evolution to the origins of climate change, is mistakenly up for grabs again. Scientific certainty is just another thing for two people to “debate” on television. And because comments sections tend to be a grotesque reflection of the media culture surrounding them, the cynical work of undermining bedrock scientific doctrine is now being done beneath our own stories, within a website devoted to championing science.

posted by SansPoint at 1:02 PM PST - 128 comments

Hipster and Proud of it.
posted by josher71 at 12:47 PM PST - 87 comments

Joss Whedon: The definitive EW interview. "We use stories to connect, to care about people, to care about a situation. To turn the mundane heroic, to make people really think about who they are... We create to fill a gap—not just to avoid the idea of dying, it’s to fill some particular gap in ourselves."
posted by kmz at 12:23 PM PST - 269 comments

47% of US jobs under threat from computerization according to Oxford study. The study reveals a trend of computers taking over many cognitive tasks thanks to the availability of big data. [more inside]
posted by stbalbach at 11:03 AM PST - 120 comments

Misandrist Lullabies.
posted by mightygodking at 10:46 AM PST - 279 comments

Merchants of Meth: How Big Pharma Keeps the Cooks in Business (SLMJ).
posted by Cash4Lead at 10:43 AM PST - 81 comments

Following a media report (and subsequent investigation) last May that wealthy guests of Disneyland and the Walt Disney World resort were abusing the Guest Assistance Card system, Disney announced this week that it will replace the card with a new Disability Access Service Card, beginning October 9th. [more inside]
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 9:50 AM PST - 74 comments

Box. A choreographed performance incorporating a live human, two industrial robots, and projection mapping onto moving surfaces. You've seen projection mapping onto static surfaces, typically buildings. This takes it several steps beyond… and the result is stunning and beautiful.
posted by davidpriest.ca at 9:39 AM PST - 16 comments

The Federal Correctional Institution in Danbury, CT (famous for once housing Piper Kerman, author of Orange is the New Black) is converting from a women’s prison to a men’s prison. Where will the inmates go? Aliceville, AL; a location more than 1,000 miles away, nowhere near a major airport, and 45 miles away from a train station. Eleven United States senators sent an open letter to the director of the Bureau of Prisons last month, and the transition remains in a state of delay. Piper Kerman wrote a NYT op-ed with her perspective.
posted by oceanjesse at 9:01 AM PST - 36 comments

Why whitewashing hurts: an illustrated guide.
posted by overeducated_alligator at 8:48 AM PST - 58 comments

Godspeed You! Black Emperor win Polaris Music Prize, then issue a statement.
posted by davebush at 8:21 AM PST - 55 comments

"[Full Turn] works with the rotation of two screens placed back to back, creating a three-dimensional animated sequence that can be seen at 360 degrees. Due to the persistence of vision, the shapes that appear on the screen turn into kinetic light sculptures."
posted by griphus at 7:38 AM PST - 19 comments

The new Sokal: Serbian academics hoax a scholarly journal into accepting their gag paper. (Scribd copy of paper)
posted by doctornemo at 7:36 AM PST - 21 comments

Constitute offers the constitutions of the world's nations for comparison. Search for constitutions by country or by topic, then pin or download results using a clean, easy-to-use interface. Brought to you by The Comparative Constitutions Project.
posted by Rykey at 6:37 AM PST - 15 comments

The Ordnance Survey (the national mapping authority for Great Britain) has a large amount of its mapping data available online for free use. Over the past few weeks, one of its summer interns has been using a few of its datasets to recreate the whole of mainland GB at 50:1 scale in Minecraft.
posted by ZsigE at 5:32 AM PST - 20 comments

"12. Get a large, 56-quart storage bin to designate as your “items to donate” box. It’ll be too big to fit in your car, so keep a box of trash bags next to it for easy bagging when you’re ready to make a Goodwill run. (Yes, the bags have to be next to it — if you leave the room to get them, you’ll be watching Youtube videos of funny kittens in two minutes. I don’t know how this happens. It just does.)" -- Twentyfive tips on how to organise your life if you're a lazy slob like me, courtesy of Jennifer Fulwiler.
posted by MartinWisse at 3:54 AM PST - 116 comments

A new academic paper digging into presidential betting in the final weeks of the 2012 election finds that a single trader lost between $4 million and $7 million placing a flurry of Intrade bets on Mitt Romney—perhaps to make the Republican nominee’s chance of victory appear brighter.

[more inside]
posted by Elementary Penguin at 3:12 AM PST - 104 comments

The Slow Winter [PDF]. A slightly true story about CPU design.
posted by aubilenon at 12:48 AM PST - 46 comments

"all we could hear was screaming and shooting." At approximately 11am on Saturday, September 21, terrorists - believed to be 10 to 15 in number, entered one of Nairobi's upscale malls and began killing people. Today, as the 4th day of the siege began, it is believed all the remaining hostages have been freed. Currently the death toll stands at 62 and 175 have been wounded. Al Shabab, a terrorist group based in Somalia, took credit for the attacks via their twitter account, before it was again suspended. [more inside]
posted by allkindsoftime at 11:23 PM PST - 49 comments

As previously discussed on MetaFilter, the countdown has now reached one day. Halo? Battlestar Galactica? A new album by Bros? Or something more sinister, as hinted at (perhaps) by the spectograph of the end-video silences?
posted by Wordshore at 10:48 PM PST - 424 comments

Art nouveau-inspired fan art of several Studio Ghibli films. Via io9.
posted by Athanassiel at 10:20 PM PST - 13 comments

Nobody brought a complaint against police for their actions at the G20 protests in Toronto. Nobody has been vindicated by this prosecution. Nobody's assault can be seen in this video.
posted by Joe in Australia at 10:10 PM PST - 6 comments

The biometrics hacking team of the Chaos Computer Club (CCC) has successfully bypassed the biometric security of Apple's TouchID using easy everyday means. [more inside]
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 9:55 PM PST - 112 comments

The civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, as described in the New Yorker by Renata Adler in 1965. [more inside]
posted by medusa at 8:35 PM PST - 21 comments

The alien cult that hacked British TV: In 1977 a British television channel was hijacked by someone claiming to be a space alien called ‘Vrillon’. [Via]
posted by homunculus at 8:09 PM PST - 14 comments

What is your state worst at?
posted by blue_beetle at 7:28 PM PST - 86 comments

I Do Not Want To Jack Guys Off Is there anything more ludicrous than a woman giving a man a hand job? [more inside]
posted by mediareport at 6:57 PM PST - 203 comments

How animals perceive time. 'FLIES live shorter lives than elephants. Of that there is no doubt. But from a fly’s point of view, does its life actually seem that much shorter? This, in essence, was the question asked by Kevin Healy of Trinity College, Dublin, in a paper just published in Animal Behaviour. His answer is, possibly not.' [more inside]
posted by VikingSword at 6:28 PM PST - 27 comments

ProPublica.org and This American Life partnered for a special report on acetaminophen (also known as paracetamol), the active ingredient in Tylenol, which is also found in many other over-the-counter medications. The narrow therapeutic index of acetaminophen means that often, the difference between safe use and overdose can be as small as one gram. From ProPublica.org: "About 150 Americans die a year by accidentally taking too much acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol, federal data from the CDC shows."
posted by fiercecupcake at 5:19 PM PST - 76 comments

The Bangka Belitung islands are a picture postcard tropical paradise, except where the tin is mined. Tin that is used in smartphone solders, and that is responsible for widespread ecological devastation. Following a Friends of the Earth campaign, all of the major manufacturers bar one have acknowledged their role in this destruction, and are seeking improved standards for tin mining. But if you truly want ethical consumer electronics, you'll have to wait for the Fairphone(Fairphone previously).
posted by wilful at 4:55 PM PST - 20 comments

18 Books Ernest Hemingway Wished He Could Read Again for the First Time. "I would rather read again for the first time Anna Karenina, Far Away and Long Ago, Buddenbrooks, Wuthering Heights, Madame Bovary, War and Peace, A Sportsman's Sketches, The Brothers Karamazov, Hail and Farewell, Huckleberry Finn, Winesburg, Ohio, La Reine Margot, La Maison Tellier, Le Rouge et le Noire, La Chartreuse de Parme, Dubliners, Yeat's Autobiographies and a few others than have an assured income of a million dollars a year."
posted by paleyellowwithorange at 4:45 PM PST - 24 comments

Naya's Quest is the new game from Terry Cavanagh. It looks like a simple isometric-view platformer but every level (once the game proper starts) is essentially an optical illusion. It will do your head in. In the best possible way. [more inside]
posted by motty at 4:15 PM PST - 16 comments

Blackberry will be harvested by a private equity firm for US $4.7 billion. Generally blamed for their own decline by disdaining the massive rush of popularity of competing smartphones and becoming increasingly well-known for the bizarre behavior of their leadership, Blackberry hoped to turn things around by ejecting their co-CEOs, rebranding from Research In Motion to the name of their sole product, and launching a new spate of products: OS 10, new generation of touchscreen phones, and planning a second attempt at tablets. In spite of some misguided punditry predicting a new era, they won no love from either the reviewers or the public. [more inside]
posted by ardgedee at 2:57 PM PST - 85 comments

Paper Matrix is a blog that gives instructions for cool papercraft objects, "reinterpreting the Danish tradition of woven paper hearts and ornaments." Cut paper in the prescribed ways and weave it together carefully to make a mobile of colorful hot air balloons, gorgeous and complex boxes; simple but satisfying pennants and much more... including a full theater for performances by paper dolls.
posted by LobsterMitten at 1:55 PM PST - 18 comments

Watch the political borders of Europe shift, expand, and disappear from 1000 AD to today (via)
posted by The Whelk at 1:34 PM PST - 49 comments

Set List is a live show where "the world’s top comedians get a never-before seen “set list” of bizarre, outrageous, and ridiculous topics as the audience follows along on the screen behind the performer." Edited highlights of this combination of improv and stand-up have just started to be posted on the Nerdist's Youtube channel. Including sets by: [more inside]
posted by Potomac Avenue at 1:04 PM PST - 20 comments

Francesco Francavilla is an artist who has been producing minimalist posters for each of the last 8 episodes of Breaking Bad.
posted by reenum at 12:36 PM PST - 9 comments

Elaine Stritch Is Really Not Thrilled About Her Golden Years (June 2013), but she's making it work (September 2013). A documentary about her life will premiere this fall. In the meantime, perhaps you'd be interested in the Elaine Stritch Alarm Clock?
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 12:16 PM PST - 17 comments

Requiring one player to independently control two characters, one with each hand, the recently released Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons (Steam/360/PS3) has been receiving high praise for its intertwining of emotional storytelling and gameplay. "Brothers is a compellingly beautiful game, yet remarkably dark... it’s a single-player co-op, executed sublimely." - Rock Paper Shotgun. "The resulting journey is so singularly devoted to creating a specific tone and atmosphere that you won't likely be able to stop thinking about it until long after you've seen it through to the end." - Giant Bomb. "We see so many games striving to be interactive movies, but Brothers is something more akin to poetry. Mechanics are stanzas, and together they pack more of an emotional wallop than some scripts achieve with thousands upon thousands of hollow words." - Polygon. [more inside]
posted by kmz at 11:28 AM PST - 22 comments

The Star Wars Minute is a podcast in which each episode subjects a single minute of Star Wars to Seinfeldian levels of analysis, with commentary, childhood reminiscences, underlining of in-universe questions raised, and geekery in the extreme. Hosted by Pete the Retailer from NerdGeekDork and Alex Robinson of the Ink Panthers podcast, the Star Wars Minute runs Monday to Friday, and has so far addressed such issues as stormtroopers' dubious search methods, who the actual antagonist of the movie might be, and a Simpsons cast member's little-known role in Star Wars. [more inside]
posted by ricochet biscuit at 11:13 AM PST - 14 comments

This is a greeting, that needs to be resurrected. Please use it today.
posted by timsteil at 9:55 AM PST - 99 comments

An estimated 8.6 percent of parents now wait until their child is six to send them to kindergarten, hoping that their maturity and increased physical size will give them advantages in the classroom and on the sports field. However, the trend, called "academic redshirting" may actually be extremely harmful, according to recent studies.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 9:14 AM PST - 106 comments

But that didn't prevent On the Media producer Sarah Abdurrahman and several members of her family and friends from being detained at a Canadian-US border while on the way home from a wedding. The story is all the more frightening as it details Sarah's inability to get any answers about policy from the Border Patrol, including the name of the officers who held her.
posted by Eyeveex at 7:38 AM PST - 92 comments

"Ted Cruz: The Distinguished Wacko Bird from Texas"
posted by zarq at 6:37 AM PST - 348 comments

In 2013 the U.S. Semi finals took place in Vegas. And a fine parade of facial hair it was. The World Beard and Moustache Championship is a biennial competition that celebrates meticulously coiffed facial hair. [more inside]
posted by Faintdreams at 6:19 AM PST - 15 comments

This is a story of boys following their mother's advice: clean up your toys when you're through playing with them. Recovering a sunk boat when its resting place is in a 6000 cubic foot per second current.
posted by 445supermag at 6:15 AM PST - 16 comments

Canadian self-described "Freemen" in Alberta have recently attracted a great deal of public attention to themselves. The justice system generally takes a very dim view of their shenanigans, as laid out in one of the most comprehensively researched and bizarre judgment issued in recent memory. Here's a general overview and debunking of the arguments they use. [more inside]
posted by thewalrus at 6:06 AM PST - 140 comments

A detailed and shocking open letter.
posted by colie at 5:41 AM PST - 33 comments

"Nobody misses the reference to Game of Thrones when we say that standing there at the Genius Bar is akin to standing Night’s Watch on the White Wall. You just don’t know what’s coming at you next." -- McSweeneys goes inside the Apple Store and encounters unexpected feelings at the genius bar.
posted by MartinWisse at 3:49 AM PST - 146 comments

"It's about coming together as a local community and sharing the fruits of your labour, your creation." In what has been described as a peer-to-peer community marketplace, people are connecting online with local cooks, who provide them with a meal for less than they would be likely to pay anywhere else. In Athens, the price is usually between three and four euros (£2.50 to £3.40). [more inside]
posted by arcticseal at 2:31 AM PST - 28 comments

Australia has just had an election and the new Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, has pledged himself to be the first Prime Minister for Indigenous Affairs. But has he properly consulted?

'The Other Election', run by the Australian Indigenous Mentoring Experience (AIME), features over 600 Indigenous kids from around Australia in years 10-12 putting themselves into the hypothetical role of delivering a speech as Australia's first Indigenous prime minister.

Ten finalists were announced today. Voting for the top 3 closes 29 January, 2013. The three best are then headed to Canberra to deliver their speeches in parliament. [more inside]
posted by de at 11:07 PM PST - 6 comments

Robot Vacuum Simulator 2013 is a groundbreaking simulator taking place in the incredible world of Robot Vacuum cleaners, with additional 2-player duel mode [more inside]
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 10:53 PM PST - 19 comments

Mazzy Star are best known for their hazy, shoegazer album So Tonight I Might See (Grooveshark stream), which contained the single Fade Into You (YouTube). That album was released in 1993, and went platinum in 1995, providing an odd counter-point to the popular grunge sounds of the day. As a band, they made three albums in the 1990s, though neither hit the peak of their sophomore album. They disbanded (as far as the public was concerned*) in 1997, though there were a series of reunion tours in 2000. Eleven years later, they released a new single, Common Burn b/w Lay Myself Down, and the group toured in 2012. This week, they release their fourth album, Seasons of Your Day, and they aren't any cheerier (in responding to interview questions). [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 8:56 PM PST - 30 comments

V.V. Ganeshananthan at The Margins on writing outside of what you know and the literary establishment's willingness to suspend disbelief and praise authenticity of narrative. As Gracie Jin put it, "In a society masquerading as post-racial, it is still only the white man who can speak authoritatively for every man."
posted by spamandkimchi at 8:53 PM PST - 13 comments

Quit. Quit early and quit often, not when something is hard, but when something isn't for you. That's the way you find your genius, (YT) says Prof. Deepak Malhotra, who gave this among other tips to graduating students at Harvard Business School in a speech on how to avoid the tragedy of living an unhappy life. [more inside]
posted by shivohum at 7:45 PM PST - 47 comments

Seikou Yamaoka spends a lot of time on his iphone. But he's not playing games or texting or reading, he's creating art. He's also created some amazingly hypnotic time-lapse videos of his works in creation, including this reproduction of Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring (done on an ipad mini rather than an iphone). Full gallery of his digital finger painting. He also does traditional watercolours.
posted by Athanassiel at 7:27 PM PST - 5 comments

Early this morning, pilot John Pedersen encountered mechanical difficulties and made an emergency landing on Lake Shore Drive in Chicago [photos]. [more inside]
posted by Westringia F. at 7:00 PM PST - 49 comments

Team Remington has won the 70th Annual One Shot Antelope Hunt in Lander, Wyoming. Team Remington defeated several other teams including Team Wyoming which lost after former Vice President Dick Cheney missed both his chosen Antelope and his fellow hunters. The annual day long hunt consists of three man teams who take turns attempting to kill a buck pronghorn antelope with a single shot. The winning team is the first to return with all three having made a successful single shot kill. The pronghorn, although not actually an antelope, is a small ruminant approximately 3 feet tall, and holds the distinction as the world's second fastest land animal, capable of running for extended distances at speeds over 50mph. [more inside]
posted by humanfont at 6:52 PM PST - 44 comments

A Tale of Benjen Stark is a short Game of Thrones fan-fiction film by VonWong, Five Knights Productions and friends. It tells "the beginning of the adventure of Benjen Stark following his return to the wall shortly after his visit to Winterfell. On a scouting mission Benjen Stark stumbles upon the bloody aftermath of an attack on a wildling camp. A pair of survivors are discovered as Ben attempts to unravel the mystery behind the carnage." [Via]
posted by homunculus at 6:33 PM PST - 29 comments

Discover how to get out of bed and do things again with these spiffy new tips from 21 Comics That Capture the Frustrations of Depression! Or pull a blanket over your head and pretend you're the last person on earth curled up in a nice, warm cave. Whatever.
posted by byanyothername at 4:54 PM PST - 89 comments

Back to the Future: The Trip. "We wanted to take this trip because we love the Back to the Future movies and thought it would be a fun, unique, and interesting trip. What you will see for each tour stop is first of all a picture from the movie from that scene, and then a picture of us at that location or a picture of what the landscape looks like currently in 2007." [more inside]
posted by paleyellowwithorange at 4:40 PM PST - 13 comments

I think that the extreme, right-wing, misogynist religious fanatics have basically hijacked the Republican party and are moving toward being able to hijack the Democrats too. I'm appalled at the hubris of these legislators who, one after another, think they can make more sensible decisions about a woman's personal, private reproductive decisions than the woman herself. They know nothing about these situations. They don't know a thing about later abortions, or why women seek them out, and yet they presume that they should be making these decisions. Interview with Dr. Susan Robinson, One of the Last Four Doctors in America to Openly Provide Third-Trimester Abortions
posted by latkes at 4:00 PM PST - 117 comments

"If I'm going to die, if Al Jourgensen is going to die, I don't want it to be from recalled yogurt." On the eve of Ministry's newest release, From Beer to Eternity, and in the wake of Mike Scaccia's passing, Al seems to find a tremendous amount of peace with putting Ministry to rest. [more inside]
posted by mannequito at 3:29 PM PST - 18 comments

You have to give them this simplified narrative of yourself, or they won’t let you try to get their money. The danger is the distraction. The danger is letting yourself care whether Meredith or the studio audience or the millions of people watching out there in America like you. The danger is that it pulls your mind away from the absolute need to be perfect at the game, to make not even a single mistake. Easy Money: My Experience on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire.
posted by Ghostride The Whip at 2:48 PM PST - 13 comments

