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If you live in the Boston area and would like to attend science, technology, math, or engineering lectures, you'll find Fred Hapgood's exhaustive and continually-updated list of Selected Lectures on Science and Engineering in the Boston Area very useful. (Here's his list of sources.) Perhaps you know of a list like this for lectures in your locality or field of preference?
posted by not_on_display at 10:47 PM PST - 6 comments

Radical Librarianship: how ninja librarians are ensuring patrons' electronic privacy [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 9:51 PM PST - 38 comments

The 2014 Festival of Bad Ad Hoc Hypotheses, or BAHFest, is a month away. If you're not sure what is in store, you can watch the entire festival (1 hr 32 min), or jump to the winning presentation: Tomer Ullman: The Crying Game (Q&A), or why babies are so annoying and the competitive advantage crying babies likely gave to warriors from times past. "I don't want to get too much into the technical details, so let's not." [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 8:27 PM PST - 13 comments

Wonder Woman’s Secret Past: Feminism, free love, and a superhero’s real powers. [Via]
posted by homunculus at 8:08 PM PST - 14 comments

Bruce Dern is a life-long runner. Three interviews with Runner's World discuss his obsession with running and how it interplays with his acting. From 1978, Running Is a Hard Act to Follow:

In the case of certain roles such as The King of Marvin Gardens, where the character stays with me for months after the movie is over, it is hard to get rid of him. It’s a frustration of the character. I think the same thing is true of running. All of my acting is on the theory of working from the inside out. Everything happens inside and then it comes out and the person grows out of that. Well, the running is the same thing for me. It happens from the inside out. It's the need and the desire that then makes the body go out and do it. And the desire to improve.

[more inside]
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 7:48 PM PST - 17 comments

A Catholic woman grapples with the death of her sister's newborn baby. [more inside]
posted by Charity Garfein at 7:43 PM PST - 19 comments

"10 Lessons From Real-Life Revolutions That Fictional Dystopias Ignore"...because sometimes the biggest problems with Science Fiction is less 'getting the Science wrong' and more 'getting the Social Science wrong'.
posted by oneswellfoop at 7:23 PM PST - 30 comments

Unfortunately it has only just finished, but a a live first-ever autopsy was performed on the second colossal squid ever to be found intact, by the Te Papa and Auckland University of Technology. The first colossal squid to be found is on display at the same university (site down at the moment, possibly due to traffic; archive.org cached site). Direct link to 86 minute Youtube video. Currently there is no word on the disposition of the squid remains.
posted by Evilspork at 5:50 PM PST - 21 comments

Everyday is Sunday (Tous les jours dimanche) is a series of surreal pictures taken by photographer Manolo Mylonas in the poor and tumultuous Department of Seine-Saint-Denis, where he lives (interview in French). For those who wonder about the sheep herd on a concrete ramp, they are part of an experiment in urban agriculture (in French, other pictures). There's no explanation for the horse on the balcony, but this is probably how it got there.
posted by elgilito at 4:45 PM PST - 8 comments

Women are called upon every day to prove our right to participate in music on the basis of our authenticity—or perceived lack thereof. Our credentials are constantly being checked—you say you like a band you've only heard a couple of times? Prepare to answer which guitarist played on a specific record and what year he left the band. But don't admit you haven't heard them, either, because they'll accuse you of only saying you like that genre to look cool. Then they'll ask you if you've ever heard of about five more bands, just to prove that you really know nothing. This happens so often that it feels like dudes meet in secret to work on a regimented series of tests they can use to determine whether or not we deserve to be here. The "fake geek girl" test is one, door guys stopping female musicians carrying gear to make sure they're actually in the band and not just somebody's girlfriend is another. Big rock magazines that interview male musicians about gear and female musicians about sexual harassment—that's up there too.

—Meredith Graves talks about musical authenticity and gender, taking Andrew WK and Lana Del Rey as her examples. Graves is in the noise rock band Perfect Pussy. Here's a video for their song "I", a live performance and a short segment where Graves and bandmate Ray McAndrew buy books.
posted by Kattullus at 4:37 PM PST - 55 comments

The Disney Food Blog offers in-depth news, reviews, and information about food and restaurants in Disney’s parks, resorts, and cruise ships, along with reviews and photographs of and about anything food-related in Disney parks, resorts, movies, and events. Disney food FAQs. Disney food news.
posted by Room 641-A at 3:11 PM PST - 50 comments

To highlight the vulnerabilities of an unsecured web interface in Canon Pixma printers that allows the uploading of arbitrary binaries as firmware, information security consultant Michael Jordan has made a printer run Doom (video) as part of a presentation at 44Con 2014. [via]
posted by figurant at 3:10 PM PST - 30 comments

Circle of Fifths - 2048 Infinite
posted by boo_radley at 2:53 PM PST - 24 comments

The SummHarry, all the Harry Potter books summarized in cartoon form by Lucy "Stop Paying Attention" Knisley. Full size; previously on the blue.
posted by Halloween Jack at 1:57 PM PST - 47 comments

Every competitive cooking show in America, ranked by the A.V. Club
posted by psoas at 12:56 PM PST - 110 comments

