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The 2014-2015 Volvo Ocean Race begins today, leaving Alicante, Spain headed for Cape Town, South Africa. The longest and most dangerous sporting event in the world, the epic sailing regatta covers 38,739 nautical miles and will take nearly 9 months to complete, covering the toughest conditions on earth, including the dreaded Southern Ocean.

This year's race shares almost nothing in common from the original Whitbread in 1973, save for one thing; there is no prize for winning. [more inside]
posted by braksandwich at 10:17 PM PST - 18 comments

Hawk Attacks Quadcopter! [more inside]
posted by charlie don't surf at 9:03 PM PST - 36 comments

In recent days, news stories have emerged about a wilderness expedition company, Amaruk, rejecting an applicant due to her religious beliefs and affiliation with a restrictive Christian evangelical school. [more inside]
posted by Lemurrhea at 7:53 PM PST - 83 comments

All about electricity pylons and electricity supply
posted by Confess, Fletch at 7:10 PM PST - 16 comments

The New York Times Magazine treated a group of second graders to a seven-course meal at a pricey NYC restaurant. Culinarity ensued. [video, via]
posted by fuse theorem at 6:20 PM PST - 70 comments

Things I won't work with: Peroxide Peroxides
posted by namewithoutwords at 6:02 PM PST - 33 comments

Paul Klee: The Silence of the Angel (2005; 51:14) is a documentary about the painter whose lectures/notebooks, The Thinking Eye and The Nature of Nature, have been called "the most complete presentation of the principles of design ever made by a modern artist ... it constitutes the Principia Aesthetica of a new era of art, in which Klee occupies a position comparable to Newton's in the realm of physics."
posted by Monsieur Caution at 6:00 PM PST - 6 comments

Frontline - Ebola Outbreak 30-minute Frontline piece on Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone televised in September 2014. It shows the human toll of the disease by interviewing doctors, aid workers, and family members.
posted by Nevin at 5:15 PM PST - 88 comments

This Alabama Judge Has Figured Out How to Dismantle Roe v. Wade
posted by davidstandaford at 4:59 PM PST - 66 comments

annotating Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah's profile of Dave Chappelle, "If He Hollers Let Him Go" [more inside]
posted by flex at 4:20 PM PST - 8 comments

Amazon has shuttered BoxOfficeMojo.com. [more inside]
posted by lewedswiver at 3:13 PM PST - 46 comments

Blisteringly sexy, she killed Nazis with her bare hands and had a 5 million-franc bounty on her head. That was one of her obituary articles in 2011 and it also called her "the real Charlotte Gray." [more inside]
posted by Michele in California at 3:09 PM PST - 31 comments

From Uproxx:

" 'Hey guys. Hey, hey guys. Yes you. You guys right there. I like this group. I like all of you too. But can we cut it out with the quotes already? I like the discussion posts, related news links, original contributions, etcetera, but this group is BLOWING UP MY NEWSFEED! Half the time when I’m scrolling through my posts, the first twenty will be composed of five friend statuses, one ad, four original posts from here, and ten quotes from here.

" 'Look, I love the Simpsons. You know I do, and I know you do too, but sometimes I need my space. I don’t want to do something as drastic as unsubscribing from notifications, because I don’t want to break up; I want to work through this together. We all love classic Simpsons, but we’ve seen it. It’s hilarious. I see at LEAST five things every day that remind me of a Simpsons quote, and sometimes my friends have to tell me to knock it off with the quotes already. Please, guys: Babies love balls, but stop adding more balls (the balls are a metaphor).' [more inside]
posted by bitteroldman at 1:25 PM PST - 52 comments

Бумбокс: a 'funky groove' trio from the Ukraine. Funky and mellifluous. Slick video production and 0.5 megapixel performances. Too many links? Try one of the following for a potential jumping-off point... [more inside]
posted by Theophrastus Johnson at 1:22 PM PST - 1 comments

The Last Saturday by Chris Ware [The Guardian]

" A brand new graphic novella by the award-winning cartoonist Chris Ware, tracing the lives of six individuals from Sandy Port, Michigan, published in weekly episodes on this page."

The page always shows the latest instalment and a new part appears every Friday. Use the arrows beneath the strip to read previous episodes.
posted by Fizz at 12:55 PM PST - 11 comments

"Revenge is never pretty, but when done meticulously, intelligently, and psychotically, it sure is a thing of beauty." Al Jazeera tells the story of James McGibney, founder of BullyVille and CheaterVille.
posted by frimble at 12:51 PM PST - 61 comments

Gunther, Christine and Otto: How a man met a woman and they set off on an epic journey across six continents in one amazing unbreakable car. 26 years road trip: Gunther Holtorf and his unbreakable Otto.
posted by milquetoast at 12:20 PM PST - 13 comments

There are various changes that come with the greying of the traditional television audience, including the kinds of ads being aired, as the median age of a broadcast or cable television viewer is increasing faster than the median age of the US population at large. Older people are treated to a litany of drug ads, filled with lists of horrifying side effects, thanks to the ability for drug companies to market directly to customers. The rise in such advertising is now the most prominent type of health communication that the public encounters, but it hasn't always been the case.
posted by filthy light thief at 12:10 PM PST - 41 comments