The whale that inspired Greenpeace The organization that would become Greenpeace started off as an advocate for peace and as an anti-nuclear group. It expanded its activities into fighting whaling and had a major influence on the virtual cessation of the commercial fishing of whales which made Greenpeace a household name. That change in direction can be traced to a single whale. Allow me to introduce to you, Skana.
posted by 2manyusernames at 2:10 PM PST - 3 comments

LEGO Ball Contraptions have been seen (and gawked at) once or twice on the Blue before. But if you're looking for a bit more purpose to this particular genre of LEGO build, look no further than the impecably accurate and stylish LEGO Rolling Ball Clock.
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 12:55 PM PST - 11 comments

Atari cartridge art and artists "The original Atari featured a wealth of games with box art that was quite a bit more imaginative than the “grizzled man holding a gun” template that’s so popular today."
posted by bitmage at 12:48 PM PST - 19 comments

Ray tracing is a computer graphics technique that produces realistic images of a three-dimensional scene. In 1987, Paul Heckbert (then at Pixar) announced a contest to produce a ray tracer in the minimum amount of code, as he describes in "A Minimal Ray Tracer." In 2009, Andrew Kensler (then at the University of Utah Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute) created a C++ version that can fit on a business card. Fabien Sanglard explicates this amazing piece of code in "Decyphering the Business Card Raytracer."
posted by grouse at 12:34 PM PST - 19 comments

Not only is today, September 22, the Autumnal Equinox it also happens to be Hobbit Day, the date Tolkien fans celebrate the shared birthdays of Bilbo and Frodo Baggins as well as Hobbit culture in general. So go around barefoot, or smoke some pipe-weed, but watch out for eating seven meals each day, because you know. . . [more inside]
posted by Curious Artificer at 11:38 AM PST - 35 comments

The Common Core (Wikipedia) is a state-led effort that established a single set of clear educational standards for kindergarten through 12th grade in English language arts and mathematics that states voluntarily adopt (that is, if they want to keep their funding). In the weeks and months leading up to implementation of the Common Core, some teachers are a little wary. Teachers and community organizers are now left to translate Common Core standards for confused parents, with some myths, rumors, and miscommunications getting in the way. Now, after months of preparing for the shift, some states are dropping out of the Common Core. But why?
posted by SkylitDrawl at 11:00 AM PST - 44 comments

jerry clouds is a soothing little art game where you help Jerry make clouds. (via Terry Cavanagh's freeindiegam.es)
posted by Going To Maine at 10:54 AM PST - 15 comments

"Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want," an infomercial fanvid.
posted by griphus at 9:11 AM PST - 23 comments

September 7th marked the beginning of the battle for the 2013 America's Cup between defending Oracle Team USA and challenging Emirates Team New Zealand. As the winners of the last cup, the Golden Gate Yacht Club decided that this year's Cup match would take place in a new class of boat, the AC72 wing sail catamaran. Almost as much airplane as sailboat, these extraordinary craft are designed to lift out of the water, allowing them to sail faster than the wind and reach astonishing speeds of up to 50 knots. It was hailed as the pinnacle of the sport until a May 2013 capsize and death of Swedish crew member Andrew Simpson had some calling it the world's most dangerous sailboat. [more inside]
posted by annekate at 9:04 AM PST - 86 comments

"Sometimes called a ‘mercy seat,’ the misericord was the small ledge that protruded from the undersides of folding seats in a choir stall in a medieval church or cathedral. Medieval liturgical services were conducted eight times a day, and the clergy who attended and performed the services had to stand during the entire ritual. Developed in the 13th century, the misericord allowed the clergy to rest while appearing to stand during services." More misericords in British cathedrals. [more inside]
posted by MonkeyToes at 5:10 AM PST - 42 comments

A Day of Grace: A time lapse video of one day at Studio 7 with the Boston Ballet.
posted by NotMyselfRightNow at 5:04 AM PST - 2 comments

Seriously impressive fourteen-year-old Rachel Parent debates Monsanto investor Kevin O'Leary about genetically modified foods. Parent, who is the founder of the anti-GMO organization Kids Right To Know, takes on O'Leary (best known for playing the antagonist in shows like Shark Tank) in an unexpectedly solid debate, countering him point-by-point and cutting him off when he attempts, in his typical Mr. Wonderful way, to condescend to her.
posted by Rory Marinich at 1:00 AM PST - 351 comments

"The Grey Ones," which premiered at TEDx SoCal in Long Beach in July 2011, is a performance piece by LA-based "illusory performance makers" WIFE and features music by Amon Tobin. Its description: "Inspired by ancient myth, organic matter, decay, and transcendence, The Grey Ones explores the use of projection mapping on moving bodies and statuesque and saintly gestures to tell a story of the beginning of time." More videos can be found at WIFE's Vimeo channel.
posted by Unicorn on the cob at 9:38 PM PST - 12 comments

The Hill’s Megan Wilson, based on documents leaked on Monday, reports that the American League of Lobbyists (ALL) is considering dropping "lobbyist" from its name. "The organization confirmed to The Hill it is 'discussing a rebranding,' and is taking 'baby steps' toward that goal. Top choices for a replacement name include The Association of Government Relations Professionals, The National Association of Government Relations Professionals and the Government Relations Professionals Association, 'based on board meetings and emails,' the document says." [more inside]
posted by Marisa Stole the Precious Thing at 9:19 PM PST - 40 comments

"Why the suicide rate among veterans may be more than 22 a day. Every day, 22 veterans take their own lives. That's a suicide every 65 minutes. As shocking as the number is, it may actually be higher." Additional data by state can be found here.
posted by HuronBob at 8:42 PM PST - 37 comments

I can't hear what you say because THIS OTTER CAN JUGGLE! (via Laughing Squid)
posted by Joe in Australia at 8:02 PM PST - 21 comments

An Argument With Instruments: On Charles Mingus. How a jazz artist’s relationship to black identity gave his music its stormy weather. [Via]
posted by homunculus at 6:16 PM PST - 9 comments

From September 1, it is illegal in Alabama to rescue raccoons, skunks, foxes, bats, oppossums and other animals. [more inside]
posted by dontjumplarry at 5:50 PM PST - 64 comments

Now Showing | 234 episodes, 16 seasons, 95 hours, 1 epic marathon #hellyeah #nosleeptilsouthpark [more inside]
posted by maggieb at 5:35 PM PST - 17 comments

Jennifer Sky, a former model/actress, recently published a NYT op-ed about her recurring role as Amarice in Xena: Warrior Princess, stating, "Gender was not relevant in the Xenaverse." Her perspective has been met with some contention.
posted by rcraniac at 4:47 PM PST - 56 comments

Cats Knocking Shit Over
posted by The Whelk at 2:37 PM PST - 135 comments

Thursday, September 21st, 1939, radio station WJSV in Washington, D.C., recorded their entire broadcast day -- from sign on, to sign off. The entire day is available here.
posted by PHINC at 1:49 PM PST - 46 comments

White Collars Turn Blue: "But computers are proficient at analyzing symbols; it is the messiness of the real world that they have trouble with. Furthermore, symbols can be transmitted easily to Asmara or La Paz and analyzed there for a fraction of the cost in Boston. Therefore, many of the jobs that once required a college degree have been eliminated... So enrollment in colleges and universities has dropped almost two-thirds since its peak at the turn of the century. The prestigious universities coped by reverting to an older role. Today a place like Harvard is, as it was in the 19th century, more of a social institution than a scholarly one -- a place for children of the wealthy to refine their social graces and befriend others of their class... While business gurus were proclaiming the new dominance of creativity and innovation over mere production, the growing ease with which information was transmitted and reproduced made it harder for creators to profit from their creations... How, then, could creativity be made to pay? The answer was already becoming apparent a century ago: creations must make money indirectly by promoting sales of something else."
posted by bookman117 at 1:41 PM PST - 24 comments

It's the weekend, time to start raving. If you adore hardcore, like it loud, are needed on the dancefloor and keep jumping all over the world (even Maaskantje), then you know there's always the sound above your hair and you're already hyper hyper (shoutout). Now Ramp it up (it's only logical), reach somewhere deep inside, move your ass and go Faster, Harder, Scooter.

By the way, how much is the fish?
posted by MartinWisse at 1:36 PM PST - 18 comments

The first translation of The Adventures of Tintin into the Scots leid is now available, and is a joy to read aloud. Give it a shot! It was also recently published in Gaelic and Welsh (Yr Ynys Ddu).
posted by shii at 1:24 PM PST - 22 comments

The Spies Inside Damascus: The Mossad's secret war on the Syrian WMD machine.
On Aug. 20, 2012, U.S. President Barack Obama declared that if Syrian President Bashar al-Assad began shifting around or using his chemical weapons, Obama would consider that "a red line." The implication was that such a move would lead to American intervention in Syria. Some officials from the Israeli Foreign Ministry believed that Obama drew the line because he believed it would never be crossed. If that was his assumption, he made it based, in part, on assessments received from the Israeli intelligence services, which have waged a multidecade clandestine campaign to strip Assad of his deadliest weapons -- and which also have emerged as the United States' primary partners in collecting information on Middle Eastern regimes.
posted by andoatnp at 1:14 PM PST - 22 comments

Incidence of Catastrophe (1987-88) is video artist Gary Hill's adaptation of Maurice Blanchot's short novel Thomas the Obscure (pdf), an "ontological narrative" with being itself as its focus. Why Do Things Get in a Muddle? (Come On Petunia) (1984) is his adaptation of a metalogue from Gregory Bateson's Steps to an Ecology of Mind (pdf).
posted by Monsieur Caution at 12:16 PM PST - 1 comment

The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity -- Five laws that explain why stupidity will always be with us, dragging us down. [more inside]
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 11:41 AM PST - 55 comments

Inspired by silent film screen tests of the 1920's, 27 SECONDS is an ongoing video collaboration by BEAUTY IS BORING and THE NEW TOUGH. Working within a set of restrictions (chest to the top of the head, white background, limited time and no sound), the 27 SECONDS series is a moving exploration of the vintage Polaroid format used to create the images for BEAUTY IS BORING.
posted by insectosaurus at 11:10 AM PST - 5 comments

It's Your Fault "Every sexual assault case in India inspires a string of stupid and hateful remarks against women. This is our response to those remarks." (SLYT) From AIB365, an Indian sketch comedy troupe.
posted by sweetkid at 10:56 AM PST - 36 comments

Nobody loves leaves more than this dog. (SLYT) [more inside]
posted by elizardbits at 9:03 AM PST - 50 comments

Following their new release, EP1, the Pixies present a video out for their song "indie Cindy." It's about a woman, two men and a murder.
posted by griphus at 8:56 AM PST - 24 comments

Getty Dubs (SLYT) (previous)
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 8:26 AM PST - 6 comments

In 1975, the blockbuster movie Jaws was released. The series culminated in 1987 with a fourth movie, Jaws: The Revenge. The NES game Jaws (online) was released that same year, incorporating elements of both the original and fourth movie. But you probably don't know about the game that Mirrorsoft commissioned in 1984 from the husband-and-wife coding team, Dave & Sara Crud. They made a ZX Spectrum movie tie-in for the original film, only for rights holders to back out and leave it unreleased for nearly three decades ... UNTIL NOW! Or at least that's the backstory MeFite malevolent wrote. [via mefi projects] [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 7:31 AM PST - 14 comments

In 1999, officials in Vienna, Austria, asked residents of the city's ninth district how often and why they used public transportation. "Most of the men filled out the questionnaire in less than five minutes," says Ursula Bauer, one of the city administrators tasked with carrying out the survey. "But the women couldn't stop writing."
posted by cthuljew at 7:18 AM PST - 37 comments

A study [PDF] by CUNY Professor Diana Reiss and Rachel Morrison (Biopsychology and Behavioral Neuroscience Subprogram in Psychology The Graduate Center of CUNY) was published last week in Zoo Biology detailing for the first time a whisper‐like behavior in a non‐human primate, the cotton top tamarin at the Central Park Zoo. [more inside]
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 5:10 AM PST - 8 comments

Why Art? Australian ABC Arts critic, theatre blogger and author, Alison Croggon, looks at public funding of the arts - and argues for more of it.


"In a survey that looked at participation in visual arts and crafts, music, dance, theatre and literature – that is, the key art forms supported by the Australia Council – 38 per cent of Australians describe themselves as art lovers, for whom the arts are an integral part of their lives. Only 17 per cent report estrangement, believing that the arts attract pretentious elites, and a tiny 7 per cent feel no connection at all. Overall, 93 per cent of Australians reported engaging with the arts in the previous year. In 2009, more people attended art galleries (11 million) than went to the football (10 million)."
posted by crossoverman at 12:46 AM PST - 39 comments

Gonzalo Benard shoots in black and white, sometimes strangers, a lot of nudes, but with a sense of humor. He runs a blog and a tumblr of art and essays.
posted by klangklangston at 10:09 PM PST - 2 comments

Mia & Roman (1968) is a 23 minute-long behind-the-scenes documentary about the making of Roman Polanski's film Rosemary's Baby.
posted by EXISTENZ IS PAUSED at 10:04 PM PST - 6 comments

Tipping Servers $200 (SLYT)
posted by SkylitDrawl at 8:06 PM PST - 135 comments

Everything you need to know about web development. Neatly packaged. "Beginners, start by clicking the html box and the next lessons you should learn will get highlighted." [via reddit]
posted by batmonkey at 6:30 PM PST - 59 comments

Sesame Street: Tyrion Simon Says. [Via]
posted by homunculus at 6:10 PM PST - 36 comments

A long lost Vincent Van Gogh painting collecting dust in a Norwegian attic was recently identified as authentic. Thought to be inauthentic by the original purchaser after being declared fake in the 70's, technological advancements have allowed for closer scrutiny to be paid, allowing it to be fully authenticated.

Plus, looking in the upper left hand corner you can clearly see a familiar blue structure. Finally the rumors of intergalactic influence on the painter can be put to rest.
posted by mediocre at 5:31 PM PST - 24 comments

How Far Did Rocky Go in His Training Run in ‘Rocky II’?
posted by msalt at 4:16 PM PST - 45 comments

Untold Riches: An Analysis Of Portal’s Level Design, from RPS, who have been looking at level design in their Level With Me series of interviews. Meanwhile Valve will be announcing something Monday morning - probably not Half Life 3.
posted by Artw at 3:34 PM PST - 107 comments

For several months, bitumen from the Athabasca oil sands has been leaching out of the ground near Cold Lake, Alberta, so far amounting to roughly half of the oil leaked in the Enbridge-caused disaster in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Nearby sites of high-pressure steam injection used to extract the bitumen (and which is already associated with violent seismic activity in natural gas fracking operations) are suspected to have caused fractures that push bitumen "sideways" and out to the surface. As Vice reporter Sarah Berman notes, "The oozing leaks will continue until the underground pressure subsides. How long that will take is anybody’s guess." While tons of contaminated vegetation and dead animals have been removed from the sites, access to the region and to government data by First Nation representatives has been repeatedly denied.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 3:09 PM PST - 23 comments

Possibly the best dad in the world, and most irritating husband. Meet Batdad via his vine movies or a youtube compilation.
posted by greenhornet at 2:35 PM PST - 24 comments

'Star Drunk,' a film by drunk people
posted by boo_radley at 1:43 PM PST - 23 comments

And that is why what happened at Maspero was so terrible. A group of Copts determined to take part in public life as free citizens had organised a demonstration to protest against the demolition of a church in Aswan by Salafis acting with the complicity of the regional governor. Before all of the entirely peaceful marchers had arrived at the Maspero building, they were attacked by army units firing live ammunition. Twenty-eight demonstrators were killed, at least two deliberately run over by army vehicles, and 212 others, my daughter’s uncle among them, injured. The message was brutally clear: whatever the supposed ‘revolution’ had meant, the emancipation of the Copts was not part of it as far as the Scaf was concerned. -- In the London Review of Books, Hugh Roberts explores why the Egyptian revolution wasn't.
posted by MartinWisse at 1:17 PM PST - 7 comments

On Wednesday, David Bowie's Facebook page posted an intriguing curio: a trio of videos ostensibly by an obscure '70s soul group known as Milky Edwards & The Chamberlings. The videos show needle-drops of tracks from Starman, a fabulous whole-cloth soul remake of Bowie's seminal 1972 album, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. The only trouble is, the album doesn't (appear to) actually exist. [more inside]
posted by mykescipark at 1:02 PM PST - 60 comments

The comedy troupe Duck's Breath Mystery Theatre started in 1975 when five University of Iowa graduate students hoped to score some free beer. You may have heard Ask Dr. Science (Wikipedia) sketches on All Things Considered. Ask Dr. Science first ran in 1982 (or maybe on New Year's Day 1981) as a project of Duck's Breath members Dan Coffey and Merle Kessler on KQED. [more inside]
posted by knile at 1:01 PM PST - 15 comments

"Each year in the United States, at least 2 million people become infected with bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics and at least 23,000 people die each year as a direct result of these infections. Many more people die from other conditions that were complicated by an antibiotic-resistant infection." This week the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released Antibiotic resistance threats in the United States, 2013, a first-ever snapshot of the burden and threats posed by the antibiotic-resistant germs having the most impact on human health. "If we’re not careful, the medicine chest will be empty when we go there to look for a life-saving antibiotic,” CDC Director Thomas R. Frieden told reporters. Reports in the Washington Post and New York Times. (Also previously.) [more inside]
posted by RedOrGreen at 12:24 PM PST - 30 comments

You Just Threw Out a Perfectly Good Gallon of Milk Because You Think the "Sell By" Date Means Something. Food waste is a huge problem. Globally, one-third of all food produced goes uneaten. In the US, that's up to 40% (pdf report). What can we do to prevent labeling confusion? And the most important question... should you eat it or is it expired?
posted by desjardins at 11:45 AM PST - 135 comments

PayPal locked down the developer’s account, and said it could only have 50% of the funds. The rest would be released as development continued, based on PayPal’s assessment of the situation. PayPal was, essentially, going to become a producer going forward. Crowdfunding's Secret Enemy is PayPal
posted by East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabaddi Champion '94 at 11:37 AM PST - 73 comments

Louis C.K. explains to Conan O'Brien why he hates smartphones. "You need to build an ability to just be yourself and not be doing something. That's what the phones are taking away, is the ability to just sit there. That's being a person." (via)
posted by changeling at 10:57 AM PST - 211 comments

The truth IS out there: British scientists claim to have found proof of alien life
A team of British scientists is convinced it has found proof of alien life, after it harvested strange particles from the edge of space. The scientists sent a balloon 27km into the stratosphere, which came back carrying small biological organisms which they believe can only have originated from space.

