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Speaker Touts Stripping to 8th Graders as a lucrative career, causing a collective freakout in our sex obsessed culture. If your considering stripping as possible career path here are some things that you should know.
posted by thedailygrowl at 9:23 PM PST - 74 comments

the stanford prison experiment,first posted in Feb 2001, can now be compared to the actions of soldiers who have served in Abu Ghraib. It's an illustration of how one can get carried away with a role and not act as one would normally. No, not an excuse. Thank you Plep!
posted by snsranch at 8:00 PM PST - 35 comments

The Salvador Option --sending Special Forces teams to advise, support and possibly train Iraqi squads, to target Sunni insurgents and their sympathizers, even across the border into Syria, in imitation of our actions in El Salvador. It remains unclear, however, whether this would be a policy of assassination or so-called "snatch" operations, in which the targets are sent to secret facilities for interrogation. More here, including this: In Iraq, in fact, as in many other places where the United States has tried to train ethical armies to fight dirty wars, the Iraqi troops are tacitly expected to do what American troops won’t. A fundamental purpose of the upcoming elections on January 30 is to create democratic legitimacy for whatever extreme measures the newly organized military decides to take.
posted by amberglow at 7:25 PM PST - 18 comments

Global dimming. It's official. Particulate pollution in the air has decreased the amount of sunlight reaching the earth. How much? A fraction of a percent? Try 10% globally over the past 50 years. Worse yet, global dimming is thought to be counteracting CO2 and its greenhouse effect, lessening the worldwide temperature increase called global warming. Why's that bad? Because, in the coming decades, particulate pollution is expected to level off, while CO2 emissions are expected to rise strongly, multiplying the effects of global warming as we know it. "That means a temperature rise of 10 degrees Celsius by 2100 could be on the cards, giving the UK a climate like that of North Africa, and rendering many parts of the world uninhabitable." Holy fucking shit! [via kottke]
posted by scarabic at 7:18 PM PST - 74 comments

Rent-a-Midget. "Think about the best party you've ever been to, wouldn't it have been better if there was a midget there? Another boring day at the office, why not have one of our little people go down and bring some life in there!"
posted by cedar at 6:19 PM PST - 16 comments

Planes, Trains, and Plantains, or the Greatest Essay Ever Written.
posted by swift at 6:07 PM PST - 27 comments

Everybody loves Magical Trevor. (flash)
posted by scrim at 4:55 PM PST - 22 comments

In 1995, Microprose released Master of Magic, a game best described as Magic: the Gathering meets Civilization. Despite a daunting list of bugs, the game developed a strong following. It's one of the top 150 games of all time (nevermind the date!), and easily one of the best turn based strategy games ever. Lots of people would love to see this franchise revived, and the good people at Stardock [makers of Galactic Civilizations] are trying to do just that. Godspeed!
posted by absalom at 4:42 PM PST - 29 comments

Concentration Test NSFW! Nekkidness Inside!
Friday fun, not work safe in any way and contains nudity mostly directed at the male population or anyone who likes boobs.
A new take on the old "Follow the Ball" game. Also in German and Danish.
posted by fenriq at 3:23 PM PST - 38 comments

Whatever happened to Jordan? This is perhaps the most thought-out dissent regarding Michael Jordan as sports god I've ever read. I have to say I agree, even though I was a Bulls fan growing up. What did he ever really stand for?
posted by Leege at 2:04 PM PST - 52 comments

Kitty the screen cleaner: FridayFlashFilter fluff. Works better than a lint-free cloth. [via the hotlinks]
posted by fatllama at 1:25 PM PST - 21 comments

Mapping the Global Future: Report of the National Intelligence Council's 2020 Project. Explore alternative futures, by creating own scenarios for global changes within the next 15 years.
posted by Gyan at 11:07 AM PST - 9 comments

Do you consider yourself a latter-day "beatnik"? Even young fans of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg proudly christen themselves with the tag beatnik these days, apparently unaware that word was originally coined as a term of ridicule by San Francisco columnist Herb Caen. "Beat" was indeed used by Kerouac to denote both "beaten down" and "beatitude" -- a state of revelation. He first heard the word spoken by a Times Square hustler and writer named Herbert Huncke; then another writer, John Clellon Holmes, popularized the term "Beat" in a New York Times article headlined "This is the Beat Generation." But the original Beats did not approve of the term "beatnik" -- combining "beat" with the Russian "Sputnik," as if to suggest that the Beat writers were both "out there" and vaguely Communist -- as this hilarious dialogue [note: MP3 link] between a very young Ginsberg, anthropologist Margaret Mead, and an excruciatingly square talk-radio host makes plain.
posted by digaman at 11:05 AM PST - 45 comments

