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Each of Historian Barbara Wells Sarudy's six blogs contains a wealth of esoteric treasures: "President John Adams declared, “History is not the Province of the Ladies.” Oh well, I'll give it a try." [more inside]
posted by whimsicalnymph at 10:37 PM PST - 7 comments

"This study was an investigation of adult brain plasticity and whether we could reopen it through the use of a drug called valproic acid. It's a mood-stabilizing drug. But we found that it also restores the plasticity of the brain to a juvenile state. And during a two-week period on this pill or a controlled substance, a healthy cohort of young adult male subjects who were carefully screened not to have had musical experience early in life, they were asked to undertake a number of training tests online. And at the end of this two-week period, they were then tested on their ability to discriminate tones to see if the training had more effect than it normally would at this age."
WERTHEIMER: So, you actually gave people a pill and then you taught them to have perfect pitch?
HENSCH: This is the result and it's quite remarkable, since there are no known reports of adults acquiring absolute pitch. [more inside]
posted by carsonb at 10:09 PM PST - 63 comments

"The IPython Notebook is a web-based interactive computational environment where you can combine code execution, text, mathematics, plots and rich media into a single document". It can be installed faily easily with anaconda or on Amazon EC2. Various interesting notebooks are to be found at the official Notebook Viewer site Another collection of interesting notebooks on many topics. [more inside]
posted by meta87 at 6:53 PM PST - 56 comments

How the Golden Globes definition of "musical or comedy" has been stretched to the limit and why that matters
posted by Artw at 4:51 PM PST - 68 comments

This film has been written symmetrically. The second half is strictly like the first, but played backwards and mirrored. The second part doesn't act like a simple rewinding, but as the following of the first. It explores all sorts of symmetry: compositions, shapes, sounds and music, scenario, colors, actions, time...
posted by MoonOrb at 2:28 PM PST - 13 comments

Richard Pryor moved to New York City in 1963, where he performed regularly in clubs alongside performers such as Bob Dylan and Woody Allen. He even opened for singer and pianist Nina Simone, who talked of his early nervousness, when she put her "arms around him there in the dark and rocked him like a baby until he calmed down." You can see something of that young man in this clip of Pryor singing a bit of jazzy blues in 1966. The performance is also available on YouTube with slightly better quality, but faded in from different scene. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 1:57 PM PST - 14 comments

The Congressman Who Went Off the Grid
Roscoe Bartlett spent 20 years on Capitol Hill. Now he lives in a remote cabin in the woods, prepping for doomsday.
posted by andoatnp at 1:28 PM PST - 72 comments

After being successfully Kickstarted into existence by fans, the long-desired Veronica Mars movie (previously) finally has an actual official trailer.
posted by The Whelk at 1:04 PM PST - 51 comments

Don Rickles gives a tour of Brooklyn in 1968 (via)
posted by timshel at 1:01 PM PST - 10 comments

Long before the temperence movement went nuclear in 1919, they tried other ways to stem the tide of alcohol consumption in the United States. In 1874, the Women's Christian Temperance Union hatched a plan to build public drinking fountains across the country in order to offer people an alternative to going into saloons to have a drink. While the project probably wasn't as effective as the ladies of the WCTU would have liked, many of these fountains still stand today. [more inside]
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 12:48 PM PST - 23 comments

Losing Aaron. "After his son was arrested for downloading files at MIT, Bob Swartz did everything in his power to save him. He couldn’t. Now he wants the institute to own up to its part in Aaron’s death." [Via]
posted by homunculus at 12:40 PM PST - 32 comments

Birds of the West Indies. Artist Taryn Simon (previously, previously, previously) has a work of photographs of James Bond's gadgets, guns, cars, and women. The work is currently showing at this year's Carnegie International, and has an accompanying book. Info at the main link, and a more thorough gallery here.
posted by Capt. Renault at 11:56 AM PST - 4 comments

Best video game blogging of 2013, via Critical Distance
posted by Sebmojo at 11:55 AM PST - 18 comments

'Polar Vortex' Brings Bitter Cold, Heavy Snow To U.S. right on the back of WINTER STORM HERCULES that delayed or cancelled flights all over the country, stranding holiday travelers, and dumping lots of snow all over the midwest and northeast. Planes are sliding off runways! Dogs are wearing booties! [more inside]
posted by ninjew at 10:56 AM PST - 443 comments

What would be the density of Asteroid B-612? (That's the home of the Little Prince. [full text]) Randall Munroe describes life there. [more inside]
posted by JHarris at 10:54 AM PST - 4 comments

Olympus BioScapes Winners 2004-2013 — Photomicrography's small world is bigger than Nikon, after all (previously).
posted by cenoxo at 10:34 AM PST - 4 comments

On January 21, The Days of Anna Madrigal, the last in the Tales of the City series, will be released. [more inside]
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 9:55 AM PST - 26 comments

For your Sunday reading, a couple of stories of ye olden computing days: Why MacPaint's Original Canvas was 416 Pixels Wide and A Great Old Timey Game Programming Hack.
posted by curious nu at 8:46 AM PST - 29 comments

Produce the number 2014 without any numbers in your source code ☠ Write a program that always outputs “2012” - even if it's modified! ☠ Obfuscated Hello World ☠ Print your code backwards - reverse quine ☠ Shortest code to print a smiley face ☠ Write the shortest program that generates the most compiler warnings and errors [more inside]
posted by Foci for Analysis at 8:41 AM PST - 16 comments

Between Ziggy and Aladdin Sane there was, briefly, Cobbler Bob (SLYT)
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 5:16 AM PST - 16 comments

Today is Iris DeMent's birthday, and I've been listening to some tunes by this delightfully idiosyncratic singer and songwriter, whose sound harkens back to an earlier era of American music. I thought some of you might enjoy hearing them today as well. Here's Out of the Fire, God May Forgive You (But I Won't), He's Not You, Easy's Gettin' Harder Every Day, Sweet is the Melody, Let the Mystery Be, Our Town (featuring harmony vocal from the wonderful Emmylou Harris), He Reached Down (with Joan Osborne and Bruce Molsky), and finally, here's Iris dueting with John Prine on his hilarious number In Spite of Ourselves.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 3:56 AM PST - 30 comments

The Portuguese footballer Eusébio, considered one of the greatest of all time, died today. The first great footballer to come out of Africa, Eusébio was above all an humble man who would congratulate a keeper who had just made a difficult save and for whom the greatest joy after winning the European Cup (now named UEFA Champions League) was in getting to trade jerseys with his idol, Real Madrid's star di Stéfano. (The goals of the final.) [more inside]
posted by khonostrov at 2:52 AM PST - 13 comments