'Alien Life' Claim Far From Convincing, Astronomy Experts Say
Isolation of A Diatom Frustule Fragment from the Lower Stratosphere (22-27Km) - Evidence for a Cosmic Origin
posted by andoatnp at 10:25 AM PST - 63 comments

Lois Weber was an important early American film-maker who pushed the boundaries of film-making so she could better tell the stories she wanted to tell. Several of her early silent films are on youtube: Suspense (1913; ~10 minutes) (she directs herself, experiments with the split-screen view and unusual and effective camera angles including shots from above and using the car's side mirror); Hypocrites (1915; ~4 minutes) (featuring dual roles, nudity, and a strong use of techniques like multiple exposures and complex editing - as well as a strong moral message); and Where Are My Children (1916, ~1 hour, 10 minutes) (a complex and controversial film even then about birth control (pro) and abortion (anti)). [more inside]
posted by julen at 10:24 AM PST - 12 comments

A boy makes a violent pact with a wolf in Jeff Le Bars's bloody and beautiful animated short Carn.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 10:04 AM PST - 14 comments

"Every year Playboy releases the ultimate guide to campus life: our infamous party school list. Over the years, it has been brought to our attention that some of our long-standing party picks have a not-so-toast-worthy, rape-ridden side to their campus life. Somewhere in the countless hours we spent tallying up co-eds and scoring beer pong, we lost track of the most essential element of the Playboy lifestyle: sexual pleasure. Rape is kryptonite to sexual pleasure. The two cannot co-exist. For our revised party guide to live up to our founder’s vision, we had to put a new criterion on top. Namely, consent. In other words… A good college party is all about everyone having a good time. Consent is all about everyone having a good time. Rape is only a good time if you’re a rapist. And fuck those people. In our new found light, we proudly present to you Playboy’s 2013 Top Ten Party Commandments, the ultimate guide for a consensual good time." Or did they,

College students across the country conspired to promote consent: the story behind yesterday’s Playboy hoax.
The Inside Story Of The Feminists Who Fooled Us Into Thinking Playboy Cared About Consent

[more inside]
posted by Blasdelb at 8:55 AM PST - 127 comments

Jim Golden takes photos of collections.
posted by griphus at 8:36 AM PST - 13 comments

Residents of the English town of Northampton have been disturbed by the recent appearance of an sinister anonymous clown. Alan Moore is probably not responsible.
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 8:16 AM PST - 113 comments

Artist Toby Allen has created fantastic faces for monsters which many are all too familiar with: Anxiety, Avoidant Personality Disorder, Borderline Personality Disorder, Schizophrenia, Depression, Paranoia, Dissociative Identity Disorder, And Social Anxiety. [via]
posted by quin at 8:15 AM PST - 18 comments

Neural network handwriting generation
posted by gwint at 7:12 AM PST - 35 comments

At the WWE Performance Center in Orlando, wrestlers-in-training (some of whom perform weekly on WWE's "minor league" show, NXT) learn both the art of working within the ring as well as how to cut a promo and improvise in-character. The WWE developmental system has promoted numerous successful young talents to the WWE's main touring roster, most recently Bray Wyatt and the Wyatt Family. Recently, the WWE uploaded a number of "performance evaluations" - promo practice routines by wrestlers in developmental - to Youtube in an account that was meant to be private. Unfortunately, they uploaded them publicly, and before they could close the account to the public, the videos had leaked across wrestling internet fandom. [more inside]
posted by mightygodking at 7:02 AM PST - 24 comments

In the weeks since LoneStarCon 3 (the 71st annual World Science Fiction Convention) took place, videos of just a few events have appeared online: the complete Hugo Awards ceremony; the WSFS business meetings; Brandon Sanderson's video AMA; a clip of a Dalek wandering the exhibition hall. The pocket program listing the schedule of public events offers further insight into what went on. And many attendees have posted their written/recorded personal reactions. A selection of the programmed content itself might be evoked with an old-school smorgasbord of links. [more inside]
posted by Monsieur Caution at 1:40 AM PST - 36 comments

Evolutionary psychologist Peter Gray, writes about why play is an important part of learning, and also key to good mental health. He believes that American kids are over-structured at home and school, with too much focus on adult-directed activities. He also explores the value of play from an evolutionary perspective, in different cultures around the world.
posted by Joh at 9:50 PM PST - 57 comments

Karl Taro Greenfeld wondered if his daughter had too much homework to do... so, for a week, he did all of it with her, for hours each night. "The school year hasn't been extended. Student-teacher ratios don’t seem to have changed much. No, our children are going to catch up with those East Asian kids on their own damn time."
posted by showbiz_liz at 9:31 PM PST - 179 comments

Sally Shoe is a Sally Jessy Raphael audio collage.
posted by escabeche at 8:09 PM PST - 19 comments

The USGS Native Bee Inventory and Monitoring Program designs and develops large and small-scale surveys and identification tools for native bees. A vital aspect of the program is to create accurate and detailed pictures of native bees as well as the plants and insects they interact with. To that end, Sam Droege has curated a collection of more than 1,200 macro photos of insects and posted them to the USGS NBIaMP Flickr collection. You can also browse via sets, if the unfiltered collection is too much to take in at once. This group has also provided a guide to taking macro photographs of insects in a lab setting (PDF).
posted by filthy light thief at 8:00 PM PST - 11 comments

The Lens Is Standard, the Photos Anything But Jerome Delay has been on a quest for simplicity while covering some of the most important stories in Africa for The Associated Press. For the last year he has relied almost exclusively on one camera, and one lens, a 50-millimeter F1.4.
posted by ColdChef at 7:52 PM PST - 39 comments

This is the story of Charlie Rowan, an undistinguished cage-fighter who faked his own death to start his life anew. What could go wrong?
posted by SkylitDrawl at 7:44 PM PST - 15 comments

In the aftermath of one of the strangest political scandals ever to plague the mayor of a major North American city, Rob Ford oversees the unveiling of a high-profile portrait of himself by a sitting councilor, made at the request of Ford's mother. The artist describes the piece as complex, but a lot remains unsaid regarding the weight Ford's personality carries into the realm of portrait.
posted by 256 at 6:32 PM PST - 58 comments

"What am I, USAID? Who cares what he spent it on? If those two dollars (or 10, or 20) magically disappeared from my back pocket, I never would have noticed. Why am I Jay Gatsby when it goes to making me better off, but Ebeneezer Scrooge if it does that for someone else? All that shit about enabling, it's just an excuse for me to keep what I feel is mine."
posted by paleyellowwithorange at 6:29 PM PST - 105 comments

How do you communicate "DANGER!" to the very far future?
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 6:13 PM PST - 65 comments

sad desk lunch "Soon it will be the weekend, the salsa murmured into your ear"
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 5:16 PM PST - 87 comments

How we prioritize federal spending in America... National Priorities Project is a national non-profit, non-partisan research organization dedicated to making complex federal budget information transparent and accessible so people can prioritize and influence how their tax dollars are spent.
posted by pallen123 at 4:52 PM PST - 9 comments

Mental Floss examines the history of the Trapper Keeper, the de rigueur school accessory of the 1980s, on its 35th birthday.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 4:42 PM PST - 63 comments

The Encyclopedia Brown Encyclopedia. Every Encyclopedia Brown mystery, described and analyzed.
posted by kenko at 4:29 PM PST - 17 comments

On June 6, 2013 @BurlCoatFactory started posting on Twitter, apparently on behalf of the Burlington Coat Factory retail chain. The tweets started out reasonably enough, if a bit whimsical. But after a month had gone by things started to get a bit zanier and eventually full on weird. New York Magazine reports that until a few days ago the Burlington Coat Factory website linked directly to the account, but the link has now been removed and the corporation has allegedly disavowed any connection to the account (though said disavowal has apparently also been removed). Jezebel, Mashable, and even Esquire cover the weirdness.
posted by Songdog at 3:59 PM PST - 104 comments

Wonder Woman Faces Sailor Moon In Epic Vogue-Off
posted by Artw at 3:33 PM PST - 23 comments

Six year old Terra dances to Jungle's "Platoon". (slv)
posted by dobbs at 3:03 PM PST - 21 comments

"New Beginnings" (slyt) [more inside]
posted by zarq at 3:02 PM PST - 2 comments

Samuel R. Delany's 1971 film The Orchid is on YouTube. According to K. Leslie Steiner (aka Samuel R. Delany), when it "Primiered [sic] at the World Science Fiction Convention in Chicago that September (Delany himself was not present), it caused a riot. Outraged fans tried to shout the film off and even pulled down the screen." Sci-fi writer Scott Edelman explains why: "Imagine that you're 16 and collapsed in the film room of an early '70s Phil Seuling Comic-Con, dazed from a day storming the dealers room and attending panels. You're with your friends enjoying Star Trek bloopers and installments of old Captain Marvel serials and maybe even Bambi Meets Godzilla ... when all of a sudden you're staring up at Bernie Wrightson's junk!" And he explains how you can get a much better copy of the film, along with a doc about Delany.
posted by goatdog at 1:00 PM PST - 44 comments

Bluedawn (푸른새벽) were a South Korean dreampop band characterized by soaring ethereal vocals, dreamy acoustic melancholy, quietly quixotic melody and softly cascading walls of sound in the vein of Mazzy Star and Hope Sandoval. [more inside]
posted by byanyothername at 12:48 PM PST - 8 comments

"As I thought about that spot, as I considered the mounting reports of suicides, homeless vets, col­lapsing families, I began to get the uneasy feeling that PTSD is a lot like autism: A thing identified, but poorly understood. I read about the supposed symptoms, the heightened alertness, the re-experiencing of specific trauma, the going numb. It was all true. Up to a point." -- Writer and veteran Myke Cole writes about post traumatic stress disorder and how it's portrayed in the media.
posted by MartinWisse at 12:22 PM PST - 25 comments

"These discussions are thoughtful and measured, but the premise that frames them all is shaky; Lessig doesn't offer much proof that a Soviet-style loss of privacy and freedom is on its way. … Unlike actual law, Internet software has no capacity to punish. It doesn't affect people who aren't online (and only a tiny minority of the world population is). And if you don't like the Internet's system, you can always flip off the modem." — David Pogue is the creator of the ''Missing Manual'' series, which will include guides to Mac OS 9, Outlook Express and Windows 2000.
posted by Nomyte at 12:16 PM PST - 39 comments

Zero Hours - For a workshop on future London, Arup, Social Life, Re.Work, Commonplace, Tim Maughan and Nesta created 10 Future Londoners for the year 2023. This one describes the working day of 19 year old Nicki, a zero hours retail contractor.
posted by The Whelk at 12:15 PM PST - 20 comments

Salva Lopez is a Barcelona-based photographer whose work shows Barcelona and its surroundings with a cool melancholy. Flickr stream here.
posted by klangklangston at 11:41 AM PST - 5 comments

Command and Control is a new book by Eric Schlosser about nuclear weapons mishaps, with a focus on the Damascus Accident. You can read an excerpt at Mother Jones, an op-ed adapted from the text at Politico, or a different op-ed at The Guardian. The book has been positively reviewed by The New York Times and Publishers Weekly. Schlosser has been interviewed by Steve Roberts on The Diane Rehm Show, Amy Goodman, Michael Mechanic at Mother Jones, and Ryan Devereaux at Rolling Stone.
posted by Going To Maine at 10:55 AM PST - 66 comments

The Go Go's bill themselves as "The Most Successful all female rock band of all time." Unfortunately, they've had some bumps in the road recently when bassist Kathy Valentine filed a lawsuit against the rest of the band. There is analysis and a band rebuttal. The Go Go's also had a controversial party video come to light within the past few years (NSFW) And, what happened to Jane Weidlin?
posted by josher71 at 10:11 AM PST - 47 comments

What should you know about the newly released iOS 7: How to find Spotlight search (aka swipe right to search), a few tricks you should know, 12 new and hidden settings, a ridiculously thorough review, an exhaustive list of the new features and reasons why should and shouldn't update right now.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 9:51 AM PST - 233 comments

Inexplicably bad property photographs. It's that simple. It's Terrible Real Estate Photos.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 9:49 AM PST - 36 comments

The setting is simple, austere. The workspace occupied by the desk is small. I am impressed not only by the simplicity of the furniture, but also by the objects in the room. There are only a few. [more inside]
posted by lattiboy at 9:46 AM PST - 76 comments

Need to argue with your crazy uncle about what the Founders really intended? Or maybe you're wondering what an 18th Century AskMe might have looked like. The National Archives has launched Founders Online, a searchable collection of over 100,000 annotated and transcribed documents including letters, speeches, diaries and more from the collected papers of George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams and family, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison.
posted by HonoriaGlossop at 9:15 AM PST - 23 comments

Thirteen years ago, about to enter fourth grade, Cheng Cheng was approached by her mother. “I’m not your real mother. I’m just providing for your education up until you finish university. After that, don’t count on my help anymore." [more inside]
posted by 2N2222 at 8:59 AM PST - 54 comments

Back in the days when diskettes were literally floppy and storage was measured in Ks and Ms rather than Gs and Ts, any geek worth the name read Byte Magazine. Its founder, Wayne Green, passed away last week on Friday the 13th, at age 91.
posted by still_wears_a_hat at 8:17 AM PST - 40 comments

As the sun sinks slowly into Mayfair and the stars come out over Centre Point, the funster’s thoughts turn inexorably towards the bright lights and rundown neon of that square half-mile known as Soho, sin city nestling like a soiled Kleenex in the bosom of our great metropolis Soho 1983: A Girl's Guide To Peep Shows, Topless Bars & Nude Encounters
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 7:57 AM PST - 5 comments

As Durham clinch the 2013 County Championship at their home ground, captain Paul Collingwood can reflect on success at club and country level, especially this season. For England he's scored more than a few runs against Australia and other sides, and has notched up 10 centuries, 20 fifties and 96 catches in test matches (the long form of the game) alone, in addition to a spot of wicket keeping. He's also captained England to their only global cricket tournament victory. But Paul is most well-known for his catching... [more inside]
posted by Wordshore at 6:50 AM PST - 5 comments

I Am An Object Of Internet Ridicule, Ask Me Anything.
posted by naju at 6:24 AM PST - 351 comments

Bill Nye on Dancing with the Stars. Perhaps the first time Dancing with the Stars has produced something truly delightful.

What can ballroom dance teach us about science? Is there any crossover there? Many people ask me this. My response is ‘Are you KIDDING?!’ First of all, just watching it, it’s all forces and torques, conservation of momentum. You’ve seen [if an] ice skater has her arms out, she pulls ‘em in, she spins faster. That’s not magic. That’s physics, or study of motion. And then, the other thing, for me, in biology,—we humans respond to music, respond to this timing and beats. Richard Feynman—I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of him—famous Nobel Laureate, after whom the Feynman diagram is named…Anyway, he used to have contests with people about keeping time [like] a clock. And most of us are actually pretty good at it. And so there’s something really deep within us that way.

posted by ocherdraco at 6:04 AM PST - 27 comments

Eater.com breaks down Wired's new food issue, which includes David Chang's essay called "The Joy of Cooking With Science"; Alton Brown on the science behind real-tasting fake chicken, and a piece on umami (recently on AskMeFi).
posted by Room 641-A at 11:07 PM PST - 18 comments

Three years ago, we resolved to fly an R/C airplane from an R/C aircraft carrier [more inside]
posted by Confess, Fletch at 9:47 PM PST - 39 comments

The definitive difference between Funny and LOL [Warning: dataviz]
posted by gwint at 9:07 PM PST - 22 comments

Will it fly? The Joint Strike Fighter is the most expensive weapons system ever developed. It is plagued by design flaws and cost overruns. It flies only in good weather. The computers that run it lack the software they need for combat. No one can say for certain when the plane will work as advertised. This Vanity Fair article investigates.
posted by wilful at 9:04 PM PST - 77 comments

Australia in 2013. We have forgotten our origins and our good fortune, we are blind to our own selfishness. In place of memory we cling to a national myth of a generous, welcoming country, a land of new arrivals where everyone gets a fair go; a myth in which vanity fills the emptiness where the truth was forgotten. -- Julian Burnside writes on refugee policy and alienation in Australia [more inside]
posted by deadwax at 8:13 PM PST - 21 comments

NSA mathematician Roger Barkan's take on NSA survellance of Americans. "As someone deep in the trenches of NSA, where I work on a daily basis with data acquired from these programs, I, too, feel compelled to raise my voice. Do I, as an American, have any concerns about whether the NSA is illegally or surreptitiously targeting or tracking the communications of other Americans? The answer is emphatically, "No."
posted by markkraft at 7:08 PM PST - 190 comments

If you've been tracking gloomy music from witch house sounds to doomy black metal stuff, you might have heard the name Chelsea Wolfe, who contributed to a hazy Halloween-all-year sounding 2-Pac/Notorious B.I.G. mixtape thing and covered Black Spell of Destruction, which was originally by Burzum. There was also her cover of The Modern Age, from the tribute compilation to The Strokes Is This It (prev). Then there are her two past albums: first The Grime And The Glow, which employed lo-fi 8-track tape hiss to add a haunted ambiance, then Apokalypsis, "moody drone-folk" likened to the sounds of PJ Harvey and Scout Niblett. If that catches your interest, great. But may I suggest skip ahead to the current album, Pain is Beauty, "emotionally exhausting in equally mad and enjoyable ways," in which the "permanent Halloween costume" of prior albums is cast aside, and "we get a better sense of her talent and spirit."
posted by filthy light thief at 6:37 PM PST - 12 comments

The poet Cassandra Gillig mashes up recordings of poets reading their work with the instrumental tracks from contemporary pop songs. She doesn't do this to be "even remotely irreverent," but rather because she believes "pop music has a way of capturing our emotions in their most palatable form & placing pop songs behind poems can guide us incorrectly or correctly but I’m hoping I’m going in a correct direction." Listen: Dylan Thomas with Miley Cyrus, Sylvia Plath with Rihanna and Eminem, Alice Notley with Justin Timberlake, Frank O'Hara with Drake, Hannah Weiner with Beyonce, William Carlos Williams with Wale, Dana Ward with Katy Perry, Dorothea Lasky with Raekwon, Ted Berrigan with Kendrick Lamar, and Richard Brautigan with Mariah Carey.
posted by raisindebt at 6:31 PM PST - 9 comments

"So why might a guy want to go on the lam? [The author of How To Disappear Completely and Never Be Found] lists three categories: legal, financial and psychological. He missed one. Scepticism: a cynical itch to find out whether the advice is sound and, if so, whether it's still relevant almost 30 years after it was published. Which is how I came to be...a 'lamster'." [more inside]
posted by paleyellowwithorange at 6:26 PM PST - 21 comments

We've seen the Stasi Fashion, but how about the Stasi camera technology & wireless bugs? High resolution photographs from the Stasi Museum.
posted by thewalrus at 6:24 PM PST - 6 comments

This is why we videogaming!
posted by Sebmojo at 4:07 PM PST - 98 comments

Lawyers need bartenders more than bartenders need lawyers. When it comes to cocktails and the names they’re given, a recipe can’t be copyrighted and a name isn’t usually trademarked, and there’s no governing body, no law of the liquor land that stops the duplication of a recipe or a cocktail name. Which makes cocktail naming—shall we call it mixonymics?—special among naming practices in the modern world: It’s the bartender tribe, not the law, that defines prior art.

"Swizzle Me This," Michael Erard, The Morning News (single link)
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 3:44 PM PST - 20 comments

Why “Racists React To [thing]” posts are just passive white supremacy.
posted by Artw at 3:16 PM PST - 129 comments

Earlier this year, Rainbow Rowell's second novel Eleanor and Park was published to great acclaim. Unfortunately, some parents in the Anoka-Hennepin School District do not share the high opinions of the book. [more inside]
posted by pxe2000 at 1:02 PM PST - 79 comments

In a “third-world” city, a self-styled tour guide might be tipped in return for leading a group of sightseers. In Italy, a Neapolitan street urchin might offer to protect a parked car in return for a gratuity.

