MetaFilter

The Food Timeline: Want to know when people first started eating watermelon? This site claims to tell you (roughly). I've no idea how accurate their dates are but this is a grand place to surf foodstuffs. (Also links to some ancient, ancient recipes that sound mouth-watering.)
posted by realjanetkagan at 10:15 PM PST - 14 comments

The Collective Unconsciousness Project is a cool Flash website that allows you to "travel through the dream database in a fluid and exploratory manner. Your travel will be based on connections of ideas and themes, and will be formed by both your interactions and the connections that are created. You have a limited amount of control, yet everything is related somehow."
posted by ashbury at 9:56 PM PST - 5 comments

Gigo-what? Europe's first brothel for women goes bust.
posted by lostbyanecho at 9:10 PM PST - 8 comments

Fear as the latest anti file-sharing campaign MSNBC has a whopper of an article intending to scare the poop out of users of file-sharing programs with names like Gnotella, BearShare, Morpheus etc. They can't shut the system down 'honestly', smirk, so they're beginning the fear campaign. The article is titled "Is your computer inviting voyeurs? Embarrassing, private text files find their way onto the Net". It details some frightening examples of acidentally sharing sensitive information, a lot of which seem farfetched; FBI documents, Korean military files, bank account numbers with pins.. If the courts can't stop file sharing, maybe fear will.
posted by giantkicks at 8:56 PM PST - 11 comments

A botched call late in the 4th... and now New England is in the AFC championship game. A hometown call?
posted by msposner at 8:43 PM PST - 45 comments

In light of the recent pets eating people thread, here's an article about 17th and 18th century polyphagi, people who ate just about anything, and I do mean anything.
posted by kittyloop at 8:41 PM PST - 4 comments

A new way to get the old snip snip. A Johns Hopkins researcher has developed a new vasectomy technique that uses ultrasound to clog up the tubes without any incision. Of course, they've only done on dogs so far. On the other hand, the article also claims that the procedure could be done by non-physicians. Do-it-yourself? Personally, I want to make sure that the person permanently altering my family jewels does have that M.D. sheepskin on the wall.
posted by KirkJobSluder at 6:23 PM PST - 9 comments

Is your toy as cool as the Ad Guy?
posted by raaka at 6:09 PM PST - 3 comments

As much as I love the taste of Ben & Jerry's this has got to stop. I'm sure this new flavor tastes terrific, but B&J have got to quit naming flavors after such lame bands. As an alternative, I suggest Kiss Krunch: Rasberry Whirl Ice Cream with little chocolate tongues. Fire away with yours...
posted by jonmc at 4:28 PM PST - 175 comments

Is your dog as yummy as Slate thinks it is?
posted by adrober at 4:24 PM PST - 19 comments

Is Your Cat As Smart As He Thinks He Is? If so, he could be in the movies. To find out if that's Einstein or Marie Curie staring at you over there, submit the beast to Hollywood Paws' impressive I.Q. test. (Dogs are su
posted by MiguelCardoso at 3:26 PM PST - 17 comments

Do you want to be a slum lord? Well you can, with just $2,100,000, you can own enough guns and cheap broken tv sets to last a lifetime. Yes, you even get to own their dirty laundry as well. "ALL OUTSTANDING LOANS ( ACCOUNTS RECEIVABLE ) $200,000.00 BRINGING IN 20% PER MONTH." I am sure that you can walk up to these people and collect right away ;-)
posted by outsider at 1:38 PM PST - 11 comments

Chinese presidential plane bugged with advanced satellite spying devices. Could this be a rerun of the spyplane incident? (News link also at the Financial Times and Yahoo! News)
posted by dai at 11:01 AM PST - 7 comments

"Any sufficiently advanced form of technology is indistinguishable from magic." -- Arthur C. Clarke
Apparently we've reached that point in the US.
posted by Steven Den Beste at 7:29 AM PST - 43 comments

Are you tone deaf? The official name for tone deafness, or the inability to distinguish between tones, is "amusia." NPR has been running a series of programs lately dealing with musical disabilities and researchers are convinced it is due to genetics if there is no physical damage. RealPlayer required to hear the tone tests on the site. (Link spotted at girlhacker.com
posted by Lynsey at 12:27 AM PST - 25 comments