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Using publicly available data and open source tools to find answers to questions about Los Angeles. What are the most expensive pieces of land in LA County? Which of these has the most expensive “improvement”, or building? What is the assessed value of Dodger Stadium? What are the most expensive cities by area in LA County? Who owns the most land? What percentage of the land in the city of LA is devoted to public space? where is the geographic center of LA County? [more inside]
posted by jjwiseman at 9:59 PM PST - 10 comments

Reddit user TeaDranks has made a map of the world resizing every country in proportion to its population. The results are fascinating. NPR has a look. As originally seen on Reddit.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 7:58 PM PST - 107 comments

Dave's Mapper automatically generates tiled RPG/adventure game maps by recombining tiles submitted by artists, with a pile of customization map generation options. Have fun and be inspired, or submit your own tiles.
posted by Jimbob at 7:17 PM PST - 14 comments

A San Francisco deputy public defender was handcuffed and arrested at the Hall of Justice after she objected to city police officers questioning her client outside a courtroom, an incident that her office called outrageous and police officials defended as appropriate. [more inside]
posted by standardasparagus at 5:42 PM PST - 113 comments

An associate professor of biology with two children speaks more negatively about the effects of balancing work and family on his career: “It's a disaster.” [1]

[more inside]
posted by en forme de poire at 5:41 PM PST - 75 comments

My cat is sad because . . .
posted by jason's_planet at 5:25 PM PST - 18 comments

It’s primarily about joining the conversations that are happening in this comics community of ours, helping to support and amplify those messages, and encouraging others to join. I love this industry. I’ve been working in it, when I’ve had the good fortune to have the opportunities, since I was like 17 years old. To see the way the industry has evolved in even the last few years is amazing–we’re seeing things (slowly!) become more representative. We’re ahead of the curve in many ways in comics and we’re also behind the curve in many ways. - Boom Studios Editor-in-Chief Matt Gagnon talks to Comics Alliance about Push Comics Forward, "a movement to actively shape what the comics industry SHOULD look like in 10 years."
posted by Artw at 4:09 PM PST - 16 comments

WWE, the Royal Rumble, Corporate Entertainment Culture, And When It All Goes Wrong.
posted by josher71 at 3:06 PM PST - 108 comments

Your Son Is Deceased The shooting of Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri, looked almost routine to people in Albuquerque. The city has one of the highest rates in the country of fatal shootings by police, but no officer has been indicted. Of the sixty-three officers who joined the Albuquerque police force in 2007, ten eventually shot people.
posted by joedan at 2:19 PM PST - 39 comments

A documentary-esque, full-length music video for Africa Express's rendition of Terry Riley's In C.
The recording includes: Adama Koita on kamel n’goni; Alou Coulibaly on Calabash; Andi Toma on assorted percussion and kalimba; André d Ridder on violin, baritone-guitar, and kalimba, as well as conducting; Badou Mbaye (perhaps) on djembe and other percussion; Brian Eno, Bijou, and Olugbenga on vox; Cheick Diallo on flutes; Damon Albarn on melodica; Defily Sako and Modibo Diawara on kora; Guindo Sala on imzad; Kalifa Koné and Mémé Koné on balafon; and Nick Zinner and Jeff Wootton on guitar.
Olugbenga's diary of the trip. The WSJ on the group's origins. Previously
posted by Going To Maine at 2:12 PM PST - 15 comments

Are You Internet Sexual?[NSFW]
Welcome to Chaturbate[NSFW], where live-cam performers engage in the wild and the weird. But watch it long enough and you realize that social media has created a whole new sexual persuasion. So, how “internet sexual” are you?
posted by davidstandaford at 2:10 PM PST - 29 comments

Youtube user dotflist has a playlist collecting classic TV themes and openings ....except something seems to be slightly off
posted by The Whelk at 2:05 PM PST - 30 comments

From the King of Clickbait to the "President" of Instagram to the Parody Twitter Illuminati...As The Washington Post says: "Everyone's stealing jokes online--Why doesn't anyone care?"
posted by Potomac Avenue at 1:49 PM PST - 36 comments

"'I'm not that kind of guy. He was a physical man,' Hackman said of Popeye [Doyle] in the Ebert interview. 'We had to go back and re-shoot the first two days of scenes because I hadn't gotten into the character enough. I wasn't physical enough.'" (Steven Hyden's piece on actor Gene Hackman at Grantland.) [more inside]
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 1:37 PM PST - 40 comments

Medical equipment recovered from wreck of Queen Anne's Revenge Marine archaeologists have found evidence of medical equipment used to heal the sick and wounded on board the pirate captain's flagship, the Queen Anne's Revenge. [more inside]
posted by Michele in California at 12:50 PM PST - 24 comments

A French institute has collected a series of rarely seen videos on the 1979 Iranian revolution, among other things on almost any topic. [more inside]
posted by hoder at 12:30 PM PST - 18 comments

Atrocity Tourism in Phnom Penh
posted by the man of twists and turns at 12:25 PM PST - 17 comments

"A Guideline of Performing Ibadah at the International Space Station (ISS)"
posted by cmchap at 11:25 AM PST - 42 comments

Seatylock, a successful kickstarter, is a clever, high-strength bicycle lock that lives inside your bike seat. [more inside]
posted by quin at 9:25 AM PST - 97 comments

No one in this convoy is looking for a fight. They’re mostly logistics guys, the United Van Lines of the U.S. Army. Their mission is to pack up the last of the gear from Combat Outpost Chamkani so that the place can be handed over to the Afghan army. America’s longest war is over for U.S. troops for the most part. All these guys want to do is bug on out.
posted by Chrysostom at 8:49 AM PST - 32 comments

Darrell Winfield, the “real” Marlboro Man, died on January 12th, aged 85 (SLEconomist)
posted by Bentobox Humperdinck at 8:13 AM PST - 21 comments

The University of Michigan Library, the University of Oxford's Bodleian Libraries and ProQuest have made public more than 25,000 manually transcribed texts from 1473-1700 — the first 200 years of the printed book. Full text access. Multiple format downloads, including ePUB. Or just download the entire corpus. [more inside]
posted by Bobby Rijndael at 7:12 AM PST - 34 comments

Perpetual Pizza. Also available a stand-alone GIF. That is all.
posted by filthy light thief at 7:03 AM PST - 39 comments

Holly Brockwell has requested voluntary sterilisation four times in the last three years, and she's been refused every time because she's under 30 and doesn't have any children. [more inside]
posted by terretu at 6:44 AM PST - 309 comments

Yesterday, the leadership of the Church of Latter-Day Saints announced support for "some legal anti-discrimination protections for LGBT people".

Though church officials emphasized that there was no change in doctrine, the move went further than other traditional faith groups have by placing religious freedom and gay equality on an equal moral footing.

posted by clawsoon at 4:42 AM PST - 144 comments

This fundamental lesson is conveyed by a metric known as the number needed to treat, or N.N.T. Developed in the 1980s, the N.N.T. tells us how many people must be treated for one person to derive benefit. An N.N.T. of one would mean every person treated improves and every person not treated fails to, which is how we tend to think most therapies work.

So it turns out that e.g. you need 2000 People to take a daily aspirin for two years to prevent one heart attack. [more inside]
posted by MartinWisse at 3:41 AM PST - 55 comments