In both cases, the inference is clear: if you don’t employ me, I will hurt you. This thinly veiled extortion is the subtext to much tipping: if the propertied individual doesn’t comply with the demands of the semi-employed, something terrible might happen to them or their things. So tipping began essentially as a way to stave off violence by the indigent, forgotten people; it is a social contract adhered to by the privileged class who fear and disdain the less fortunate and are aware of the failure of their own class to create equity.
posted by four panels at 12:52 PM PST - 41 comments

Top Secret: Images from the Stasi Archives A collection of images from the book, including more disguises, images of house searches, hand-to-hand combat techniques, hidden cameras, and even fake beards, is available free of charge at Simon Menner’s website. [more inside]
posted by KokuRyu at 12:11 PM PST - 26 comments

Meet the overwhelmed psychiatrist in the world’s happiest country (via)
posted by spamandkimchi at 11:44 AM PST - 4 comments

During the communist coup and Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1978-1979, thousands of Afghan people disappeared. It was always suspected that most of these people had been murdered, but for many victims this couldn't be proved, which left their family in uncertainty for decades. A war crimes investigation by the International Crimes Unit of the Dutch police however turned up evidence that will end some of this uncertainty. This evidence, in the form of transport orders and death lists for some 5,000 victims has now been put online by the Dutch ministry of justice.
posted by MartinWisse at 11:36 AM PST - 9 comments

As the Cygnus cargo spacecraft makes its initial demostration flight to the International Space Station, the question arises, what is the ISS for?
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 9:44 AM PST - 108 comments

"Duquesne has claimed that the unionization of adjuncts like Margaret Mary would somehow interfere with its mission to inculcate Catholic values among its students." - Daniel Kovalik
posted by jeffburdges at 9:32 AM PST - 114 comments

Someone strapped a camera to an Eagle. The results are just about as awesome as you'd expect.
posted by jacobian at 9:12 AM PST - 59 comments

France's upper house of parliament, the Sénat has passed a women's equality bill, which aims to redress some of the persistent inequalities between men and women, in the sphere of pay, jobs and parental leave. [more inside]
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 9:11 AM PST - 38 comments

Writing advice from Oates, Wolfe, Levine, Pynchon, Stein, Welty, DeLillo, Chekhov, Gallant, and Elkin; Baldwin, Miller, Morrison, Vonnegut, Atwood, Nabokov, and Stein again; Maugham, Hughes, Duras, Orwell, Ashbery, Sontag, Creeley, and Steinbeck; O'Connor, Baxter, Didion, Yeats, Hejinian, Cocteau, du Plessix Gray, and Bolaño; Waldrop, Cary, Pessoa, Amis, Carroll, Atwood, and Le Guin; Vinge, Williams, Crane, Creeley once more, Gallant, Vargas Llosa, Mathews, and Wolfe again. [more inside]
posted by Iridic at 9:03 AM PST - 33 comments

Mostly digital collages made from images found here/there on the internet, a lot taken from northern and early renaissance paintings.
posted by Tom-B at 8:38 AM PST - 9 comments

In 1986, an episode public-access TV show Forestville Rocks began with these words: "Butch Willis has moved into the most selective rock n roll territory, that of the inspirational primitive. Guided by neither the commercial concerns of mainstream pop nor the calculated artsiness of new wave nor the hip rage of punk, Willis stands quite alone; undaunted, he dreams the rock n roll dream..." [more inside]
posted by Potomac Avenue at 8:33 AM PST - 11 comments

The Geometric Artwork of Andy Gilmore [more inside]
posted by moonmilk at 7:47 AM PST - 4 comments

Introverted teenage girl gets superpowers- it's been done to death, right? Never quite like this. Worm is a web serial updating twice a week since mid-2011 that follows Taylor, a would-be superhero in a crapsack world with the ability to control insects and a truly frightening creativity with that power. Things escalate quickly. Morality is gray. Survival seems increasingly unlikely. [more inside]
posted by Wretch729 at 7:12 AM PST - 52 comments

Portrait of a Ten-Year-Old Canadian Girl
posted by zarq at 7:01 AM PST - 10 comments

Before we go any further, I just want to point out that this bear is literally 75% off. I mean, unless you have the body of the headless bear in the back.
posted by still_wears_a_hat at 6:17 AM PST - 77 comments

Boswell's head started to swim. He had been struggling to bowl to left-handers. Suddenly [the batsman] "looked as though he was 50 yards away. He was like a tiny dot. I just couldn't see him. Then I bowled a wide and I heard the noise of the crowd. I bowled a second wide, and the noise got louder and louder and louder." His muscles grew tight. His fingers grew tense. He began to sweat.

On the first day of September 2001, promising young fast bowler Scott Boswell came in to bowl for Leicestershire in the final of the C & G one-day cricket tournament against Somerset. A few minutes later, Boswell had given rise to a dark cricketing legend, TV footage that would eventually become one of the most watched cricket clips on Youtube, and his professional career was effectively over. In his first interview since that day, Boswell talks to Andy Bull about what happens after a bowler gets the yips.
posted by Sonny Jim at 6:07 AM PST - 28 comments

Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz believes that guns "should not be part of the Starbucks experience." CEO Schultz told CNN that the company is simply making a request "through the lens of civility and respect."
posted by pallen123 at 5:58 AM PST - 580 comments

Revelations in the field of quantum physics have resulted in the discovery of the Amplituhedron, a jewel-like higher dimensional object whose volume elegantly predicts fundamental physical processes that took the brilliant Dr. Richard Feynman hundreds of pages of abstruse mathematics to describe. The theoretical manifold not only enables simple pen-and-paper calculation of physics that would normally require supercomputers to work out, but also challenges basic assumptions about the nature of reality -- forgoing the core concepts of locality and unitarity and suggesting that space and time are merely emergent properties of a timeless, infinitely-sided "master amplituhedron," whose geometry represents the sum total of all physical interactions. More: The 152-page source paper on arXiv [PDF] - Lead author Nima Arkani-Hamed's hour-long lecture at SUSY 2013 - Scans of Arkani-Hamed's handwritten lecture notes - A far more detailed lecture series "Scattering Without Space Time": one, two, three - Arkani-Hamed previously on MeFi - A hot-off-the-presses Wikipedia page (watch this space)
posted by Rhaomi at 2:18 AM PST - 126 comments

Japanese baseball's single-season home run record has been broken. Set by the legendary Sadaharu Oh (still holder of the world career home run record) in 1964, it stood for 49 years. In recent years, several players had come close to breaking it... only to be walked for the rest of the season, by teams managed by Oh himself. The record was broken by Wladimir Balentien, who's from Curaçao -- an island familiar to baseball fans partly for its oddball names which combine Dutch, Papiamentu, and other influences. In affectionate tribute, Notgraphs published this guide to figuring out your Curaçaoan name.
posted by LobsterMitten at 12:36 AM PST - 31 comments

Bryan Schutmaat takes photographs of the American West, Heartland, and rural America.
posted by klangklangston at 10:40 PM PST - 11 comments

Tim Blais, a physics graduate student at McGill University, performs an a-capella version of his masters thesis to the tune of Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody. [more inside]
posted by yuwtze at 10:03 PM PST - 19 comments

What is the fashion known as techninja? The basis is the high-tech materials popular with hikers, bikers, and climbers, but worn as street wear. It takes inspiration from a military aesthetic, from science fiction (NSFW), and Goth Ninja. Want to know more? Here's a guide (2, 3, 4, 5), and here's some inspiration (pinterest, tumbler, 2). [more inside]
posted by rebent at 8:02 PM PST - 99 comments

Revolutions is a new weekly podcast by Mike Duncan, who is best known for the History of Rome podcast, though he also writes comics. There are two episodes so far of Revolutions, a short introduction to the series and one on Charles Stuart, king of England.
posted by Kattullus at 6:32 PM PST - 34 comments

"Over the years, napping has gotten a bad rap, becoming a sign of laziness or weakness, especially during the workday. Yet, according to a growing body of scientific research, napping can actually be a very good and very smart thing to do. How so? Napping can help refresh the mind, make you more creative, boost your intelligence, and even help you live a longer, healthier life. Studies over the past decade have confirmed all of this and more, and napping is slowly gaining acceptance as a part of a healthy lifestyle, even in some corporate offices. Whether you're ready to jump on the nap-happy bandwagon or just learn more about the research being done on the practice, read on as we share the science behind the need to nap, interesting research into napping, and a scientist-approved method for taking the ideal nap."
posted by paleyellowwithorange at 6:23 PM PST - 58 comments

But, we can still dream
posted by jcworth at 6:23 PM PST - 22 comments

Finnish jazz pianist + beat boxer + guitarist = Iiro Rantala's Shit Catapault. Equal parts hilarious, bouncy, groovy, and unexpectedly moving.
posted by Rory Marinich at 5:32 PM PST - 17 comments

Some Ohio State students found that behind a locked door in their basement...was a random dude they didn't know was living in their house.
posted by Tesseractive at 5:08 PM PST - 84 comments

Eiji Toyoda, architect of the “lean manufacturing” method helped turned the automaker Toyota, into a global powerhouse and changed the face of modern manufacturing. 'In almost six decades with the company he helped transform a tiny spinoff of a textile loom maker into the world’s biggest automaker. Early on, he helped put Toyota at the forefront of a wave of automobile production in Japan, pushing it to bolster its lineup, first by adding compact vehicles and sports cars in the 1960s and 1970s. In the 1980s he initiated the development of luxury models to compete with the likes of Mercedes-Benz and BMW, culminating with the Lexus brand in 1989.' [more inside]
posted by VikingSword at 4:02 PM PST - 43 comments

It was Ben who introduced me to A Course In Miracles. He was part of a self-help group that ran workshops based on a couple of popular New Age spiritual philosophies. Ben credited this group with his ongoing recovery from a mysterious undiagnosed chronic pain and illness, and he encouraged me to embrace it as a cure for whatever it was that caused me to spend so many of my days unable to get out of bed.

"Failing a Course in Miracles," Anne Ouellette, The Toast
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 3:27 PM PST - 17 comments

‘Mad Men’s’ Split Season 7: You’re Killing Me, AMC
posted by crossoverman at 3:19 PM PST - 97 comments

"In the early days of human flight, a new word entered our lexicon: "aviatrix," the female version of "aviator." These women were true pioneers, although if you asked them, they would probably tell you they were just adventurous and loved flying -same as the men who took to the air in those days." Mentalfloss profiles seven women from the first decades of airplanes. If you'd like more tales of adventure and daring, the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum website has a section on women in aviation, as does the San Diego Air and Space Museum (related Flickr gallery). [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 2:50 PM PST - 9 comments

How, against all odds, Time Bandits got made. Somehow in the face of a universe that seems dead set against it Terry Gilliam continues making movies today, the latest being Zero Theorem.
posted by Artw at 1:55 PM PST - 75 comments

Once upon a time, typographical practice was anarchy. Printers put in all sizes of spaces in haphazard ways, including after periods. Then, a standard emerged: the single space after a period. Unfortunately, the evil typewriter came along, and for some unknown reason, people began to put wider double spaces after periods. Typographers railed against the practice, but they could do nothing. [more inside]
posted by XMLicious at 12:59 PM PST - 101 comments

"She mentioned the East Coast dealer by name and said, 'He's—is he my dealer?'" In The Lies of the Artists, art writer Jen Graves explores the lies artists tell to sell their work.
posted by chrchr at 12:47 PM PST - 27 comments

Oscar Wilde And Walt Whitman Totally Did It (The Sex).
posted by The Whelk at 12:44 PM PST - 79 comments

Why Do Baseball Players Still Bunt So Damn Much?
It’s the most maddening and demonstrably ineffective strategy in baseball and has been for quite some time. So why do teams keep doing it?
posted by andoatnp at 12:40 PM PST - 61 comments

Artist Juan Ortiz has gone back to all eighty episodes of the original Star Trek series and created retro posters/book covers for each of them. He naturally has a full color book available for purchase, but you can also browse through them on his tumblr, which also contains posters for all twenty-two episodes of the animated series.
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 12:17 PM PST - 6 comments

Dreamspace is an animated cyberpunk comic-presented-as-visual-novel/adventure-game by artist Cryoclaire (potentially NSFW; artistic nudity) about networked psychedelics, consciousness expansion through underground social networks and gorgeous trippy neon GUIs. Like most cyberpunk fiction, the characters are all sunny, cheerful personalities, everyone has a good time and absolutely no one winds up crippled, dead or insane by the end.
posted by byanyothername at 11:37 AM PST - 14 comments

How to Empty a Swimming Pool (SLYT)
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 11:22 AM PST - 59 comments

Who's a 'journalist'? People who can afford to be- and absolutely not Julian Assange. A US Senate panel has approved legislation to protect journalists from having to reveal their confidential sources. The proposed law defines 'journalism' by profession, and not by practice- shutting out citizen journalists while protecting corporate media.
posted by anemone of the state at 11:10 AM PST - 92 comments

A judge in the UK has ruled that a Muslim woman can stand trial wearing the niqab, but must remove it when giving evidence. Following the ruling Shami Chakrabarti, Director of Liberty, praised the judge for his "sensitivity and clarity", while Keith Porteous Wood, executive director of the National Secular Society condemned the decision, saying "We will be complaining to the Office of Judicial Complaints and...asking senior legal officers to make visibility throughout court hearings mandatory". [more inside]
posted by billiebee at 10:44 AM PST - 26 comments

Jackson Landers tells a brief story about getting bit by a black widow
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 10:17 AM PST - 195 comments

The first-ever Miss Uzbekistan is one of 110 pageant queen hopefuls in the 63rd Miss World Competition. The only problem? Apparently, nobody in Uzbekistan seems to know how 18-year-old Rakhima Ganieva won her crown. [more inside]
posted by Ruthless Bunny at 9:59 AM PST - 34 comments

Many African-American and mixed race babies offered for adoption are finding new homes in Europe and outside of the US. (SLCNN)
posted by tafetta, darling! at 9:18 AM PST - 24 comments

Why Generation Y Yuppies Are Unhappy - A short essay on happiness, reality, frustration, and generational expectations.
posted by Argyle at 8:50 AM PST - 297 comments

Citi Bike BMX [slyt]
posted by functionequalsform at 8:42 AM PST - 15 comments

"Me and the boys played a bit of a joke on our mate Russ. Kegs of beer have been plumbed into every tap in the house, with loads of cameras to catch the action. Took us all day to set up but it was worth it when the icy cool beer came pouring out." (SLYT)
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 7:41 AM PST - 65 comments

"2013 has brought an unprecedented wave of new late night shows, some more formally innovative than others. But years before The Colbert Report, another topical show occupied its coveted post-Daily Show spot. A mix of the roundtable debates of Politically Incorrect and the unpredictability of live standup, Tough Crowd with Colin Quinn was possibly the purest form of comedy ever on television."
posted by Potomac Avenue at 7:22 AM PST - 52 comments

Ginger Cat versus The Paper Army [slyt | cute | via]
posted by quin at 6:43 AM PST - 17 comments

Takayo Kiyota turns rolled sushi into another kind of art. When cut, what looks at first like lumps of rice covered in seaweed becomes faces, fetuses (in different stages of development, depending on where you cut the roll), and iPhones . Also, blue poop with flies. The artist's page (in Japanese). [some sushi-rice based nudity, which is a sentence I never thought I would write].
posted by blahblahblah at 6:29 AM PST - 9 comments

The Book Globe has mapped the settings of all the 267 novels nominated for the Booker Prize since 1969.
posted by MartinWisse at 5:55 AM PST - 21 comments

World map divided into 665 equally populated districts
posted by allen.spaulding at 10:08 PM PST - 64 comments

Kevin O'Connor, co-founder of DoubleClick and current CEO of FindTheBest files a RICO lawsuit against Lumen View for trying to extort, via patent claims, money from FindTheBest, not to mention claiming that calling someone a "patent troll" is a "hate crime".
posted by juiceCake at 8:21 PM PST - 37 comments

Linda Ronstadt was diagnosed 9 months ago with Parkinson's and, according to Linda, she "can't sing a note". Linda sang her last concert in 2009, her voice reflecting the impact of the disease. It's hard to pick out a favorite, there are just so many fantastic hits, especially considering that Linda suffered from stage fright, but...I'll leave you with this simple tune, Someone to Watch Over Me. Previously on Metafilter.
posted by HuronBob at 7:44 PM PST - 66 comments

"A perfect little stoner play put on by three adorable children." [more inside]
posted by Sebmojo at 6:21 PM PST - 27 comments

Google knows almost every wi-fi password. Of course this means that the NSA also has access to them. Apple might not be much better.
posted by blue shadows at 6:20 PM PST - 96 comments

In 2012, 32 year old Jeremiah McDonald uploaded to YouTube 'A Conversation with my 12 Year Old Self'. Before long, the quirky and somewhat heartwarming video had been viewed over 10 million times. MetaFilter discussed it here. Here's a follow-up video, in which McDonald discusses the genesis and evolution of the idea: "Making Of" A Conversation With My 12 Year Old Self: Needlessly Self-Indulgent Edition
posted by paleyellowwithorange at 6:16 PM PST - 4 comments

Welcome to Fear City: A Survival Guide for Visitors to the City of New York (ca. 1975).
posted by griphus at 5:23 PM PST - 54 comments

A Young Man's Adventures in Women's Publishing (SLNew Yorker, previously)
posted by box at 4:34 PM PST - 60 comments

Fusion at Lockheed's Skunkworks lab [more inside]
posted by sammyo at 4:09 PM PST - 65 comments

And even worse, it seemed that the harder I tried to be sentimental and lovey-dovey, the less it was reciprocated. "But eventually it became clear. Through giving, through doing things for my wife, the emotion that I had been so desperately seeking naturally came about. It wasn't something I could force, just something that would come about as a result of my giving." (SLHuffPo)
posted by Kitteh at 3:19 PM PST - 64 comments

If you truly would like to hear this story, first of all you will probably want to find out where I was born, how I spent my stupid childhood, what my parents did before my birth—in a word, all that David Copperfield rot. But truthfully speaking, I don’t have any urge to delve into that. "If Holden Caulfield Spoke Russian" (SLNYer)
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 2:51 PM PST - 15 comments

National Public Radio produced at least two short runs of sci-fi radio dramas in the relatively recent past. The first of these two was Sci-Fi Radio, which was was produced out of Commerce, Texas, and broadcast on NPR in 1989-90. The producers drew their inspiration from some of the best stories from some of the best science fiction authors of the 20th century, including Ray Bradbury, Roger Zelazny, Henry Kuttner, and Poul Anderson. You can read more here on the Old Time Radio Plot Spot, or listen to the series on the Times Past Old Time Radio blog (also on Archive.org). A decade later, NPR revisited the format with 2000X: Tales of the Next Millennia, for which they won a a 2001 Bradbury Award. The official site is no longer online, but Archive.org captured Yuri Rasovsky's site for the series. Rasovsky shared two of those broadcasts and talked about his work in radio with Radio Drama Revival, and you can listen to the rest, as recorded from radio and grouped in an unsorted jumble (with duplicates), thanks to the very generous OTR Sounds.
posted by filthy light thief at 2:45 PM PST - 7 comments

...pretty much everything you need to know [on personal finance] on a 4x6 index card.
posted by latkes at 1:26 PM PST - 117 comments

"Today I would probably describe Archipelago as a group blog. It was a computer-based system that allowed about a dozen members to regularly post short essays and whimsical observations. Each member had his or her own icon which appeared next to timestamped postings which contained pictures, sounds, and hyperlinks. All pretty standard except for one thing: the year was 1988." The archives of Archipelago show a glimmer of what the social web was to become over the next two decades. [more inside]
posted by codacorolla at 1:08 PM PST - 13 comments

Factory Farm Map - find a factory farm near you.
posted by four panels at 12:11 PM PST - 17 comments

It is Goat Week over at Modern Farmer! Come for the live GoatCam, stay for the goat taxonomy, rules for raising a goat in the city, and a story about the effort to make goats that produced spider silk (previously).
posted by Cash4Lead at 12:00 PM PST - 33 comments

Nature covers a brane based theory of cosmological creation... Is the universe a 3D brane created from a 4D star collapsing into a black hole? [more inside]
posted by Samizdata at 11:21 AM PST - 107 comments

10 Fascinating Photos That Look Unbelievably Like Paintings.
posted by The Girl Who Ate Boston at 9:36 AM PST - 40 comments

The Butterball turkey hotline is seeking to hire its first male spokesperson/operators.
posted by Diablevert at 9:35 AM PST - 35 comments

The first online shopping transaction took place from a Gateshead living-room in 1984, sixteen years before Tesco fully launched the web version of their stores. It didn't take place on a BBC Micro or an Acorn, but through Videotex, a service better known by the Francophone world as Minitel (previously).
posted by mippy at 9:02 AM PST - 13 comments

Streaming video of local DC news as an active shooter situation is ongoing. There are 10 victims mentioned so far at least two police officers are involved. DCist broke the story before any local news stations did. [more inside]
posted by SuzySmith at 7:11 AM PST - 493 comments

