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3 Hive This is a great source for free, legal and cool mp3's. The folks at 3hive have put together a great collection of links to bands and the free mp3's they have available, including a short description/bio of each artist. New posts appear almost every day making this an excellent source for new music. Radio who needs it!
posted by mule at 11:50 PM PST - 8 comments

Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sleep (But Were Too Afraid To Ask). Circadiana is a new specialty blog dedicated to chronobiology. As a night owl (I'm posting this link at 2:45 AM), I look forward to many late nights reading this site.
posted by painquale at 11:43 PM PST - 14 comments

The next step? And so on... Seymour Hersh, the fellow that broke the Abu Ghraib story (more) is now saying in the New Yorker that the US has been operating covertly in Iran (and possibly as many as 9 other mid-east and S. Asian countries). As this BBC article says "Mr Hersh could be wrong. But he has a series of scoops to his name, including the details of the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal last year. His track record suggests that he should be taken seriously."
posted by edgeways at 10:13 PM PST - 120 comments

Read J.D. Salinger's "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" if you're bored at work this week (or stuck in a Mexican hotel). And when you're done with that dig into the rest (with a couple of exceptions) of Salinger's published work.
posted by cmaxmagee at 9:15 PM PST - 50 comments

With all of the talk and posts about itunes, the RIAA, P2P, etc. I thought that I would take this opportunity to point out that there are hundreds of great, free music files online that are legal to download. Sites like Soundloads which posts links to new music every day, Garageband which features up and coming bands, and CNet's music site that lets anyone and everyone upload their files to share with the masses, all feature some great music. And the creators of the music are asking you to download the files for free and add them to your playlists.

I've also downloaded some good music from epitonic.com, purevolume.com, audiostreet, even blogs can be a good source of new, free, legal music downloads. While you're not gonna find the latest big media pop diva or boy band, you can find good music if you take the time to look a little.
posted by copacetix at 8:27 PM PST - 17 comments

Naïve in Thailand: The misadventures of an unprepared 43-year-old Brit who drops everything to try and help with tsunami rebuilding. Pet peeve? "The only real irritation has been the American Christian volunteers."
posted by NortonDC at 8:24 PM PST - 88 comments

Empty your pockets before attending the Presidential Inauguration. Among items forbidden are pocket tools, explosives, animals -- and in case they forgot to mention something, "any other items at the discretion of the security screeners that may pose a potential safety hazard"
posted by ThePrawn at 5:39 PM PST - 50 comments

Chika Honda, falsely imprisoned for ten years by Australian authorities for heroin smuggling, and never pardoned, tells her story in her own words [Real Audio] in this Walkley Award-nominated documentary. This is a wrenching story of incompetence by the federal police, legal aid services, media-influenced juries and the problem of translation in legal investigations. Listen to her story and decide on her innocence for yourself.
posted by DirtyCreature at 4:19 PM PST - 6 comments

Blogs contribute to political reform in Iran (New York Times): Former vice-president of Iran, Mohammad Ali Abtahi, said that he learned through the Internet about the huge gap between government officials and the younger generation. "We do not understand each other and cannot have a dialogue," he said. "As government officials, we receive a lot of confidential reports about what goes on in society. But I have felt that I learned a lot more about people and the younger generation by reading their Web logs and receiving about 40 to 50 e-mails every day. This is so different than reading about society in those bulletins from behind our desks."
posted by hoder at 2:52 PM PST - 7 comments

A fun time waster for anyone stuck in a Mexican hotel room, like me, or bored sitting at home. A joining of del.icio.us and flickr. Related to this askme
posted by mss at 1:06 PM PST - 7 comments

Carnivore, the gold standard for conspiracy theory, has apparently been mothballed. An interesting element of this is that Carnivore has been removed from service not because it is invasive of civil liberties, but rather because it has failed to perform against commercially-available monitoring technologies. Of course, since we do not know what those technologies *are*, it may be that they have built into them considerations of individual rights to privacy that Carnivore could not be altered to respect. However, given the drift of the US on matters of data privacy, this seems unlikely... So, what are the programmes that do it better than Carnivore? What do they have to offer that Carniviore doesn't, or is it just the ISPs are now offering information straight to the government? And does this mean that it is no longer fashionable to append long strings of exciting-sounding nouns to emails? (Apologies if this is old news to the more plugged-in - this report has only just been released under FOI)
posted by tannhauser at 11:08 AM PST - 27 comments

An in-depth profile of Generation X dads. As one myself, I think it gets most things right. However, if you want to take paternity leaves and go home early and spend more time w/family, it helps to have money to actually do that!
posted by braun_richard at 10:52 AM PST - 29 comments

The real Kraftwerk pocket calculator! With a sound sample of it playing 'Computerwelt'. I never knew this existed!
posted by starscream at 10:23 AM PST - 16 comments

There are many different types of sundials, from the very large to the small and portable. Some of the more unusual specimens include the spectacular new Sundial Bridge in Redding, CA, topiary and garden sundials in Britain, and, perhaps most lovely, stained glass sundials, rare now, but more common from the 16th through the 19th centuries.
posted by madamjujujive at 8:54 AM PST - 23 comments

Northumberland Rock Art. An archive of Neolithic and early Bronze Age rock carvings from north east England. I'm browsing by motif, but you can make your own!
posted by steef at 8:07 AM PST - 4 comments

Extra Oomph. A bit like Ralph Stedman in style, Linda Zachs gives us her beautiful, her bizarre, her funny, and her inspirational. and sometimes her commercial.
posted by es_de_bah at 6:21 AM PST - 8 comments