Jennifer Aniston explains everything in her blog. Well...um...probably not. But the interesting thing about this blog is how many of the people in the comments section assume it's really her. Odd.
posted by braun_richard at 10:23 AM PST - 44 comments

Yet another dead microbiologist. Why was Joeng Im of the University of Missouri, a 72 year old protein chemist, stabbed to death, stuffed in the trunk of his car, and burned? Was it a random act of violence? Was it a former student bent on revenge? Or is this biologist merely following in the footsteps of 40 other microbiologists and other scientists who have mysteriously died in the past 4 years? Scientists like David Kelly, Steven Mostow, Ian Langford, , Don C. Wiley, David Wynn-Williams, Michael Perich, Gene Mallove, and dozens of other scientists? Is it too presumptuous, too "tinfoil hat" to suppose that someone is killing off the microbiologists of the world, for some nefarious purpose?
posted by Sir Mildred Pierce at 10:07 AM PST - 46 comments

Ship shape? Welcome aboard the SS United States. Her maiden voyage was July 7, 1952, where she set a trans-Atlantic record which still stands. Her passenger list included such luminaries as Marlon Brando, Salvador Dali and Harry Truman. Several sites document the effort to save her from being sold for scrap or sunk. Far from her former glory, she now lies at anchor in the Delaware River in Philadelphia, a sad counterpart to her former self.
posted by fixedgear at 9:53 AM PST - 25 comments

It worked! Huygens has successfully landed on Saturn's moon Titan and the Cassini orbiter is sending good data back to Earth as I type. Isn't it amazing how we can take a probe the size of a compact car, send it on a 7 year journey in the most inhospitable environment imaginable, deploy a sub-probe that has been dormant for that entire time and land it where we had planned on another solar body so far away that it takes 67 minutes to get a signal back and forth. Exploration and research has never been so cool.
posted by tgrundke at 9:52 AM PST - 37 comments

Jorma Kaukonen shares his thoughts on his former bandmate's recent death
Drummer Spencer Dryden of Airplane dies. Dryden recorded on a number of the Airplane's most famous albums, "Surrealistic Pillow"; "After Bathing At Baxter's"; the live "Bless Its Pointed Little Head"; "Crown Of Creation"; and "Volunteers." Read the CNN article.
posted by turtlegirl at 9:37 AM PST - 10 comments

Into the realm of Henry Darger When Henry Darger died in Chicago on April 13, 1973, he was a destitute man whose final days were spent at a home for the elderly. Now, 30 years later, Darger ranks among the greatest outsider artists America has ever seen. Found in the astounding clutter of Darger's one-room apartment was a 15,000-page fantasy epic, bound by hand in 15 volumes, titled "The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What Is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion." Along with this were three separate volumes filled with 300 drawings, including 87 multi-sheet horizontal panels, some 12 feet long with drawings on both sides. The discovery of Darger's NSFW work spawned numerous books, a play, a British rock band (the Vivian Girls), and an excellent y2karl MetaFilter post. And now there's also Jessica Yu's documentary "In the Realms of the Unreal: The Mystery of Henry Darger," a portrait of the reclusive artist that has been shortlisted for the upcoming Academy Award nominations. Again, Darger's art can be disturbing and must be considered not safe for work (more inside)
posted by matteo at 9:36 AM PST - 30 comments

Why the Mac Mini may signal the end of Apple as a traditional computer company. Jobs might well be looking beyond Apple's role as a niche computer maker with this new product.
posted by clevershark at 8:55 AM PST - 101 comments

Friday flash frustration. Along the same lines as the Hi Q game I used to play as a kid, and equally addictive. I'm not sure what speaks more about my IQ: that I can only get 3 balls left, or that I can't stop playing. Ripley's has several other games as well. There goes Friday.
posted by howling fantods at 8:41 AM PST - 16 comments

Fabulous images of the Moscow Metro underground, also known as "the people's palaces". Click "M"s on the entry map to view gorgeous (often architecturally surreal) panoramic images, and visit the picture gallery for sweet details. Via Jorgen at Viewropa.
posted by taz at 7:37 AM PST - 24 comments

Testing the limits of credit card receipt signatures. Are there any?
posted by DBAPaul at 6:53 AM PST - 62 comments

Throw paper in the bin game. - Satisfying.
posted by kenaman at 6:08 AM PST - 25 comments

The Trip Receptacleswas a series of three 3-hour shows consisting of all-psychedelic, all-entheogen radio, featuring names like Leary, Grof, Capra, McKenna and more. Nearly four hours of shows on mp3. [via FutureHi].
posted by moonbird at 4:49 AM PST - 23 comments