Mexican artist Pedro Reyes newest project "Disarm" consists of robotic musical instruments made out of dismantled firearms which were confiscated by the authorities. It is a follow-up to his previous piece "Imagine". [via]
posted by quin at 6:42 AM PST - 2 comments

The cruise liner Costa Concordia is finally being raised (live footage) at a cost of more than $500m, in a delicate refloating procedure. Grounded since the 13th January 2012, when it ran aground at the Island of Giglio at the cost of 32 lives, the Costa Concordia will take 10-12 hours to be refloated, several more months to be prepared for towing and then taken off for scrap. [more inside]
posted by MuffinMan at 6:05 AM PST - 41 comments

Question: Can you explain in one sentence or less [laughter] well you know what I mean, can you say why the Newsroom is the best show on Television? [SLFOD]
posted by Potomac Avenue at 4:38 AM PST - 85 comments

Explain Shell is a nifty little website created by Idan Kamara that takes the often horrid Linux command line man pages and makes them that much easier to understand, by breaking down a command like ssh(1) -i keyfile -f -N -L 1234:www.google.com:80 host into its component steps.
posted by MartinWisse at 2:41 AM PST - 64 comments

Taxonomy: The spy who loved frogs. "To track the fate of threatened species, a young scientist must follow the jungle path of a herpetologist who led a secret double life." [Via]
posted by homunculus at 12:40 AM PST - 8 comments

"Like nailing jelly to kittens." - Unloved, hugely delayed and plagued by bugs, GTA almost didn't see the light of day. This is the story of how a small team of developers at DMA Design saw their vision through and kickstarted a gaming revolution.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 11:49 PM PST - 24 comments

A desire path … can be a path created as a consequence of foot or bicycle traffic. The path usually represents the shortest or most easily navigated route between an origin and destination. The width of the path and its erosion are indicators of the amount of use the path receives. Desire paths emerge as shortcuts where constructed ways take a circuitous route, or have gaps, or are lacking entirely. [more inside]
posted by Deathalicious at 10:47 PM PST - 42 comments

Photographer and historian of the New York Press Photographers Association Marc Hermann searched the New York Daily News archive to find historic NYC crime scenes, and superimposed them on photographs of the same locations today. [more inside]
posted by cairdeas at 8:04 PM PST - 8 comments

Choi Xoo Ang , M.F.A.,sculptor. His (potentially shocking) 2010 gallery exhibition. [NSFW]

If visualizing an angel wing comprised of human hands doesn't turn you off (here), then larger and potentially disturbing gallery photos are here andhere. Many more (some repeats, some slow to display) are here and here. The latter includes some critical commentary. Christies has sold his work. [more inside]
posted by davidpriest.ca at 7:34 PM PST - 11 comments

In an unusually enlightening ninety-minute panel, the cast of Breaking Bad – including show creator Vince Gilligan – discuss the process of making the show, of bringing it to an end, and of coping with its aftermath. Towards the end, Gilligan spoke fondly of show director Rian Johnson, known for his work on films like Brick and Looper. Johnson had previously directed Breaking Bad's most controversial episode, Fly, which critic Alan Sepinwall called the best bottle episode in TV history. Gilligan took his praise a step further: "[Rian directed] what may be the best episode we've ever done." [approx 1:27:30] He was referring, not to Fly, but to Ozymandias, the show's third-to-last episode, and the inspiration for this previous post. Ozymandias, which aired tonight, was accompanied by [SPOILER LINKS FROM THIS POINT FURTHER] livetweets from Aaron Paul, who plays Jesse Pinkman, and provoked immediate visceral reactions from critics and fans alike.
posted by Rory Marinich at 7:27 PM PST - 864 comments

Matthew Shepard's murder in 1998 became a symbol of hate crime that helped to drive anti-hate crime legislation. But "what if nearly everything you thought you knew about Matthew Shepard’s murder was wrong?" [more inside]
posted by Athanassiel at 6:24 PM PST - 67 comments

The Three Versions of Mozart's Exsultate, jubilate. "Obviously, the 16-year old Mozart was not conversant with all of the theological ramifications of the Milano text when he created the music for Exsultate. Nonetheless, he wrote music which illuminated and even enhanced the spirituality of the text. How a sixteen-year old could create music of the beauty and elegance of this piece is difficult enough to comprehend. That he could match the music so perfectly to the text, playfully enhancing and amplifying its meaning, is mind-boggling, and a clear augury of the genius to be presented to the world in later years in such works as Le Nozze di Figaro, where the perfect matching of music with text is acknowledged by many musicologists today as virtual perfection." [more inside]
posted by paleyellowwithorange at 6:14 PM PST - 8 comments

The Free Press investigates the causes of the Detroit bankruptcy. From 13th checks to Kwame's gamble, the story of Detroit's bankruptcy is surprising and often counter-intuitive.
posted by klangklangston at 5:19 PM PST - 60 comments

Calvin & Muad'Dib
posted by zarq at 4:49 PM PST - 47 comments

These aerial shots of factory farms look like bloody zombie wounds
posted by Sebmojo at 2:38 PM PST - 37 comments

‘Beauty is in the eye of the beer holder’: People who think they are drunk also think they are attractive (full-text PDF) is a study that just won the IgNobel Prize for Psychology. Previously, bar-hopping researchers had demonstrated (paywalls, abstracts only) that the "beer goggles" effect affected men and women equally, could last as long as 24 h (for men rating women) and was not selective for opposite-sex faces, that the reduced ability of inebriated people to perceive asymmetry was a potential culprit, that beer goggles were no excuse for having sex with minors because even heavy alcohol consumption does not interfere with age-perception, and even that the effect did not exist at all.
posted by elgilito at 1:20 PM PST - 23 comments

Fifty years ago this morning, Addie Mae Collins (age 14), Denise McNair (age 11), Carole Robertson (age 14), and Cynthia Wesley (age 14) lost their lives when a bomb set by the KKK went off in the basement of their church in Montgomery, Alabama. [more inside]
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 12:45 PM PST - 22 comments

W. Kamau Bell Is Trying To Become A Thing
A few years ago, sick of performing for San Francisco audiences who didn’t want to hear about race or politics, he was ready to quit comedy completely. Now he’s the host of TV’s most diverse, boundary-pushing nightly talk show, which just happens to be the flagship of a new network. No pressure or anything.

Totally Biased with W. Kamau Bell on fxx.com and Video on Demand
Previously on MetaFilter: Sarah Silverman talks about the roasting she got at the James Franco roast
posted by andoatnp at 12:05 PM PST - 21 comments

To mark the 178th anniversary of Darwin’s first exploration of the Galapagos Islands, Google Maps has captured dozens of locations featuring the local biodiversity. It's the newest of Google's ongoing efforts to bring diverse locations to you via your computer.
posted by filthy light thief at 11:41 AM PST - 9 comments

"...back in the day I feel like we could have been doing polka and we still would've gotten compared to Ani DiFranco"

Tegan and Sara Quinn sit down with The Nerdist's Chris Hardwick and Jonah Ray to discuss consciously trying to expand their fanbase, the challenge of being seen as something other than a "gimmicky" (girl/gay/twin) group, the futility of trying to gauge "authenticity" in music and, of course, Miley Cyrus' VMA performance
posted by The Gooch at 11:29 AM PST - 10 comments

A new critically acclaimed film (96%) is coming out soon 12 Years a Slave (trailer), the true story of Solomon Northup. His memoir is a riveting read (or listen to Louis Gossett, Jr. reading it), but this post is about where Northup was enslaved, a cotton plantation near the Red River, Louisiana. [more inside]
posted by stbalbach at 11:20 AM PST - 5 comments

Home Truths: Domestic Workers in California (PDF). 2012's groundbreaking National Domestic Worker Survey was conducted in 14 cities; the sample analyzed in this report includes 631 domestic workers (nannies, caregivers, housecleaners) in four metropolitan areas in California: Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, and San Jose. [more inside]
posted by spamandkimchi at 10:49 AM PST - 131 comments

A 6 minute re-enactment of Neil Young's "Into the Black" from Rust Never Sleeps. (SLYT)
posted by Smart Dalek at 7:00 AM PST - 14 comments

WWE- Conversations during matches
posted by Blasdelb at 5:39 AM PST - 45 comments

We all just scratched our heads and wondered, ‘Where's the Ricky Bell we all know?'" Ricky Bell, former USC Trojan and member of the College Football Hall of Fame, was the number one pick of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in the 1977 NFL draft, ahead of Tony Dorsett. But his injury-plagued career resulted in only one brilliant season , until he was traded to the San Diego Chargers in 1982. Less than three years later, he was dead.
posted by MoonOrb at 12:05 AM PST - 7 comments

A medical enema device used for Blowing smoke up the ass.
posted by homunculus at 11:11 PM PST - 25 comments

Putting time in perspective.
posted by fings at 8:23 PM PST - 50 comments

Have you heard the music of Tiny Parham? Though not as celebrated a name as some of his early jazz contemporaries like Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong or King Oliver, Tiny's arrangements were inventive, lively and big fun to listen to, and his bands were full of fine players. Here are three slow to medium tempo numbers selected by The Mainspring Press Record Collectors blog that are a good starting point. Then, if you want to get things jumping a little hotter, try Nervous Tension and Sud Buster's Dream. We'll round it out with Tiny's Stomp. Thanks for the music, big man!
posted by flapjax at midnite at 7:51 PM PST - 4 comments

Where in the world are you most likely to be hit by lightening? Where's the best place to go to totally escape from the Internet? Which countries has Britain *not* invaded? [more inside]
posted by cairdeas at 6:15 PM PST - 61 comments

I'm Marty Stouffer, and these are a few of my favorite animals. A strangely hypnotic YT project devoted to the host of the long-running PBS series "Marty Stouffer's Wild America" and his many mentions of wildlife.
posted by MonkeyToes at 6:13 PM PST - 29 comments

Conceived as part of the 7 Day FPS Challenge, SUPERHOT (playable in-browser, requires Unity plugin) is an FPS with a neat time mechanic. Trailer on Youtube. Steam Greenlight page.
posted by juv3nal at 5:36 PM PST - 16 comments

Caltech and The Feynman Lectures Website are pleased to present this online edition of The Feynman Lectures on Physics. Now, anyone with internet access and a web browser can enjoy reading a high-quality up-to-date copy of Feynman's legendary lectures.
posted by Artw at 2:52 PM PST - 27 comments

A look at the flexible DVR systems and production workflow that powers clips used in television shows like The Colbert Report and others. Other organizations, including the police and local governments use them too.
posted by juiceCake at 2:18 PM PST - 15 comments

The Bluffer's guide to Irish folk: 20 songs from the last 50-odd years of Irish traditional music.
posted by rollick at 1:09 PM PST - 27 comments

John Banvard, 95, Gerard Nadeau, 67, were married Thursday at a Chula Vista, CA Veterans' senior living facility. Mr. Banvard, a World War II vet, and Mr. Nadeau, a Vietnam vet, have been together for 20 years, and were married at the facility despite the opposition of some residents. In response to the opposition, Mr. Nadeau said, "Oh, that's their problem not mine, but you know what this will do, open the door for other people." [more inside]
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 12:13 PM PST - 32 comments

The FBI yesterday acknowledged that it secretly took control of Freedom Hosting last July, days before the servers of the largest provider of ultra-anonymous hosting were found to be serving custom malware designed to identify visitors. [more inside]
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 11:34 AM PST - 81 comments

In literature, there are two key sorts of annotations: marginalia, or the notes jotted down in the margins by the reader, and additional information formally provided in expanded editions of a text, and you can find a bit of both online. Annotated Books Online is an on-line interactive archive of early modern annotated books, where researchers can share digitized documents and collaborate on translations. For insight into a single author's notes, Melville's Marginalia provides just that. For annotations with additional information, The Thoreau Reader provides context for Walden (linked previously), The Maine Woods, and other writings. Then there's the mostly annotated edition Ulysses, analysis of Joseph Conrad's Nostromo, and the thoroughly annotated US constitution (twentieth amendment linked previously). More marginalia and annotations inside. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 11:26 AM PST - 6 comments

Washington DC has had restrictions on the heights of its buildings since the first year of its existence, thanks to its namesake -- George Washington himself laid down a limit of 40 feet in 1791 (and then suspended the limits, as did several of his successors). The limits waxed and waned over the next century or so until the U.S. Congress, in its capacity as the over-government of America's capital, laid down the Heights of Buildings Act of 1910, setting the upper limit of any building at 130 feet. Now that the city is gaining population again (for the first time since the 1950s), developers and officials may be looking to release the federal height restrictions and give control to the city government (which already has zoning limits in various areas that further restrict heights). The WaPo provides a visualization demonstrating what the skyline might look like if the limits are raised, or even if areas filled out to the current Height Act maximums.
posted by Etrigan at 10:53 AM PST - 64 comments

If there was ever one man responsible for how an entire generation of American kids dreamed about science, animals, and nature it might be a producer by the name of Ivan Tors. [more inside]
posted by Toekneesan at 10:35 AM PST - 7 comments

Fans of the late Richard Scarry may be happy to know that a new book featuring Scarry's favorite character Lowly Worm is due on the shelves this autumn. From the Guardian article: "The book will feature one of Scarry's best-loved and most ubiquitous [and mysterious] characters, the alpine-hatted, singly-shod Lowly Worm, who drives an applecar and was probably the first worm in space." [more inside]
posted by jessamyn at 10:14 AM PST - 45 comments

Disney princesses try to maintain their cultural relevance and popularity by cross-dressing, twerking, and hitting the hottest (and fakest) magazine covers.
posted by fuse theorem at 9:33 AM PST - 27 comments

Ghost Stories is a series of animated shorts by the Late Night Work Club, a group of animators working with their spare time and funding.
posted by zabuni at 8:38 AM PST - 4 comments

Film Crit Hulk recommends "136 great books for your eyeballs".
posted by Going To Maine at 8:33 AM PST - 24 comments

SETI chief astronomer Seth Shostak on how soon we might find evidence for extraterrestrial life (SLYT)
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 8:26 AM PST - 25 comments

X inactivation is a type of gene dosage compensation. In humans, the sex chromosomes X and Y determine the sex of an individual - females have two X chromosomes (XX), males have one X and one Y chromosome (XY). All of the genes on the Y chromosome are required in male development, while the genes on the X chromosome are needed for both male and female development. Because females receive two X chromosomes, they inherit two copies of many of the genes that are needed for normal function. Extra copies of genes or chromosomes can affect normal development. An example is Down's syndrome, which is caused by an extra copy of part or all of chromosome 21. In female mammals, a process called X inactivation has evolved to compensate for the extra X chromosome. In X inactivation, each cell 'switches off' one of its X chromosomes, chosen at random, to ensure the correct number of genes are expressed, and to prevent abnormal development.

Here is a helpful eleven minute description of what it is and why it's important by Etsuko Uno and metafilter's own Drew Berry in a fucking gorgeous Goodsell-esque 3D animation.

[more inside]
posted by Blasdelb at 2:50 AM PST - 34 comments

Confused about who wrote the Bible we have, and why? Jim MacDonald has the answers. How was the Canon of the Christian Bible selected? There really isn't a better, or funnier, short account than this. After all, if fandom is a religion, then religions must work like fandom, right? And the epistolatory disputes of late antiquity were just Usenet to the Greeks. So if you want to know how the Doctrine of the Trinity became important, this will explain it: [more inside]
posted by alloneword at 11:46 PM PST - 150 comments

As the United States moves toward a knowledge-based economy, school achievement has become the cornerstone of lifelong success. Women are adapting; men are not. Yet the education establishment and federal government are, with some notable exceptions, looking the other way.
posted by MoonOrb at 9:33 PM PST - 126 comments

Sarah Silverman talks about the roasting she got at the James Franco roast
posted by anothermug at 7:09 PM PST - 91 comments

As part of his summerlong Explaining America roadtrip series, Grantland's Rembert Browne visited Black Rock City for the first time. He does his best to relate the experience in a two-part piece. Part 1:Getting There / Part 2:Burning There.
posted by mannequito at 6:09 PM PST - 19 comments

Jonathan Franzen: what's wrong with the modern world. [The Guardian]
posted by Fizz at 5:50 PM PST - 89 comments

Speed Kills Your Pocketbook [more inside]
posted by narcissus_and_ambrosia at 5:42 PM PST - 49 comments

Why is Zambia so poor?
"I’m not going to tell Zambia how to run itself, what it needs to fix and in what order. The explanations I heard, they aren’t the whole puzzle, they aren’t even the biggest pieces. The only thing I’m able to conclude after my trip here is that it’s incredibly difficult for a poor country to go about getting un-poor. Just when you think you’ve got the right narrative, another one comes bursting out of the footnotes. It’s the informality. No, it’s the taxes. No, it’s the mining companies. No, it’s the regulators.

And that’s what makes fixing it so difficult."

This landlocked country in Sub-Saharan Africa isn’t a failed state in the traditional sense: There’s no dictator, no child soldiers. But most of its 14 million people live on less than $1 per day. How did things get this way, and can they ever get better?
posted by Guernsey Halleck at 5:07 PM PST - 39 comments

It's been twenty years since Dante Ferrando opened the Black Cat Club on 14th St in DC. The neighborhood has changed immeasurably, but the music is still going.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 2:32 PM PST - 16 comments

After nearly 5000 launches, we've put a lot of objects in space. Amongst them are around half a million pieces of debris, generated by explosions, breakups and collisions (previously). With speeds of up to 15 km/s, even tiny fragments can cause major damage and the creation of further debris. The Kessler Syndrome describes a situation where the cascade of collisions creates an exponential increase in the amount of debris, leading to a potentially impassable artificial belt in LEO lasting for generations. [more inside]
posted by lucidium at 2:27 PM PST - 44 comments

Russell Brand goes to the GQ Awards
posted by figurant at 2:26 PM PST - 75 comments

The Hunt's Donuts Story Hunt’s Donuts was a thorn in the side of the police at the heart of a neighborhood that has always been a thorn in the side of the police. . [more inside]
posted by dubold at 2:16 PM PST - 5 comments

"Read this carefully so that you understand it. When you come home we will show you the model. Lots of love, Daddy." In 1953 Francis Crick, sat down to write his twelve-year-old son Michael a letter explaining his brand-new discovery: the double-helix structure of DNA. Now you can read the original, seven-page hand-written letter, complete with an interactive feature that lets you click for details, context and explanations. Courtesy of the Smithsonian. [more inside]
posted by evilmomlady at 1:14 PM PST - 18 comments

Ridiculous Indie Rock Band Photos [more inside]
posted by Kitteh at 1:02 PM PST - 89 comments

New Orleans Jazz Fest 2013 - Just a short Billy Joel and friends jam
posted by panaceanot at 12:26 PM PST - 6 comments

Ahoy, ye landlubbers! Set sail to swash yer buckles with Brawlin' Sailor [Flash], the latest effort from game developer Major Bueno. [Previously]
posted by Smart Dalek at 12:25 PM PST - 6 comments

Hoot.ch is a cool, beautifully curated music gizmo with new songs almost every day. Dazed electronica, sunny pop, arty rock, stained-glass hip-hop - from John Hopkins to Belle & Sebastian to Pusha T, and lots of unknown gems. Sometimes you just want to sit back and let good songs play. [more inside]
posted by Marquis at 10:00 AM PST - 23 comments

The Smithsonian's Freer and Sackler Galleries have quietly been posting full-length, downloadable concerts by some of the world's master musicians since 2005. [more inside]
posted by ryanshepard at 9:44 AM PST - 11 comments