Above all, what these experiences demonstrate is that there isn’t really an alternative to talking to the terrorists if you want the conflict to end. Hugh Orde, the former chief constable in Northern Ireland, rightly says, “There is no example that I know of, of terrorism being policed out” – or fully defeated by physical force – anywhere in the world. Petraeus said that it was clear in Iraq that “we would not be able to kill or capture our way out of the industrial-strength insurgency that was tearing apart the very fabric of Iraqi society”. If you can’t kill them all, then sooner or later you come back to the same point, and it is a question of when, not whether, you talk. If there is a political cause then there has to be a political solution. [more inside]
posted by philip-random at 11:23 AM PST - 36 comments

Joanna Goddard has been interviewing American women raising their children in other countries, to hear how motherhood around the world compared and contrasted with motherhood in America. She's talked to parents in Norway, Japan, Congo, Northern Ireland, Mexico, Abu Dhabi, India, England, China, Germany, Australia, Turkey, and Chile. [more inside]
posted by Banknote of the year at 11:05 AM PST - 51 comments

The Boston Globe reports on the post-doc crisis in science research:

The life of the humble biomedical postdoctoral researcher was never easy: toiling in obscurity in a low-paying scientific apprenticeship that can stretch more than a decade. The long hours were worth it for the expected reward — the chance to launch an independent laboratory and do science that could expand human understanding of biology and disease.
But in recent years, the postdoc position has become less a stepping stone and more of a holding tank. Some of the smartest people in Boston are caught up in an all-but-invisible crisis, mired in a biomedical underclass as federal funding for research has leveled off, leaving the supply of well-trained scientists outstripping demand.

posted by Diablevert at 10:20 AM PST - 47 comments

Normal Milestones in Child Development
posted by prize bull octorok at 9:42 AM PST - 45 comments

Visualizing the relationships between letterforms using dimension reduction
posted by a snickering nuthatch at 9:21 AM PST - 8 comments

How To Correct A Date About Nerd Knowledge: A Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Comic
posted by Navelgazer at 9:07 AM PST - 134 comments

Jim Gillette, best known for his work as lead singer for the band Nitro, and their hair-metal masterpiece Freight Train [Warning: Loud. Embarrassing. Potential and unexpected earworm.], has also helped out the Mythbusters, and now, the intent has provided his greatest gift; Vocal Power Voice Lessons.
posted by quin at 8:54 AM PST - 16 comments

David Cronenberg, John Landis, and John Carpenter talk horror movies with Mick Garris [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 8:09 AM PST - 21 comments

"Here the focus is narrow, almost obsessive. Everything that is not absolutely necessary to your happiness has been removed from the visual horizon. The dream is not only of happiness, but of happiness conceived in perfect isolation. Find your beach in the middle of the city." [more inside]
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 7:49 AM PST - 15 comments

Youtube user Papierfliegerei really likes paper airplanes, but all that folding can really get you down. Thankfully, 3D printing technology has finally caught up to the point where his dream of a Paper Airplane Machine Gun can finally be realized. [more inside]
posted by sparklemotion at 6:57 AM PST - 25 comments

Jude Isabella has written a fascinating piece on the intelligence of city raccoons:

City raccoons also appear smarter than their rural counterparts. Suzanne MacDonald, a comparative psychologist who studies raccoon behavior at York University in Toronto, has compared the problem-solving skills of rural and city raccoons. The result? Urbanites trump their country cousins in both intelligence and ability. For the past few summers, she videotaped rural and urban racoons toying with containers baited with cat food. While both rural and city racoons readily approached familiar containers, they dealt differently with unfamiliar ones. Where rural raccoons took a long time to approach novel containers, city raccoons would attack them the moment she turned her back.

posted by steinwald at 6:45 AM PST - 62 comments

While it did not set out to rectify the gender imbalance in gaming, Dungeons & Dragons opened the door just enough to let women gamers in. TSR’s early efforts to include women explicitly in its fantasy games sometimes did more harm than good, but the foremost rule of role-playing games is that gamers are free to innovate, to vary the system to suit their needs. Both men and women have since used these tools to invent and enjoy their own adventures, both through Dungeons & Dragons and the many games it influenced.

Jon Peterson looks at the history of female gamers and how Dungeons & Dragons was so much more successful at getting women to play than earlier war and fantasy games. (For those interested in the early history of roleplaying Peterson's blog may be of interest.)
posted by MartinWisse at 6:23 AM PST - 40 comments

Intel’s manuals for their x86/x64 processor clearly state that the fsin instruction (calculating the trigonometric sin) has a maximum error, in round-to-nearest mode, of one unit in the last place. This is not true. It’s not even close.
posted by Proofs and Refutations at 4:44 AM PST - 65 comments

"Kailash Satyarthi, the child rights activist from India, and Malala Yousufzai, the activist for girls education in Pakistan, were announced as the joint winners of this year's Nobel Peace Prize by the Norwegian Nobel Committee on Friday."
posted by vivekspace at 3:05 AM PST - 77 comments