In 2004 Joseph Kahn directed the hyper-kinetic, poorly reviewed motorcycle action movie Torque. It was Kahn's directorial debut, and though he was tapped for (one of many) failed Neuromancer adaptations, he devoted the next six years to a largely self financed project: the horror-comedy farce Detention. Noted cultural critic Steven Shaviro discusses in this essay why Detention, despite also being reviewed negatively, is one of his favorite movies of the decade. Shaviro's review contains major spoilers for the plot, and it's probably best to go into the movie blind. A brief non-spoiler synopsis is available below the jump. [more inside]
posted by codacorolla at 12:39 PM PST - 25 comments

Will Self takes responsibility ... [more inside]
posted by philip-random at 11:19 AM PST - 95 comments

Investment firm Starboard Value is unhappy with Olive Garden— unhappy enough to issue a scathing 294-page PDF enumerating all of the restaurant's sins. [more inside]
posted by Faint of Butt at 10:30 AM PST - 248 comments

We Are a Camera: Experience and memory in the age of GoPro.
posted by chunking express at 10:18 AM PST - 15 comments

PodCastle 328: The Old Woman With No Teeth

When The Old Woman With No Teeth decided to have children, she didn’t go about it in the usual way. Well, really, what else could you expect from The Old Woman With No Teeth? If she ever did anything the usual way, even boiling a pot of water, the world might start spinning widdershins on its axis.

"Now you just stop that. I can read perfectly well, you impudent ragger. Set down what I told you, and don’t believe all the stories you’ve heard about me."

There are many stories about The Old Woman With No Teeth, but people should not believe all of them. The most popular one is that she wore away her teeth by chewing a tunnel to the six-sided world. Nobody knows if this story is true. Many people have looked for the passageway she is supposed to have gnawed through reality, but none of the venturers have managed to pinpoint it.

"None of the ones who’ve come back, you mean. Silly bastards."

[more inside]
posted by Lexica at 9:22 AM PST - 7 comments

"Where the Wild Roses Grow" (live at Koko) (slyt): Cave and Minogue perform their duet for the first time in fifteen years.
posted by mr. digits at 9:17 AM PST - 10 comments

The Nuart Festival underway in Stavanger, Norway offers "a new breed of art exhibition that is neither institutionalised nor commercial, giving the artists free reign to express themselves to the full." And to back that talk up, they offer the entire town of Stavanger, Norway as the artists' canvas. Those of us who can't get to Norway can check out the growing gallery of works being populated through October 12th.
posted by cross_impact at 8:50 AM PST - 2 comments

"The server comes over to your table after you've finished your cheesecake, carrying a deck of cards. He or she asks you to cut it and pick any card. Each of the cards has a different chocolate flavor on it, such as lime or raspberry. The waiter then asks you to flip over your cheesecake plate – and there, right in front of you, is a chocolate that corresponds to your card.

They do this mind-blowing trick to every single customer who eats there." The 6 Most Pretentious Dishes Rich People Pay Money For from Cracked.
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 8:38 AM PST - 90 comments

"Sexual assault is alarmingly common in the U.S. military, and more than half of the victims are men. According to the Pentagon, thirty-eight military men are sexually assaulted every single day. These are the stories you never hear—because the culprits almost always go free, the survivors rarely speak, and no one in the military or Congress has done enough to stop it." A tough read from GQ. Could be triggering.
posted by showbiz_liz at 7:59 AM PST - 44 comments

We can take advantage of the dense and real-time nature of our system to perform novel Augmented Virtuality (a.k.a Mixed Reality) interactions... A user can choose a set of planes to alter the original input with an application display, allowing for instance to read a Facebook Wall on a real wall. The user can still safely navigate an environment without fear of collisions and perform tasks like zooming in/out as natural as walking closer/further from surfaces.

-Dense Planar SLAM (Simultaneous Localization And Mapping)
posted by griphus at 7:27 AM PST - 13 comments

Two years ago, Notch of Minecraft fame, posted a tweet that mockingly said "Anyway, my price is two billion dollars. Give me two billion dollars, and I'll endorse your crap. Earlier last week, rumors started going around that Microsoft was interested in buying Minecraft and its developers, Mojang. And today, it is official. Microsoft has bought Minecraft and Mojang for 2.5 billion dollars.
posted by ymgve at 6:58 AM PST - 302 comments

Lydia Davis on Madame Bovary, Nabokov's Marginalia, and Translation: [YouTube] In this video from the Center for the Art of Translation, author and translator Lydia Davis discusses how she used Nabokov's margin notes from his edition of Madame Bovary to aid her own translation. She also discusses in-depth translation choices that she made. A full audio recording of this event can be hard on the Center's website.
posted by Fizz at 5:41 AM PST - 9 comments

There are many foreign players in English football today, but back in the 70s and 80s there were only a few. Some became club legends, others had disappointing spells with their club. This Daily Mail article has lots of lovely 70s and 80s style pictures of many of these players, including Ardilles, Grobelaar, and, of course, a young Alex Sabella.
posted by marienbad at 3:27 AM PST - 5 comments

The thing about ableism is that it’s everywhere, and it’s incredibly common, and we don’t even realize it. It’s in the books we read, and in our daily lives. Ableism is that belief that everyone who is able-bodied is “normal” and everyone else is abnormal. Abelism is probably one of the most common kinds of –ism’s, and it rarely gets talked about.

The language of disability and why it matters.
posted by MartinWisse at 3:23 AM PST - 62 comments

Cmd.fm is no frills, command line music streaming. For the geek music lover in all of us. [more inside]
posted by zardoz at 1:20 AM PST - 24 comments