Fawkes always noted that “the cartoonists know me as the one who plays the clarinet. The jazz people say I’m the one who does the cartoons.” -- TCJ's Adam Smith interviews British cartoonist & jazz musician Wally Fawkes, who played with the likes of Sidney Bechet and Humphrey "ISIHAC" Lyttelton. He gave up jazz for cartoons and for forty years was the artist on the classic UK newspaper comic Flook, which featured writing by a host of well known names like George Melly, Barry Took, Compton Mackenzie, Barry Norman and Humphrey Lyttelton again.
posted by MartinWisse at 9:44 AM PST - 4 comments

allRGB is a repository of images that contain one pixel each of every possible colour in the RGB colour space.
posted by alby at 9:35 AM PST - 35 comments

If you wanted to understand how cameras work, you could spend some time with your camera manual. If it's not handy (or not helpful), you might opt to read through Wikipedia pages about film speed, ISO and digital equivalents, F-numbers (f-stop* or relative aperture), and depth of field (DOF). If you prefer, you could read "tedious explanations" of f-stop and depth of field and other photographic topics from Matthew Coles. Or you can spend 45 minutes watching 3 videos from YouTube user Dylan Bennett, as he explains ISO, F-stop and depth of field. Then you can join Joe Brady for a few hour-long sessions on setting up your camera for Portrait Photography with Ambient Light and Landscape Photography, and mastering exposure for landscape photography [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 9:00 AM PST - 30 comments

Internet darlings Nate Silver and Public Policy Polling are feuding publicly this week, over PPP's decision not to release a polling result that they felt was probably inaccurate. Nate Silver tweeted "VERY bad and unscientific practice for @ppppolls to suppress a polling result they didn't believe/didn't like." And then the Twitter-based snipefest began, with PPP calling Silver's allegations 'absurd' and accusing him of 'jealosy,' while Silver called PPP's actions 'totally indefensible' and accused them of having their 'finger on the scale.' [more inside]
posted by showbiz_liz at 8:17 AM PST - 75 comments

The Last Thing You See: A Final Shot Montage [contains flashing images]
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 8:07 AM PST - 21 comments

48 Names for Things You Didn't Know Had Names [slyt]
posted by quin at 7:45 AM PST - 35 comments

"Not a lot of rushees get awesome scores," the Tri Delta member said. "Sometimes sisters [of active members] don’t get that. [She] got excellent scores. The only thing that kept her back was the color of her skin in Tri Delt. She would have been a dog fight between all the sororities if she were white." The University of Alabama's student newspaper reports on all-white sorority chapters' rejection of black applicants, including members' claims that the decisions came not from them but were handed down by alumnae. [Further coverage in the New York Times.]
posted by komara at 7:37 AM PST - 173 comments

Composer Wesley Johnson (aka jimlapbap) barbershops the heck out of 2012's biggest hits. If you can get past the autotune (as he says, he's a composer, not a vocalist), there's some lovely moments, and apparently his Korean is not too shabby, either. (slyt)
posted by ericbop at 7:14 AM PST - 11 comments

Playing at the World is a blog about the early days of tabletop RPGs. Select articles include "How Gaming Got Its Dice" (and the followup "The Origins of Dice Notation,") "The Early Works of Gary Gygax, " "A Playtesting Edition of Dungeons & Dragons (1973)" (and the followup "The Dalluhn Manuscript: In Detail and On Display") and "Character Sheets in 1975."
posted by griphus at 6:38 AM PST - 36 comments

Jeff Wagner would like you to know that he is running for mayor of Minneapolis. (slyt, mostly sfw)
posted by dry white toast at 6:18 AM PST - 26 comments

Hey, the Indian sitar is a great instrument and all, but it's really refreshing to hear Indian music played on Hawaiian slide guitar, and in that department, you can't do better than Debashish Bhattacharya. Here's an hour and fifteen minutes of his sublime sound for your listening pleasure: Calcutta Slide Guitar vol.3.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 5:41 AM PST - 16 comments

Intermeshing, rotating mechanical gears have been found in an insect. The gears act to ensure that the legs of the hopping insect move at the same rate when jumping, and are lost during molting to an adult stage. Via reddit, where the journalist is participating. Science magazine report (paywalled).
posted by exogenous at 4:44 AM PST - 52 comments

France has made Japan angry again, this time with insensitive political cartoons about Fukushima. With radiation levels still spiking, and the government only reticently admitting to constant leaks, some are questioning the legitimacy of PM Abe's insistence that Tokyo is safe. With decisions not to prosecute anyone involved in the disaster, it seems that amakudari is, in Japan as in most other countries, still alive and well.
posted by GoingToShopping at 1:40 AM PST - 43 comments

Soccer Euphoria The Olympic Stadium in Kabul has not seen this big a crowd since the Taliban used the place for public executions. No coercion was needed on Thursday to bring tens of thousands of delirious fans here to greet their national soccer team on its return from winning its first international championship. The underdog team stunned India, the defending South Asian champions, in a 2-0 victory in Katmandu, Nepal.
posted by Golden Eternity at 11:14 PM PST - 12 comments

With the Great Pacific Garbage Patch increasing in size, coming up with a viable solution seems like a pretty important thing to do. Enter Boyan Slat, the 19-year-old with a plan that could clean up 7,250,000,000kg of plastic from the world's oceans - within about five years. [more inside]
posted by Athanassiel at 10:49 PM PST - 37 comments

The only Liberal Party MP to lose her seat in the 2013 Australian Federal Election... Like many people around Australia, a group of Indi locals watched the past three years of politics – one of the ugliest and most negative in the country’s history – in despair. Feeling alienated from what they saw in Canberra, and from their own MP's part in it, they began meeting quietly at the Wangaratta Library. So constrained was political discourse in the area – and so strong was Sophie Mirabella's grip on the seat – that these meetings began with a distinctly clandestine edge.... The unseating of Liberal maverick Sophie Mirabella.
posted by mattoxic at 10:06 PM PST - 119 comments

In 1987, alongside another popular first-run syndicated show (perhaps you've heard of it?), a horror anthology series premiered, and together they spearheaded a massive wave of first-run syndication genre shows including, but by no means limited to, "War of the Worlds", "Hercules: The Legendary Journeys", "Xena: Warrior Princess", "Forever Knight", and "Babylon 5". [more inside]
posted by Mister Moofoo at 9:52 PM PST - 22 comments

Martyn Ashton, one of the fathers of trials riding, sustained "life changing" injuries on September 1st. [more inside]
posted by cmfletcher at 7:48 PM PST - 10 comments

Zachary R. Mider writes about how the Waltons avoid paying the estate tax. There is a follow-up interview at Bloomberg TV.
posted by Going To Maine at 7:17 PM PST - 156 comments

Chipotle's new ad for a mobile game is haunting, dark, and beautiful. It strikes a pretty serious chord for a fast food chain trying to launch a game that ends with a free burrito. If you were wondering how in the hell it got made, there's a behind the scenes video with the creators, designers, and animators that came up with it on their website.
posted by mathowie at 5:58 PM PST - 87 comments

After a fight with a former friend, reportedly over a "boyfriend situation", Rebecca Sedwick was suspended. When Rebecca reported she was being bullied, the school worked with Tricia, Rebecca's mother, to change Rebecca's schedule. Tricia had her daughter close her Facebook account, too. [more inside]
posted by misha at 5:21 PM PST - 220 comments

An update to Into the Wild.
posted by AceRock at 4:31 PM PST - 113 comments

Elvis Voyager I has left the building solar system. (Previously, previouslier, previouslier still)
posted by Gelatin at 4:21 PM PST - 55 comments

World's Largest Cave, Son Doong, Prepping For First Public Tours (previously)
posted by kliuless at 3:11 PM PST - 12 comments

The Year Of Wallace (who wasn't Darwin) is pretty well-covered on MeFi. But there's news, history keeps evolving: First, a 17-year-old pupil rediscovered Wallace's butterfly collection at the Oxford University Museum. Second, a new book details how evolution was discovered. [samples here and here | both links link to .pdf files, the second one a biggie] And finally, The Darwin-Wallace mystery solved.
posted by Substrata at 2:35 PM PST - 6 comments

Loved by some but often ignored, passed on by Spielberg, peppered with famous poker player cameos, the boldly painted, logorrheic portrait of real gambling life, California Split might be the quintessential Altman film. [more inside]
posted by Potomac Avenue at 2:24 PM PST - 15 comments

Rocket frog takes a flying
posted by dov3 at 1:50 PM PST - 64 comments

What if, rather than fight supervillians, the students and teachers of Xavier's School For Gifted Youngsters decided to run an ad agency?
posted by The Whelk at 1:47 PM PST - 21 comments

The Ugly Animal Preservation Society has named the blobfish world's ugliest animal & society mascot.
posted by rcraniac at 1:10 PM PST - 37 comments

How Zynga went from social gaming powerhouse to has-been
posted by figurant at 12:59 PM PST - 76 comments

The end of kindness: weev and the cult of the angry young man.
posted by kmz at 10:17 AM PST - 278 comments

Susie Sie is a film artist who eschews computer effects and 3D modeling for capturing the dreamlike beauty of real objects. CYMATICS is her latest work, using lycopodium powder, a speaker, and macro photography. Other works include SILK, BLACK, Ampersand and EMERGENCE. Recommended with headphones and in full-screen mode.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 10:01 AM PST - 6 comments

On Tuesday, a court in India convicted four men of "rape, unnatural sex, murder, conspiracy and destruction of evidence" after they brutally gang-raped a woman on a bus in Delhi last December. The woman died two weeks later in a Singapore hospital. When news broke, it sparked protests (previously) and raised awareness worldwide about the plight of many women in India. Now that the verdict is in, the Guardian analyzes the incident to see how "the nation's surge to superpower status has left millions behind struggling on the margins." (Links in this post contain descriptions of rape and assault which some may find disturbing.) [more inside]
posted by zarq at 9:42 AM PST - 16 comments

Bill de Blasio’s win in New York’s Democratic primary isn’t a local story. It’s part of a vast shift that could upend three decades of American political thinking.
posted by DynamiteToast at 9:29 AM PST - 144 comments

What do you get when you put a band together out of ten, far too young, Australian hipsters? You get the groovy, funky, instrumental sound of The Cactus Channel, that's what.
posted by MartinWisse at 9:25 AM PST - 13 comments

The Vatican’s new secretary of state has said that priestly celibacy is not church dogma and therefore open to discussion, marking a significant change in approach towards one of the thorniest issues facing the Roman Catholic Church.
posted by Chrysostom at 8:56 AM PST - 66 comments

What if a typical family spent like the federal government?
posted by anotherpanacea at 8:47 AM PST - 56 comments

No matter what time period you are referring to, no matter what country or region of the world you are referencing, there is a single claim that you can make that will always be true and will never be challenged, not even by Malcolm Gladwell himself: the middle class is always in the process of emerging.
posted by davidjmcgee at 8:45 AM PST - 15 comments

"Gentlemen: I have a story that may be of interest to you. It is not widely known who invented the circuitry concept for the automatic sequential performance of musical pitches - now well known as a sequencer. I, however, do know who the inventor was - for it was I who first conceived and built the sequencer." This is the opening to an undated, unaddressed letter, found in Raymond Scott's personal papers (yes, the same fellow whose kooky soundtracks scored everything from Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies to Ren & Stimpy, The Simpson, and Animaniacs). You can read the rest of Scott's letter, along with Bob Moog's recollections of visiting Raymond's electronics laboratory in the mid-1950s. Or you could jump ahead to the mid-1960s, when Jim Henson was in his late 20s to early 30s, and he was working on a variety of odd projects after a successful run with Sam and Friends, but before he it it big with Sesame Street. It was at this point that he teamed up with Scott on a few short, experimental films. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 8:42 AM PST - 11 comments

The pig was reportedly last seen resting under a tree, possibly nursing a hangover.
posted by Annie Savoy at 8:34 AM PST - 22 comments

"So I just remove their faces to have close look at what's inside. In some way I explore and make them uglier to give them some human beauty." The stunning gifs of Milos "Sholim" Rajkovic. [more inside]
posted by HumanComplex at 8:33 AM PST - 7 comments

Mick Humphries can put you in the driver's seat! (SLYT)
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 8:02 AM PST - 5 comments

If the NSA is able to break through banks' computer security, does that mean it solved the prime factorization problem? The New York Times reported recently that “the agency has circumvented or cracked much of the encryption, or digital scrambling, that guards global commerce and banking systems.” Since banks' encryption codes rely on the fact that nobody knows how to find the prime factors of really large numbers, it could mean that the NSA has found a way to do that. Or it could mean that the NSA has simply gotten lots of banks to give up their information, or found other ways around their encryption. But if they've cracked this long-standing math problem, might the secret leak? What would be the effects?
posted by Sleeper at 7:59 AM PST - 60 comments

While abridged series are nothing new – take a TV series, usually anime, and edit it down to an eighth of its length, usually with ample snark added – Team Four Star's Dragonball Z Abridged is a notably excellent one. Watch a group of idiotic superheroes combat endless waves of aliens, androids, and genocide! Season 1 started off somewhat roughly, but their Season 2 is great throughout – you probably want to start here – and Season 3 (not-completed) has been their funniest work yet. Don't worry if you've never had the stomach for DBZ—the plot is covered comprehensively enough that you can follow along as if you had watched all of the 130 episodes that DBZA currently covers! [Warning: The series' humor is off-color and far from PC.]
posted by Rory Marinich at 7:47 AM PST - 18 comments

Making a knife with only common tools viewed as a time-lapse. [more inside]
posted by quin at 7:43 AM PST - 25 comments

How to Advertise on a Porn Website. Startup Eat24 explains how they advertise on porn sites and the advantages in doing so.
posted by chunking express at 7:37 AM PST - 28 comments

Coming soon to children's television near you if you live in Portugal: Mourinho and the Special Ones
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 7:35 AM PST - 6 comments

Do you remember this? And this? A group of activist engineers based in Amsterdam do, and they decided to do something about it. The result is the world's first fair-trade, environmentally audited smart phone, the Fairphone.
posted by rhombus at 7:19 AM PST - 26 comments

After 500 years, the government of David Cameron has announced the unthinkable: from as early as today a majority stake in the Royal Mail of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland will be put up for sale into private hands. Some are not happy. The sale is expected to fetch between US$3-4.7 billion. But what does it mean? Should you invest? And what does it mean for other postal systems in, say, Australia or the USA? Postal services have been benefiting from the rise in online shopping, even as traditional mail declines.
posted by Mezentian at 6:40 AM PST - 74 comments

A Plea for Caution From Russia (SLNYT) My working and personal relationship with President Obama is marked by growing trust. I appreciate this. I carefully studied his address to the nation on Tuesday. And I would rather disagree with a case he made on American exceptionalism, stating that the United States’ policy is “what makes America different. It’s what makes us exceptional.” It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation. There are big countries and small countries, rich and poor, those with long democratic traditions and those still finding their way to democracy. Their policies differ, too. We are all different, but when we ask for the Lord’s blessings, we must not forget that God created us equal.
posted by philip-random at 9:54 PM PST - 315 comments

"In comic books, as in the moving image, the frame is the constituent element of narrative. Each page of a comic book is a frame which itself frames a series of frames, so that by altering each panel's size, bleed or aesthetic variety, time and space can be made elastic. Weisinger and Boring's Phantom Zone took this mechanism further, behaving like a weaponized frame free to roam within the comic book world. Rather than manipulating three-dimensional space or the fourth dimension of time, as the comic book frame does, The Phantom Zone opened out onto the existence of other dimensions. It was a comic book device that bled beyond the edge of the page, out into a world in which comic book narratives were experienced not in isolation, but in parallel with the onscreen narratives of the cinema and the television. As such, the device heralded televisual modes of attention." - Daniel Rourke on Superman's Phantom Zone (well, kinda...)
posted by artof.mulata at 9:51 PM PST - 10 comments

Why Would Anyone Buy a Cassette Tape? "I went back to the merch table to see what was on offer and saw - among other things - a cassette tape. I figured that participating in a weird economic trend would be worth the $5, so I bought it. Needless to say, I don't own anything that could play a cassette tape."
posted by paleyellowwithorange at 9:44 PM PST - 121 comments

Disney has announced plans to rerelease The Little Mermaid to theaters on September 20. However, the rereleased film has been synced with an iPad app that gives users the ability to play games, sing-a-long to the movie and interact with the characters. While in the movie theatre.
posted by Wordshore at 9:25 PM PST - 106 comments

For the duration of the Toronto International Film Festival, TIFF has posted the short films they're screening this year on Youtube. You can watch them all, but if you only watch one, check out Noah, which is not safe for work and which I thought was pretty great.
posted by dobbs at 8:41 PM PST - 16 comments

A letter from a Sandy Hook Parent. Nelba Marquez-Greene lost her 6 year old daughter, Ana Grace, in the Sandy Hook tragedy. Her son was in another part of the building, heard the shooting, and survived. Nelba composed this letter to this country's teachers.
posted by HuronBob at 8:00 PM PST - 20 comments

Postcards from the Alligator Farm. [via]
posted by Combustible Edison Lighthouse at 7:34 PM PST - 9 comments

Jason Statham (previously) has many, many jobs to do.
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 7:31 PM PST - 15 comments

Scientists have found an underground water reserve in Kenya. So large that it could meet the entire country's water needs for the next 70 years.
posted by pallen123 at 7:04 PM PST - 50 comments

Guess the programming language by "Hello World" snippet.
posted by Artw at 5:04 PM PST - 62 comments

All debates about ideas are shaped by their material conditions...Technology intellectuals work in an attention economy. They succeed if they attract enough attention to themselves and their message that they can make a living from it. It’s not an easy thing to do.
posted by shivohum at 4:43 PM PST - 12 comments

The National Archives' Media Matters blog recently highlighted several newly digitized military etiquette training films from the late 60s and early 70s. These included a series of three films aimed at the difficult intersection of military service and gender dynamics for the members of the Women's Army Corps: The Pleasure of Your Company (background post), Mind Your Military Manners, and Look Like a Winner (background post). Bonus film for the guys: How to Succeed with Brunettes.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 4:38 PM PST - 7 comments

What if Jerry Bruckheimer had made "Monty Python and the Holy Grail?"
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 3:20 PM PST - 45 comments

The 30th annual Dallas Pride parade and festival, which will take place this weekend, has come under some controversy since the organizers announced the need for the event to be family-friendly and said nudity and lewd behavior will no longer be tolerated. [more inside]
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 3:02 PM PST - 151 comments

Get lost in 75 forum pages full of amazing photography taken in China (Central North China chase Star Travels). The itinerary (You can also step through just the images from the itinerary link and avoid the forum posts. First link processed through Google Translate. This is not photography done by tourists. These guys are good.
posted by spock at 1:49 PM PST - 16 comments

HTML Giant reviewer AD Jameson reviewed the movie The World's End. He didn't love it at first. Then he thought about it more. Then he thought about it a lot. [Warning, every link in this post contains spoilers] [more inside]
posted by Potomac Avenue at 1:46 PM PST - 82 comments

"Sadly, because much of Word was built with old timey web applications that no longer exist, the content here only covers the years 1995-1998. The archive from 1998-2000 is in pretty bad shape, with various broken links and missing images and sounds. Happily, we’re in the process of slowly restoring it." [more inside]
posted by jcterminal at 1:03 PM PST - 26 comments

Abrupt rise of new machine ecology beyond human response time
posted by Tom-B at 12:39 PM PST - 71 comments

Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (1874-1927) was born in Germany, moved to the U.S. (and was arrested for wearing men's clothes in 1910) and lived in New York City from 1913-1923. She may have been involved with the submission of Fountain to the 1917 exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists (Previously); she also made an assemblage Portrait of Marcel Duchamp, and the plumbing assemblage God is attributed to her, photographed by 1918 flu epidemic casualty Morton Schamberg. She was known to wear a coal scuttle as a hat, with postage stamps on her cheeks; historians have called her America's first performance artist. In the 1920s she was friends with Jamaican-American writer Claude McKay. Her writing was preserved by Djuna Barnes and was finally published in 2011 by MIT Press as Body Sweats: The Uncensored Writings of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven edited by her biographer Irene Gammel and Suzanne Zelazo
posted by larrybob at 12:25 PM PST - 2 comments

Brandan Odums makes important and beautiful art in the ruins of New Orleans's 9th Ward [more inside]
posted by tafetta, darling! at 12:08 PM PST - 4 comments

What if Batman was the next Ben Affleck in Good Will Hunting? (slyt,nsfw language)
posted by roaring beast at 12:07 PM PST - 28 comments

Jo Kamm is a ceramic artist. He's also a member of the Kansas City Juggling Club. He's found a way to combine his passions.
posted by snottydick at 11:50 AM PST - 4 comments

Working conditions inside the mine were appalling. The miners had to crawl around in the hot dark stopes on their knees, bent almost double, working in dreadful conditions gouging out the blue asbestos which was in very thin bands in the hard rock…working conditions in the mill were even more appalling than the mine. Milling was a dry process where the ore was ground down and the fibre then extracted. Conditions were so bad that the men needed flood lights to see through the dust at midday. The men worked in these clouds of asbestos dust for hours on end, when only one minute at such concentrations to blue asbestos fibres would have been enough to cause lung cancer or mesothelioma. [more inside]
posted by themadthinker at 10:54 AM PST - 28 comments

Gabriel Stein reflects on the end of the The Rocky Mountain News, his father's decades-long career there as an editorial cartoonist, and the silver lining he sees in the billionaire acquisitions of The Washington Post and The Boston Globe.
posted by audi alteram partem at 10:53 AM PST - 8 comments

Elementary school students are using Shrinky Dinks to make beautiful Chihuly-style minisculptures. And so can you! You don't need to buy official Shrinky Dinks - just save your #6 plastic and Chihuly it up.
posted by moonmilk at 9:54 AM PST - 21 comments

His name is Mule, and he has been wandering for 29 of his 65 years. He has a website, and a presence on Facebook, but otherwise lives a very simple life, traveling on foot with his three mules, sleeping mostly outside and living hand to mouth. In his effort to make a statement about urban sprawl and our increasing dependence on cars, he often faces harassment from police. If you ever have come across him, it is a sight you will not forget.
posted by Blogwardo at 9:35 AM PST - 35 comments

A new story in The Guardian shows how the NSA routinely shares raw intelligence data with Israel without first filtering it to remove information about US citizens. The memorandum of understanding (published here in full) shows that the US government handed over intercepted communications likely to contain the phone calls and emails of US citizens. This goes against earlier Obama administration claims that there were strong safeguards in place to protect Amercans' communications.
posted by anemone of the state at 9:07 AM PST - 113 comments

"Kissinger and, to some degree, Bush have been what we call Pinocheted. This is a new verb in the lexicon of the human rights movement since Juan Garcés’s accomplishment in getting Pinochet arrested. They have faced the issue of, when they travel abroad, will they be subpoenaed and questioned for crimes that they supported or participated in or instigated?" -- On the fortieth anniversary of that other 9/11, Democracy Now talks about the role Nixon and Kissinger played in getting the 1973 Pinochet-led coup against the Chilean government off the ground, as part of its larger coverage of the coup and its effects.
posted by MartinWisse at 9:02 AM PST - 25 comments

The history of the most baffling element of the employment dance - The Cover Letter. (The Atlantic)
posted by The Whelk at 8:50 AM PST - 130 comments

John Lloyd Wright might not have the renown for the architectural creativity of his father, but John found inspiration in his father's work and designed toys that are still being made today. I'm talking about Lincoln Logs. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 8:26 AM PST - 13 comments

The Steve Miller Band had a number 1 song (for one week) in 1974 with The Joker, a terrific song about a picker, a grinner, a lover, and a sinner all rolled into one. One of the most famous lines in the song deals with The Joker's various nicknames - the Space Cowboy, the Gangster of Love, and Maurice (an odd nickname for sure). The nickname Maurice is allegedly earned due to the singer's tendency to "speak of the pompatus of love." Putting aside why you would call a guy Maurice for that reason - and why the existing alternative nickname The Gangster of Love would not cover it - the lyric raises the question of just what the heck the "pompatus of love" is. (The "pompatus of love" lyric was not limited only to The Joker, it also features in another of Steve Miller Band's oeuvre, Enter Maurice, and it is spoken by Wolfman Jack in The Guess Who's "Clap for the Wolfman"). [more inside]
posted by AgentRocket at 8:09 AM PST - 75 comments

After (intentionally?) missing a last second penalty kick, the US Men's National Team beat Mexico in Columbus by a now famous final score. Following the game, the team watched Honduras hold on for a 2-2 draw against Panama which officially cemented the team's slot in the 2014 World Cup. An unassuming venue [autoplay video], Crew Stadium was the first purpose-built soccer facility in the US, and it has become the preferred location for the US to take on its most-powerful CONCACAF rival.
posted by Rock Steady at 7:51 AM PST - 136 comments

Baby hedgehog Boat! [slyt | cute]
posted by quin at 7:38 AM PST - 23 comments

Abe's Nuclear Energy Policy and Japan's Future: "Japan has nearly doubled spending on solar power projects to $20 bn and ramped up renewable energy capacity equivalent to six nuclear reactors, pointing the way to a sustainable and cheaper alternative to nuclear energy." [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 4:22 AM PST - 32 comments

All Always Was is a hip hop video by historian himself. You can download his album Earth Beasts Awaken. Its all quite beautiful.
posted by misterG at 2:51 AM PST - 6 comments

Hot Pepper Game Reviews is a youtube channel wherein the participants eat a hot pepper before reviewing a video game.
posted by juv3nal at 10:58 PM PST - 50 comments

“Have You Heard The Word” used to appear—frequently—on Beatles bootlegs as a ‘long lost’ Beatles recording. In fact the song was recorded by Bee Gees singer Maurice Gibb, who, along with some Aussie mates, gathered round the studio mics and recorded, apparently, a single take of the song, featuring Gibb's rather convincing John Lennon impersonation.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 10:58 PM PST - 32 comments

London’s coffee craze began in 1652 when Pasqua Rosée, the Greek servant of a coffee-loving British Levant merchant, opened London’s first coffeehouse (or rather, coffee shack) against the stone wall of St Michael’s churchyard in a labyrinth of alleys off Cornhill. Coffee was a smash hit; within a couple of years, Pasqua was selling over 600 dishes of coffee a day to the horror of the local tavern keepers. For anyone who’s ever tried seventeenth-century style coffee, this can come as something of a shock — unless, that is, you like your brew “black as hell, strong as death, sweet as love”, as an old Turkish proverb recommends, and shot through with grit.
posted by barnacles at 10:30 PM PST - 66 comments

Phonebloks suggests a different way for dealing with obsolescent hardware, through modular design on a common base
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 10:04 PM PST - 53 comments

TEEN GIRL SQUAD! Cheerleader! So-and-So! What's Her Face! The Ugly One! Exchanging Decemberween presents! Fondly recalling kindergarten! Battling it out with the bands! Coping with grievous tragedy! In twenty-four great-smelling colors! Off to camp! Valentime's! Sitting on the babies! Exempting those exams! Attending Teen Girl Prom! Meanwhile, Sci-Fi Greg, DnD Greg, Open Source Greg, and Japanese Culture Greg step into the Apple Store robotic dragon's lair...
posted by Rory Marinich at 10:02 PM PST - 66 comments

The story of Frederick Law Olmsted's 'Greensward Plan' for New York's Central Park. "From the NASA space shuttle, Central Park is visible to the naked eye as a bright emerald bar on the fat knuckle of Manhattan... If an astronaut were to plunge by re-entry capsule into the heart of the park, she could never be more than around 400 metres from the urban roar of a city of more than 8 million people densely packed. And yet, wandering the labyrinthine paths of the Ramble, surrounded by thick woodland, rocky headlands, rivulets and little stone bridges that cross ravines, she would neither hear nor see the metropolis. This is a miracle."
posted by paleyellowwithorange at 9:27 PM PST - 34 comments

Today the government of the Canadian province of Quebec released its proposed charter of Quebec values. “The minister in charge of the charter, Bernard Drainville, announced … that if the charter were adopted by the legislature, the wearing of kippas, turbans, burkas, hijabs and "large" crosses would be banned for civil servants while they are on the job.” (Images of acceptable and unacceptable religious symbols) The Canadian federal government indicated that it would “challenge any law that [it] deem[s] unconstitutional.”
posted by Jasper Friendly Bear at 7:57 PM PST - 175 comments

The Difference between Bluegrass, Old Time and Celtic bands, now finally explained!
posted by Confess, Fletch at 7:09 PM PST - 58 comments

Tom Yulsman on the ignorant, misrepresentative and fictitious claims promulgated by some conservative journalists.
posted by whyareyouatriangle at 5:06 PM PST - 36 comments

In the summer of 2000, the top executives in charge of the basic-cable network FX—which was mostly known for showing reruns of The X-Files and Buffy the Vampire Slayer—were eager to make a change. They believed that in order to be relevant, they needed to present audiences with an original, prime time scripted drama that would be so provocative it would completely alter the way the network was perceived. Good Cop, Bad Cop: An Oral History of The Shield
posted by Ghostride The Whip at 2:44 PM PST - 66 comments

WTF Visualizations is a collection of charts and graphs that make no sense. Why settle for boring old bar charts and pie charts when you can use Percentacles, Timecentages, Interferograms, the Donut Ring Explosion or whatever this is?
posted by RobotHero at 2:41 PM PST - 94 comments

John Wooley's leaked Market Research Report tackles the complex pros and "Cons" of Internet Neutrality. Enable your sarcasm settings for this hilarious mockumentary that explores why free and open internet is a win-win scenario for business and the humans that create them.
posted by muchalucha at 2:31 PM PST - 5 comments

Sci-fi author A.C. Crispin has died. She was 63. [more inside]
posted by zooropa at 1:26 PM PST - 39 comments

If you're one of the 9 million or so inhabitants of Planet Earth who watched this video last week and laughed out loud at the spectacle of a girl whose sexy "twerking" home video turns into an epic fiery disaster, then the joke's on you, courtesy of now undisputed prank-champion Jimmy Kimmel.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 1:01 PM PST - 109 comments

"Brown has been called many things during his brief public career – satirist, journalist, author, Anonymous spokesman, atheist, "moral fag," "fame whore," scourge of the national surveillance state." From Rolling Stone, the story of Barrett Brown, the public face of Anonymous.
posted by Pyrogenesis at 11:58 AM PST - 37 comments

Before retiring in May 2013, Sir Alex Ferguson spent 26 seasons as the manager of Manchester United, the English football (soccer) club that ranks among the most successful and valuable franchises in sports. During that time the club won 13 English league titles along with 25 other domestic and international trophies—giving him an overall haul nearly double that of the next-most-successful English club manager. In 2012 Harvard Business School professor Anita Elberse had a unique opportunity to examine Ferguson’s management approach and developed an HBS case study around it. Now she and Ferguson have collaborated on an analysis of his enormously successful methods.
posted by criticalbill at 11:55 AM PST - 17 comments

You may succeed at work, but will you succeed at life? The rabbi of Toronto's City Shul, Elyse Goldstein, reacts against the "cult of busy" and the addictive quality of busyness for busyness's sake.
posted by jb at 11:00 AM PST - 68 comments

"Brigitte Höss lives quietly on a leafy side street in Northern Virginia. She is retired now, having worked in a Washington fashion salon for more than 30 years. She recently was diagnosed with cancer and spends much of her days dealing with the medical consequences. Brigitte also has a secret that not even her grandchildren know. Her father was Rudolf Höss, the Kommandant of Auschwitz." [more inside]
posted by zarq at 10:53 AM PST - 79 comments

How often does a great story dominate the headlines, only to be dropped from the news cycle? How often do journalists tell us of a looming danger or important discovery – only to move quickly to the next new thing? What really happened? How did these events change us? And what are the lingering consequences that may affect our society to this day? These are the questions we are answering at Retro Report, an innovative documentary news organization launched in 2013 as a timely online counterweight to today’s 24/7 news cycle. Combining documentary techniques with shoe-leather reporting, we peel back the layers of some of the most perplexing news stories of our past with the goal of encouraging the public to think more critically about current events and the media in ~10 minute segments. [more inside]
posted by Blasdelb at 10:21 AM PST - 15 comments

Manifesto: People’s Union of American College Football: Make American Football Strong Like Bull, Smart Like Tractor. Under former capitalist system, American college football very unfair. Only few teams is climbing to top of heap, and is making all the money, especially more dollars on the television contract. Best, powerful teams is playing cupcake opponent, then flying across country to form conference alliance with faraway team, while also ignoring strong opponent right over next hill. People’s Union of American College Football is creating much better system. Each team is playing best quality opponents throughout season. Each team is being organized by geography, and must fight way out of home District to qualify for national playoff. Champion is last team standing, and is TRUE champion over all other teams in whole country.
posted by (Arsenio) Hall and (Warren) Oates at 7:51 AM PST - 49 comments

"And then one day you find ten years have got behind you..." It's a long slow five minutes, and you don't even know it's happening, but it is. Slowly but surely, the inevitable march of aging happens before your very eyes. Don't skip ahead, just let it unfold.
posted by symbioid at 7:45 AM PST - 57 comments

Tommy Edison, who has been blind since birth, explains his perception of things that are intangible including the sun, sky, fog, Great Wall of China, Grand Canyon, and space. [slyt | via]
posted by quin at 7:36 AM PST - 14 comments

Beg Waves (video) > G Shock > 7 Souls (in a laundromat) > Celebrate The Body Electric (It Came From An Angel) (video) > Late For School (in a laundromat) > Sky Drool > Small Wevs > Die Allman Bruder (in a laundromat) [more inside]
posted by Going To Maine at 7:33 AM PST - 3 comments

An Oral History Of The Wrens’ The Meadowlands The Meadowlands is ten years old today.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 7:31 AM PST - 20 comments

Megapode, Greek for "large foot," refers to refers to 12 species of Australasian chickenlike birds (order Galliformes), which have small heads compared to their bodies, and large feet. They are also known as Mound Builders, or Incubator Birds, as they bury their eggs in some warm material, most commonly fermenting or decomposing plant matter. But on Sulawesi island in Indonesia, Maleos bury their eggs in sun-baked or volcanically heated sands, then depart. The young hatch from their large eggs (5 times the size of chicken eggs), then dig out of their sandy incubators and walk or fly away. If you can't make it to Indonesia to see the birds in person, you can also visit the Wildlife Conservation Society's Bronx Zoo to see their 9 Maleos, or check out their video about Maleos and the zoo's breeding program. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 7:12 AM PST - 5 comments

From today's NYTimes Op Ed, a short documentary about brothers, Sergio Polanco and Jaime Polanco, and their cousin, Cruz Guzman working 50+ stories above the ground. [more inside]
posted by readery at 6:01 AM PST - 5 comments

Hearing complaints that the Fairfax County Public Library was throwing away tons of books, County Supervisor Linda Q. Smyth (D-Providence) decided to peer into a Dumpster. Twice, she found stacks and stacks of high-quality books, bought by the taxpayers, piled in the trash. The second time, she filled a box. The discarded books have opened a broader discussion about the library’s long-term plan, which would eliminate the requirement for fully trained librarians, reduce branch staff and cut the amount of time children’s librarians spend helping families inside their libraries. [more inside]
posted by Measured Out my Life in Coffeespoons at 5:22 AM PST - 170 comments

The Movie Math Quiz: Can you figure out which movies are being described by these mathematical equations?
posted by schmod at 5:04 AM PST - 13 comments

Have We Reached Gadget Fatigue? — Smartphones are everywhere, and smartwatches are poised to follow. Techies are eying Google Glass. And we now wear our technology on our sleeve. Have we finally reached gadget overload? From CIO, September 5, 2013.
posted by cenoxo at 4:41 AM PST - 63 comments

To my daughter's high school programming teacher: "I spent 16 years raising a daughter who had all the tools and encouragement she needed to explore computer programming as a career. In one short semester, you and her classmates undid all of my years of encouragement."
posted by Mezentian at 1:50 AM PST - 294 comments

“Planned genocide has begun,” read the Facebook entry on one of the groups I browse daily. The link: a picture of five monoliths looming like an American Stonehenge over a lush and lonely hill in remote Elberton, Georgia. I was only an hour away at the time, and decided to visit them in person.
posted by empath at 11:40 PM PST - 65 comments

We're a couple of months away from the gales of November, but it's already getting a bit cold on Lake Superior. You've all heard Gordon Lightfoot's ballad about the Edmund Fitzgerald. [more inside]
posted by HuronBob at 9:34 PM PST - 35 comments

'Robert Frost', a poem by George Bilgere [more inside]
posted by paleyellowwithorange at 9:24 PM PST - 15 comments

HelloRun is an HTML 5 dodging game with exciting lights and fun music. (Takes a couple seconds to load, works best in chrome) Via
posted by rebent at 8:23 PM PST - 32 comments

Though Cy Coleman enjoyed early success as a jazz pianist, the songwriter would eventually make his biggest mark on Broadway with scores for musicals such as "Wildcat" and "Sweet Charity". Before he died in 2004, he had won five Tonys, two Emmys and the lasting admiration of a great many artists. But enough of the balloon juice; get to the music! [more inside]
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 7:55 PM PST - 10 comments

How much data can you shove through a fiber optic cable? Quite a lot, as it turns out. Using the ITU standard 50 GHz dense wavelength division multiplexing grid, not only can you easily do 80 x 10 Gbps channels in a single fiber pair, but recent advances in modulation technology mean that with QPSK, 4QAM or 16QAM modulation, 1/80th of a dark fiber pair can carry a 100 Gbps signal in the optical space previously occupied by a single long distance 10 Gbps circuit.
posted by thewalrus at 6:54 PM PST - 39 comments

Harvard Business School Case Study: Gender Equity [HBS '13] had been unwitting guinea pigs in what would have once sounded like a far-fetched feminist fantasy: What if Harvard Business School gave itself a gender makeover, changing its curriculum, rules and social rituals to foster female success? The New York Times reports. [more inside]
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 6:48 PM PST - 33 comments

Remember that feeling of dislocation and anticipation while you watched with no clue as to what was going to come next, but knew it was going to be either strange or awesome or horrible or some combination of all three? Well, MTV has been quietly reviving it's Liquid Television brand over the past few years, essentially as an online destination for new "awesome" animation. Tonight, 9/9/13, five all-new episodes of Liquid Television will finally be released - on Hulu, iTunes, MTV Geek, Amazon, Xbox and Playstation. The network is still hoping to schedule a broadcast time slot for the revived series sometime in the remaining months in 2013, and there may be an announcement about that soon. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 6:41 PM PST - 60 comments

In photographer Matt Slaby's series In Xanadu, current and former drug users in Denver describe places throughout the city where they've experienced overdoses. [more inside]
posted by ActionPopulated at 5:50 PM PST - 18 comments

B-movie legend Albert Pyun is retiring from filmmaking due to a diagnosis of "full blown MS". [more inside]
posted by brundlefly at 5:39 PM PST - 14 comments

WMFU DJ Irwin Chusid has put together a tribute website to music producer Tom Wilson. Wilson was born in 1931 and died young at 47 in 1978. Among the musicians he worked with: Sun Ra, Cecil Taylor, Bob Dylan, Simon & Garfunkel, Pete Seeger, The Mothers of Invention, The Velvet Underground, Nico, Gil-Scott Heron, and Professor Longhair. Some of his notable and more far-out productions, include the Bob Dylan "Like a Rolling Stone" session which was the subject of the much repeated Al Kooper organ riff anecdote. He had been president of Harvard's Young Republican club, graduated Harvard cum laude, and was African-American. He was also friends with Wally "Famous" Amos, and it was through Wilson, that Amos, at the time an agent at William Morris, came to represent Simon & Garfunkel.
posted by larrybob at 5:20 PM PST - 5 comments

Workout Wednesdays with Zach Anner! Let's do this! #1 / #2 / #3
posted by naju at 3:15 PM PST - 23 comments

If I offered evidence that jellyfish are displacing penguins in Antarctica—not someday, but now, today—what would you think? If I suggested that jellyfish could crash the world’s fisheries, outcompete the tuna and swordfish, and starve the whales to extinction, would you believe me? The New York Review of Books reads Lisa-ann Gershwin's book about the rise of the jellyfish and the coming "jellification" of our oceans. (Previously but not as terrifyingly.) [more inside]
posted by RedOrGreen at 2:54 PM PST - 85 comments

Semi-submersible ships are the only vessels capable of loading, transporting and off-loading extremely heavy equipment. These mighty ships are used to carry entire gas refineries, huge oil drilling rigs, and even warships and submarines, on lengthy journeys across the globe.
posted by mudpuppie at 2:43 PM PST - 42 comments

Arcade Fire are back with a groovy single, Reflektor, accompanied by an amazing interactive experience. [more inside]
posted by mysticreferee at 1:49 PM PST - 58 comments

Calvin Coolidge "Cal" Worthington and his "dog", Spot, were fixtures on 1970's TV in Southern California. [more inside]
posted by Sophie1 at 12:50 PM PST - 79 comments

The costs of cash. Economists know that using cash has a built-in cost, compared to electronic forms of payment like credit cards or direct deposits. (Prepaid cards, not so much.) This creates a "digital divide" that may contribute to income inequality. A new study out today from Tufts quantifies these costs, which hit the poor over three times as much as wealthier folks, on average.
posted by gottabefunky at 11:44 AM PST - 129 comments

"We introduce an interactive technique for modelling 3D man-made objects by extracting them from a single photograph." 3-Sweep: Extracting Editable Objects from a Single Photo, SIGGRAPH Asia 2013 (SLYT)
posted by oulipian at 11:25 AM PST - 17 comments

Dave Chappelle did NOT "melt down" in front of a boisterous crowd in Hartford CT last week according to this report in Ebony magazine--him walking off the stage may say more about the audience than it did about him. [more inside]
posted by Potomac Avenue at 11:11 AM PST - 116 comments

Nostalgia isn't always pretty: The 24 Worst-Dressed Members of G.I. Joe and Cobra along with The 10 Most Useless Members of G.I. Joe and finally, The 20 Stupidest GI Joe Vehicles Ever.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 10:59 AM PST - 55 comments

TechCrunch Disrupt Kicks Off with "Titstare" App and Fake Masturbation [more inside]
posted by not_the_water at 10:14 AM PST - 217 comments

The 2013 Lasker Awards were announced today. Often called the "American's Nobels", they recognize the contributions of scientists, physicians, and public servants who have made major advances in the understanding, diagnosis, treatment, cure, and prevention of human disease. Included in today's crop of recipients are Dr. Graeme M. Clark, Dr. Ingeborg Hochmair, and Blake S. Wilson who were awarded their prizes for developing the modern cochlear implant. [more inside]
posted by scblackman at 9:48 AM PST - 2 comments

"I am totally ashamed to say it but we do truly hate this boy!" Reuters has published an investigative piece on parents trading or giving away their adopted children. A disturbing practice brought to you by the internet, Yahoo! message boards, and a near-total lack of oversight by any authority.
posted by prefpara at 9:05 AM PST - 150 comments

A mistake is only an opportunity to do something else (video), says Ralph Steadman, an illustrator and satirist famous for being Hunter S. Thompson's long-time collaborator.
posted by shivohum at 8:59 AM PST - 7 comments

Now let's go live with Ike and Tina Turner! That's almost an hour of live clips (via madamjujujive). The same YouTube user who uploaded this also posted a similar set, if not the same thing, labeled "Live in '71." But how could that be, if some of the film was from the Playboy After Dark variety show (SFW Wikipedia page), which was syndicated in 1969 and 1970? What, you're not familiar with that show? OK, this YouTube playlist of musical performances from the show might be relevant to your interests. And don't miss Sammy Davis Jr. doing his thing on the show.
posted by filthy light thief at 7:03 AM PST - 18 comments

You're Lewes F.C., a small semi-professional football club playing in the Isthmian League in London, six levels below the English Premier League. You want to get punters to come to your games, but don't have the budget to put out radio or tv ads. What do you do? Create some really great match day posters, like this one mimicking a WWII Russian propaganda poster or this Clash poster.
posted by MartinWisse at 6:51 AM PST - 25 comments

The amazing time-lapse "Rio" by Joe Capra may be one of the most visually striking things you see all day.
posted by quin at 6:38 AM PST - 15 comments

This needs a full screen, and preferably a dark room: Fastest Lap Around Manhattan 2013 [more inside]
posted by Joe in Australia at 5:54 AM PST - 80 comments

How do farmers deal with wasted acreage at the corners of their crop circles? Some add corner systems, so water sprayers can reach the otherwise untouched land at the edges of the sprayers' reach. But as Edible Geography points out, "ecologists are preaching the potential of pivot corners. In a simplified landscape of monoculture crop circles, the corners can restore complexity: left as native perennial grassland or managed as early successional habitat, these concave triangles can provide valuable habitat for bees, birds, and predatory insects to support crop pollination and natural pest control." A short look at the costs and benefits of pivot discards.
posted by MonkeyToes at 5:06 AM PST - 24 comments

I am not really quite sure how to describe the website MELT except to warn you to prepare to be away for a very long time. (NSFW).
Incorporating works of artists (Be sure to scroll down) both surreal and illustration and sculpters and photographers and documentaries and mixtapes and so much more.
Probably the best way to get around is to just click on the various labels.
Happy Travels
posted by adamvasco at 4:11 AM PST - 7 comments

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. Me And The Devil. Home Is Where The Hatred Is. The Bottle. [more inside]
posted by vapidave at 3:00 AM PST - 20 comments

Parkour, done similar to the style of the video game Mirror's Edge.
posted by Evernix at 8:34 PM PST - 41 comments

The Disappearance of Marco Siffredi. For those not near death, reaching the summit of the highest mountain in the world is a time of unequaled euphoria. It’s the achievement of a lifetime, the realization of a magnificent dream. But for Marco, the dream is just beginning and the summit is nothing more than a hurdle. His goal-3,000 meters of first tracks down the Hornbein-still lies before him. prev Everest
posted by allkindsoftime at 8:21 PM PST - 16 comments

The book that helped me understand my son. Author David Mitchell's introduction to The Reason I Jump, a newly-translated memoir by thirteen-year-old Naoki Higashida on what it's like to have autism.
posted by Rory Marinich at 7:47 PM PST - 13 comments

There Can Only Be One Direction. [slyt]
posted by solarion at 7:38 PM PST - 14 comments

The sound of silence - Research by Dr. Chia-Jung Tsay published in PNAS suggests that top musicians are judged as much for the visual aspects of their performances, as much as for the aural ones, regardless of the experience level of the listener or judge
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 6:54 PM PST - 22 comments

"We're encouraged, foodwise, to pay attention to contrast and balance: a little bit of salt to balance out intense sweetness, a little bit of acid to balance out a lot of rich fat, a bleach-haired goober with sunglasses on the back of his head hustling Donkey Sauce-drowned garbage-food on two different cable channels every nine minutes to balance out any confidence you had that success in life accrues to the deserving, and so on." Deadspin d/b/a Foodspin teaches us that sometimes too much is just enough.
posted by Inspector.Gadget at 6:31 PM PST - 69 comments

Kenneth Leedom and Peter Cott have been together for 58 years. In a NYTimes article, they discuss their lives, from encounters with other men during World War II, gay bath houses in the 1970s, the AIDS epidemic, and their 2011 wedding, at the ages of 86 and 87.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 5:53 PM PST - 17 comments

British market-research firm Ipsos Mori has released the results of "The largest ever global study of the best city to do business in, live in, and visit." Interactive data here, more info here.
posted by Navelgazer at 4:37 PM PST - 21 comments

A high school athlete's bizarre death in Georgia raises questions among his family and other members of their community. [more inside]
posted by Alonzo T. Calm at 4:14 PM PST - 41 comments

Politico: "The U.S. government on Friday approved Shuanghui International Holding’s bid to buy iconic U.S. pork producer Smithfield Foods in what would be the biggest Chinese takeover of a U.S. company to date." [more inside]
posted by Wordshore at 3:52 PM PST - 46 comments

One hundred years ago today, W.B. Yeats published one of his best known poems, September 1913, as a letter to the Irish Times. [more inside]
posted by rollick at 3:32 PM PST - 7 comments

On September 22, Germany will hold its 18th federal election since 1949 and the first since the European financial crisis. At the moment, the government is made up of the black/yellow coalition between the Christian Democratic Union and the Free Democratic Party, led by Angela Merkel, who have held power since 2009. The Social Democratic Party, The Left and Alliance 90/The Greens sit in opposition. [more inside]
posted by frimble at 12:01 PM PST - 37 comments

So the Toronto International Film Festival is going on as I write this. Their twitter hashtag is #TIFF13. But if you'd rather, Patton Oswalt and his followers have been making a little mischief with it, firing off a string of hilarious and brilliant never-to-be-made movies.
posted by nevercalm at 11:51 AM PST - 55 comments

The Value of Suffering by Pico Iyer [New York Times]
posted by Fizz at 10:48 AM PST - 17 comments

The problem with tracing meh over time, as with so many fleeting interjections, is that it’s terribly underrepresented in the linguistic and lexicographical literature. [more inside]
posted by whyareyouatriangle at 10:48 AM PST - 13 comments

Sheep teaches young bull to head butt, Terceira Azores
posted by andoatnp at 10:36 AM PST - 40 comments

Why You Can't Travel Back in Time and Kill Hitler. (SLio9) io9 takes on the Hitler's Time Travel Exemption Act trope, from a classic episode of The Twilight Zone to Desmond Warzel's Wikihistory. [more inside]
posted by suburbanbeatnik at 10:26 AM PST - 129 comments

Over the past couple of weeks, Wonkblog has examined the fast rising cost of college tuition in the United States and its effects on society. [more inside]
posted by reenum at 10:09 AM PST - 47 comments

Somewhere in-between the space-age bachelor pad sounds of Esquivel and the gimmicky novelty of Spike Jonze sits Mel Henke, one of the most overlooked originators of the mid-century lounge sound. While most famous for versions of All That Meat, 77 Sunset Strip, and Pennies From Heaven, his largely instrumental wink-wink-nudge-nudge album La Dolce Henke is considered his masterpiece - The Lively Ones - The Twisters - You're Driving Me Crazy - Woman In Space - Farmer John - Old McDonald Had A Girl - See The USA In Your Chevrolet - Last Night On The Back Porch (Warning, historical sexism, erotic car metaphors)
posted by The Whelk at 8:47 AM PST - 8 comments

Peter Purgathofer, an associate professor at Vienna University of Technology, built a Lego Mindstorms robot that presses "next page" on his Kindle repeatedly while it faces his laptop's webcam. The cam snaps a picture of each screen and saves it to a folder that is automatically processed through an online optical character recognition program. The result is an automated means of redigitizing DRM-crippled ebooks in a clear digital format. It's clunky compared to simply removing the DRM using common software, but unlike those DRM-circumvention tools, this setup does not violate the law.
posted by SpacemanStix at 8:37 AM PST - 50 comments

Viktor Safonkin is an artist who classifies his style as Eurosurrealism, and could be considered more in line with Hieronymus Bosch than Salvador Dalí. Fantastic Visions has more on the artist and some of his art, and you can see a simple gallery of images without titles or details on the Art Odyssey blog. A more complete gallery of work is on Safonik's Facebook page. You can also watch a short (9 min.) film exhibited at the Viktor Safonkin`s expozition in St. Petersburg's Russian Museum. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 6:35 AM PST - 3 comments

""Pastrix" is a demeaning term used to refer to female ministers by certain Christians who believe in male-only pastoral ministry. But Denver-based Lutheran Rev. Nadia Bolz-Weber, a tattooed yet traditional liturgist, has reclaimed it as a title for her brand of faith. “It was an insult, and anytime you can reclaim an insult as a good thing, you win,” says Bolz-Weber." [more inside]
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 6:18 AM PST - 22 comments

If you're curious about the Eastern Front in World War II, the Russian produced, English spoken Soviet Storm: World War II in the East is obligatory viewing and now all eighteen episodes are available on Youtube. [more inside]
posted by MartinWisse at 1:47 AM PST - 54 comments

In the final days before the New York City mayoral primary on September 10th, current mayor Michael Bloomberg is coming under attack for an article published this week in New York Magazine in which he criticizes frontrunner Bill de Blasio for running a“class-warfare and racist” campaign because of the way in which he has used “his family to gain support." [more inside]
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 5:20 PM PST - 179 comments

An interactive map from Smithsonian.com lets you compare a map of 1836 Manhattan drawn by celebrated mapmaker Joseph Colton (mentioned previously) with an aerial view of the city today.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 4:09 PM PST - 10 comments

Kelli Stapleton kept a candid blog about the struggles of raising Issy, a teenager with autism who suffers frequent violent episodes. A newspaper profile from earlier this spring detailed the family's trouble accessing the professional help Issy requires. Kelli admitted in her most recent blog post on September 3rd: "I have to admit that I’m suffering from a severe case of battle fatigue." Later that day, [Kelli's husband] received a message from Kelli that police described as "despondent". Kelli Stapleton is now under arrest on charges of attempted murder and Issy remains hospitalized after what appears to be a failed murder/suicide. Bloggers from the national autism community have responded.
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 2:59 PM PST - 188 comments

A translated version of Avicii's "Wake Me Up" recently broke the record for highest number of views for an Irish language video. It's just the most popular example of the headline-grabbing music videos being made at Coláiste Lurgan, an Irish language summer school for teenagers. Their other popular videos include An tAdh 'Nocht (Get Lucky), Tóg Amach Mé (Wagon Wheel), Pompeii, and Amhrán na gCupán (When I'm Gone). Interview with the school's manager here, setting out his mission. See more songs on YouTube and Bandcamp.
posted by rollick at 12:30 PM PST - 19 comments

Wealthy Entitlement: Income inequality undermines the fairness of a free market
posted by stp123 at 12:29 PM PST - 28 comments

Darkseid is impressed by Thanos’s coffee.
posted by bswinburn at 10:24 AM PST - 45 comments

Combining 3D scans of real life models in ultra high detail with the Oculus Rift and the Razer Hydra for movement controls to make one of the most realistic and spooky experiences in Virtual Reality [NSFW Artistic nudity] Welcome to the future. [more inside]
posted by Blasdelb at 10:19 AM PST - 67 comments

With roots in the laws of seventeenth and eighteenth-century England, intellectual property protections go back to the beginnings of capitalism itself. The online magazine Jacobin recently featured a three-part series tracing the history of property law and its contemporary manifestations. [more inside]
posted by whyareyouatriangle at 10:10 AM PST - 9 comments

To a Chinese Scrap-Metal Hunter, America's Trash Is Treasure: Johnson Zeng is a Chinese trader who travels across the U.S. in search of scrap metal. By his estimate, there are at least 100 others like him driving from scrap yard to scrap yard, right now, in search of what Americans won’t or can’t be bothered to recycle. His favorite product: wires, cables, and other kinds of copper. His purchases, millions of pounds of metal worth millions of dollars, will eventually be shipped to China. [more inside]
posted by zarq at 9:43 AM PST - 29 comments

The Mondo Moment. R. U. Sirius has published an excerpt of his upcoming book, Use Your Hallucinations: MONDO 2000 in Late 20th Century Cyberculture.
posted by zabuni at 7:40 AM PST - 64 comments

Kittens! Playing! In! Plastic Balls!
posted by The Whelk at 7:28 AM PST - 23 comments

Vice has posted the entirety of Lil' Bub and Friendz, a movie about Lil' Bub and the culture and business of online celebrity cats and memes.
posted by Pope Guilty at 5:00 AM PST - 33 comments

A relic hunter dubbed 'Indiana Bones' has lifted the lid on a macabre collection of 400-year-old jewel-encrusted skeletons unearthed in churches across Europe.
posted by empath at 1:26 AM PST - 63 comments

If someone mentions the state of Jefferson that existed in an alternate universe, the question should be: which one? The western neighbor of the Kansas Territory, the eastern portion of Texas, the later effort to split off a western portion of Texas, or the new state composed of parts of Oregon and California? [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 10:30 PM PST - 25 comments

Many years ago, I found a quarter inch audio reel in a rotting cardboard box, covered in dust, while helping my dear friend and mentor, Lighting Cameraman John B. Peters, clean up his garage. He told me it had been recorded in Vietnam during his coverage of that war. On the box, still legible, was handwritten: “Firefight, no name village, near Chu Lai, September 10, 1966, Nagra 3, 3,75 I.P.S.” John recalled that he was out with a patrol that day, and when the Vietcong ambushed them, they all had to duck for cover, but his soundman kept the audio recorder rolling throughout the duration of the fierce firefight that followed.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 9:50 PM PST - 43 comments

Lisa Frank Is Real "The reclusive artist behind the iconic brand gives a tour of her kaleidoscopic headquarters."
posted by ocherdraco at 6:43 PM PST - 61 comments

An Illustrated Book of Bad Arguments

This book is aimed at newcomers to the field of logical reasoning, particularly those who, to borrow a phrase from Pascal, are so made that they understand best through visuals.

posted by jenkinsEar at 5:59 PM PST - 48 comments

DOGS FOR SALE (SL Tumblr)
posted by emjaybee at 5:52 PM PST - 11 comments

In honor of The Monkees recently concluded pseudo-victory-lap-quasi-memorial-for-the-late-David Jones North American tour, the first of which to have Michael Nesmith anywhere near it in over 20 years; here is the last time the famously reluctant Monkee had anything to do with the rest of the boys, 1997's ABC television special Hey Hey It's The Monkees. [more inside]
posted by mediocre at 3:50 PM PST - 57 comments

Daft Punk's "Get Lucky" performed in Mario Paint Composer (SLYT)
posted by supercrayon at 3:39 PM PST - 19 comments

93 Still (Gummy Soul Remix, free download) In celebration of the 20th anniversary of 93 'Til Infinity, Souls of Mischief graciously opened their vaults to give Gummy Soul the exclusive acapellas of their classic album, to remix for the first time ever. [more inside]
posted by KokuRyu at 2:10 PM PST - 16 comments

Disch died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound on July 4, 2008, and, if one so desires, Endzone can be read as a suicide letter. But then, so could his entire body of work; the reduction of any writer's output, whether it be that of Sarah Kane, David Foster Wallace or Hunter S. Thompson, to an explanation of his or her suicide divests it of intention and frisson. It reduces the novelist to a patient of post-mortem psychotherapy. Clute, reversing this impulse, wrote that Disch took his own life "to demonstrate that he really had meant what he had been saying over [his] career." -- Brendan Byrne reviews the last work Thomas M. Disch completed before his suicide: his Livejournal.
posted by MartinWisse at 2:10 PM PST - 13 comments

ARMSGLOBE: an interactive visualization of the international trade in small arms (generally defined as lethal weapons for use by individuals) from 1992 to 2011. Click on an individual country or type its name into the search box to examine it separately. Uncheck the boxes in the lower right corner to narrow down by category. Drag the slider at the bottom or click the graph button to view change over time. May take a while to load on slower connections. [more inside]
posted by Nomyte at 1:46 PM PST - 5 comments

Football and the fall of Jack Kerouac.
posted by xowie at 1:12 PM PST - 8 comments

because I said I would is a website run by Alex Sheen. It's dedicated to the memory of his father, whose legacy to his son was the importance of keeping one's promises to oneself and to others. Alex sends promise cards to anyone in the world who wants them-- simple pieces of paper on which to write a pledge or commitment, a way to stay true to your word. Last month, Alex received a message from a young man with a unique confession, and decided to reach out to him.
posted by bayani at 12:50 PM PST - 24 comments